[linux-audio-user] Windows Audio Apps with latest Wine

Greetings all ... i've been testing a few windows audio applications with the latest version of wine, and have achieved some very interesting results. i haven't been able to find many reports on these apps, so hopefully this will be a pleasant surprise to most of you: Steinberg Wavelab v4 works perfectly!! what's great is that, as far as i can tell, ALL vst effect plugins work within wavelab. as far as i can tell, ALL audio processing functionality is working - don't know about cd burning and stuff, haven't tested that. the ONLY problem with the program is that the drop-down menus are blank - the top level is ok (the "File", "Edit", "View" etc) but beneath is blank ... takes a little bit, but once you know where the important buttons are, it's not that much of an issue. one thing you might need to do when starting it up is to keep an eye out for when it crashes (if it does) on start up. as the splash-screen comes up, you'll see it scanning through your vst plugins directory (bottom left corner). if it crashes, take note of which plugin it was scanning at the time, and then go into the Wavelab/Presets/Plugins folder, open the file "plugins to ignore.txt" and simply add the plugin that crashed wavelab. repeat this process until it starts properly. you can then go to the "options" menu, and choose the first blank space on the drop-down - this will bring up the global options for wavelab, allowing you to select soundcard driver etc ... if you want to look at what i mean by the blank menus, then have a look at these screenshots (n.b. - it seems to only be the static menus affected - dynamically generated ones like the vst plugin selector and undo/redo have no appearance problems): http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/wavelab.png http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/wavelab1.png also, the audio-montage function seems to work too, though i have not really tested it - when i was using windows, wavelab's audio-montage was a big part of my radio work, and to see it functioning in linux is incredible. i must say too, that the audio quality is superb, though you'd probly need a powerful machine to run smoothly. Native Instruments Traktor DJ 2.53 works perfectly in all aspects of sound and gui. if you choose "asio full duplex" driver from the options, you can get pretty good stability and latency (the asio option, i think, only appears if you've installed a steinberg product like cubase or nuendo - none of which i could get to work, but at least the asio drivers seem to work ok). this is great news, as linux mp3 mixing software has a little way to go yet before it approaches the sophistication of some of these windows apps. ImageLine Fruityloops Studio 5 Sort of works ... the only problem seems to be midi. vst instruments and effects load up fine, but when choosing to add a midi channel to control a vst instrument from within fruity, the whole program freezes. the gui also suffers from patchiness - when windows open on top of the main interface, closing them will leave a black hole which can be redrawn from dragging the mouse over affected area. the pre-loaded audio channels in the step-sequencer work fine. fruityloops would be a killer-app to have fully-working in linux. i feel it is REALLY close to working. well, these are exciting enough for me at the moment, but i strongly encourage people to upgrade their wine installations and start testing these programs and others - when dedicated windows users start hearing of their favourite audio apps working in linux, we'll start to see a LOT more people here, and a LOT more heads to use for our open source sound software (there are lots already, but the more the merrier). plus, some of these programs rock. just in case you have troubles replicating these results, here is my pathetically haphazard wine cfg file: http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/config maybe one day soon, we could organise a group of us to organise a structured crew of testers/debuggers/advocates to get a specified set of programs working with wine ... wavelab and fruityloops look promising because they already work to some degree, and if fully working, they would really provide access to ALL the audio possibilities of windows on linux (wavelab with its comprehensive audio processing/editing and fruityloops with it's sequencing/vst-midi interface). anyway, hope everyone can get something out of this :) shayne -- ----------------------------------------- fedora core 2 kernel 2.6.9-2.2.rdt.rhfc2.ccrma wine 20041201 xfce 4.2rc2 ----------------------------------------- asus a7n8x-x m/b 80 gb western digital caviar h/d 512mb generic ram nvidia geforce mx400 agp 8x v/c soundblaster live 5.1 platinum