12 Apr
2005
12 Apr
'05
6:54 p.m.
On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 09:02, linux-audio-dev-request(a)music.columbia.edu
I really would like to see a coherent approach
defined and organized
to study and maintain VST/VSTi compatibility under Linux. Matters to
be
considered include :
Keeping current with WINE development (ongoing).
We at muse research have some direct experience in this area. Our VST
support library is closed, but we do use and contribute to Wine.
We find and fix VST related Wine bugs all the time. We are using
wine-20040914 but will probably be moving to wine-20050310. Later
versions do make a difference in how well plugins are supported.
Support and compatibility is OK especially for the smaller, freebie
plugins. For the big ones (like Native) compatibility is more
problematic. We will be helping with this effort by finding and fixing
Wine bugs, and significant differences between Wine and Windows. Some
are fixable with Wine and some will require developer cooperation.
As an example, sfz (a Soundfont player) makes an Invalidate() call
during the (supposedly) realtime process() call. In Windows that's
cheap, in Wine it's not. The sfz folks weren't willing to change their
plugin. But the folks at BFD (Fxpansion) were. A Receptor and Wine
friendly version is forthcoming.
Trying to resolve licensing issues with Steinberg
(if they're
willing to alter their licensing, perhaps they just need some more
prodding?).
This is a dead end. You can argue it all you want. They have no business
interest in changing the terms of VST. It isn't going to happen. It's
even difficult to get some of the key, larger plugin vendors to do
anything for Linux but we are chipping away at it.
- mo
===================================
Michael Ost, Software Architect
Muse Research, Inc.
most(a)museresearch.com