danboid reviews 5.0.2

[danboid]

Hi GMaq, Trulan and AVLinux land!

I've just spent most of the day testing 5.0.2 and so I feel ready to give some initial feedback on this latest release- well I am the complaints dept. after all! To summarise, I feel AV Linux is very nearly my perfect distro but 5.0.2 needs a bit more polish before I can recommend it without reservation. Despite what he says, I'd like to think GMaq could hopefully get some of the following issues fixed and release a 5.0.5 or 5.1 as it would seem a shame otherwise.

First, the good things I've spotted so far include:

* I very much appreciate the newer/updated kernel and packages- especially having the latest iceweasel!

* Linuxsampler works now (the one bundled with AV5.0 never worked for me)

* The LXDE clock only updated after second or third minute under AV5.0 but thats fixed now

* Updated manual is always a plus

Hopefully I'll spot some more improvements but thats it for the good news so far, now for the real meat aka why you should've let me beta test this before releasing it!!

My biggest complaint and worry re: AV5 has carried on over into 5.0.2 unfortunately and that is the default cpu/trayfreq settings should be set to 'performance' and not 'ondemand' - the reason being that I should imagine the majority of AV Linux users will want to use JACK and many of these will try using it on a laptop. In my experience JACK is rather unreliable and much more likely to produce xruns if you have you cpu freq scaling set to anything other than performance. The current AV cpu defaults are likely to lead to laptop users getting an unwarranted (and easily avoided) unfavourable impression of both the distro and Linux audio in general. The alternative would be to warn users of this in either "5 need-to-knows", "Performance settings" or "Using JACK" (or even all three) in the manual but we all know normal people don't (want to) read manuals and that sensible defaults rule. I know it tells you how to change the CPU gov default in the manual but its potential effect on JACK for laptop users goes unmentioned.

Whilst I'm discussing the otherwise excellent AV Linux manual, I have a few more suggestions for improvements to it for the next release:

* By virtue of the fact that AV Linux uses LXDE instead of GNOME or KDE and slim instead of GDM/KDM, it is obviously a distro that is concerned about performance and the manual makes it clear it is also aiming to be usable by Linux noobs too. Hence the manual would greatly benefit from a section listing all the services you can safely disable via rcconf as they are many and doing so reduces boot time, frees up RAM and as a result improves performance.

* I know you're struggling for space (or at least trying to keep it under 2GB) so if you don't want to include a load more dictionaries for the LibreOffice Writer spellchecker then you could tell people in the manual that they simply need to use the package manager to install the myspell dictionary package for their locale to get spellchecking to work although I would like to see British English and dictionaries for the major European languages on the DVD if you can find the space.

* The remastersys installer installed grub2 to mbr OK but only listed AVLinux kernels and options. I've also got RHEL and OSX installed on this machine so to update the grub menu to include those as well as AV Linux all I had to to was run 'update-grub2' as root then reboot.

..and whilst we're on the subject of remastersys its a real shame the project has come to and end. Seeing as it was used to create AV its obviously a very capable tool and I was hoping to see its locale problem fixed in that, in 5.0.2 as in AV5, you have to answer about 10 or more very samey questions about your locale and keyboard layout - way more than all other distros/installers require.

Another 'bug' that was present in AV5 thats also in the new release is when I start A3 I get the errors:

Error opening file /usr/local/lib/lv2/docs/manifest.ttl (No such file or directory)
lilv_world_load_bundle(): error: Error reading file:///usr/local/lib/lv2/docs/manifest.ttl

I do not get these two errors when running A3 under Debian Testing and I expected they'd be gone seeing as you say you are now using the regular testing packages for lv2core, lilv, suil etc right? drobilla was at a loss to explain these errors unfortunately but I've only seen it under AV Linux.

PACKAGES

The selection of packages is second to none and hard to fault- as I already said I'm very happy to see the latest iceweasel and there have been a few excellent additions like gxtuner, xcfa and ffmultiplex but I would highly recommend you replace fantasia with qsampler in the next release because qsampler loads/runs faster, uses less memory, its easier to use than fantasia and it shares visual style (and author too) with both qjackctl and qtractor whereas fantasia looks like neither qtractor nor Ardour. Can anyone give a good reason for not swapping these packages other than they prefer the way fantasia looks?

The only other app I was hoping to see is sunvox. sunvox features numerous built in synths and hence out-does renoise in a few areas and is pretty much best-of-breed under Linux for an integrated electronic music app. AV includes multiple MIDI sequencers so I don't think having 2 trackers is going overboard especially when sunvox comes in at under 1MB for the full app. It would make a very cool addition I think.

A very minor point regarding packages is that in your release announcement you claimed cheese has replaced guvcview although this isn't the case.

PLUGINS

Alongside the issue with the cpu governor that I've already mentioned, the other real big problem with 5.0.2 is that it includes a number of dodgy (mainly VST) plugins and plugin packages such as linuxvst-plugin-pack. No arguments, this package is just a plain mess! It would seem, according to A3, that the worst offender within that package is soundcrab.so as A3 specifically warns about that one in the log window:

[WARNING]: Cannot get linuxVST information from /usr/local/lib/linux_vst/soundcrab.so

Deleting just that file (which didn't work anyway) fixed that error. I would like to see a working soundcrab although most users will be better off using Linuxsampler, cetainly when A3 can 'export' MIDI projects including LS data (which is why you may want to use soundcrab or Highlife to use soundfonts instead right now).

linuxvst-plugin-pack also contains a broken TAL-Noisemaker (doesn't even show as valid plugin), Vex (which loads but didn't make any sound for me) and loads of svn files that shouldn't be in the package at all. I have not tested them all but that (and esp. all the rogue svn files it contained) was enough for me to uninstall the whole package.

At the end of this review you'll see the startup log from he latest A3 running under a fresh 5.0.2 install compete with a hefty helping of nasty vst plugin errors! :/ Thankfully, uninstalling linuxdsp-linuxvst-demos got rid of all the A3 loading errors about plugins except for one:

Failed to expand qname `linuxdsp:linuxdspVCBStereoPlugin'

Which of course can be resolved by uninstalling linuxdsp-lv2-demos. It is my personal opinion (and one I know is shared by Paul Davis) that no VST plugins should be included and distributed with AV Linux that are also available as LV2 plugins- people should be encouraged to use and support the much more open and likely more reliable (eventually, at least) LV2 format instead.

I should also note that before I uninstalled linuxdsp-linuxvst-demos, A3 would frequently crash when loading the MKII-GRAPH-EQ VST plugin that shows up as the first scanned plugin in the log below. Also, I have compiled A3 as the beta and final releases will be wrt plugins, that is with lxvst enabled but no support for wine VSTs.

Thanks again for all your hard work GMaq, Trulan and anyone else who helped with this release! I hope you don't think I've been too harsh in my critique as it really is an amazing distro and a definite improvement over the last release- just don't be shy about asking me to do some beta testing before the next release please!

Dan

---------------------------

Error opening file /usr/local/lib/lv2/docs/manifest.ttl (No such file or directory)
lilv_world_load_bundle(): error: Error reading file:///usr/local/lib/lv2/docs/manifest.ttl
Ardour3.0alpha10 (built using ['10428'] and GCC version 4.6.1)
Copyright (C) 1999-2011 Paul Davis
Some portions Copyright (C) Steve Harris, Ari Johnson, Brett Viren, Joel Baker

Ardour comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see the source for copying conditions.
ardour: [INFO]: Loading default ui configuration file /home/iatn/src/3.0/gtk2_ardour/../gtk2_ardour/ardour3_ui_default.conf
Loading ui configuration file /home/iatn/src/3.0/gtk2_ardour/../build/gtk2_ardour/ardour3_ui_dark.rc
ardour: [INFO]: Ardour will be limited to 1024 open files
ardour: [INFO]: Loading user configuration file /home/iatn/.config/ardour3/ardour.rc
Using SSE optimized routines
ardour: [INFO]: looking for panners in /home/iatn/src/3.0/gtk2_ardour/../build/libs/panners/2in2out:/home/iatn/src/3.0/gtk2_ardour/../build/libs/panners/1in2out:/home/iatn/src/3.0/gtk2_ardour/../build/libs/panners/vbap
ardour: [INFO]: Panner discovered: "Equal Power Stereo"
ardour: [INFO]: Panner discovered: "Mono to Stereo Panner"
ardour: [INFO]: Panner discovered: "VBAP 2D panner"
Found 0 along :/home/iatn/.config/ardour3/templates
Grab new name focus
lost focus
lost focus
RemoteVSTClient: all cache files are up-to-date, not running scanner
** INFO ** MKII-GRAPH-EQ: License Key - no license file found

** MKII-GRAPH-EQ Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.


** VC1B VST Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.

** INFO ** MKII-GRAPH-EQ: License Key - no license file found

** MKII-GRAPH-EQ Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.

** INFO ** MBC2: License Key - no license file found

** MBC2 Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.


** VC2B VST Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.


** CH-EQ2B VST Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.


** GR-EQ2-VST Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.


** SR-2B Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.


** CH-EQ1B VST Running in DEMO MODE:-
Audio processing will be bypassed
every 60 Seconds - and the level will
drop by 6dB.

LV2: Discovering 65 plugins
Failed to expand qname `linuxdsp:linuxdspVCBStereoPlugin'
Attempt to add quad with NULL field.
Done LV2 discovery

[GMaq]

Error opening file /usr/local/lib/lv2/docs/manifest.ttl (No such file or directory)
lilv_world_load_bundle(): error: Error reading file:///usr/local/lib/lv2/docs/manifest.ttl

Hi danboid

Hadn't heard from you in quite some time and I heard disturbing rumors you had moved to OSX...

I'm short on time tonight to fully reply to the Tolstoy-sized post above however this 'bug' is absolutely harmless and I think it differs a bit from a similar error message in AV 5.0. Here's the deal, I packaged the linuxDSP stuff with my own packages and in the process decided instead of putting the manuals in /usr/share/doc where they would languish forever hidden in the presence of thousands of other documents that nobody EVER reads I would place the manuals in 'docs' folders in their respective 'lv2' and 'linux_vst' folders. The issue is that since LV2 plugins reside in '.lv2' folders that the lv2 support libs parse ALL folders in the lv2 directories and complain because my 'docs' folder doesn't have all the usual guts (ie manifest.ttl) of an LV2 plugin.

We can argue about who should do what but I think that the LV2 support lib stuff shouldn't be parsing any folder that doesn't have a '.lv2' extension in it's name.

Your point is valid but the error message is harmless. If and when I do an updated package of linuxDSP LV2 Plugins (I think he is working on his own installer like the one in his custom Ardour2 LinuxVST build) I will move the 'docs' folder elsewhere.

As far as my linuxVST package, Ardour 3 may not like some of them but all Sequencers pre-existing on AV Linux have not complained and A3 is a future certainty but not out of Alpha yet
so I'm not going to jump too quickly on that until Ardour 3 gels into a stable finished product.

[trulan]

Hi danboid, thanks for your review, I think I'll go cry in a corner now...just kidding.

You do have a point about the default CPU governor.  My preferred setting for this is to have the governor set itself to 'performance' when on AC and to 'ondemand' when on battery.  I use it this way on my laptop, but it is not entirely predictable and I wouldn't feel good about using that setting as the default for AVLinux.  I would love to see development resume on trayfreq, it hasn't seen any activity in a while.

Aside from that, changing the default CPU governor to 'performance' would be trivial.  Obviously this is a situation where we can't please everybody, but the whole point of having trayfreq there in the first place was to make it as easy as possibly for the user to control this.  So your point is taken, and I'm thinking you might be right.

[linuxdsp]

PLUGINS

Alongside the issue with the cpu governor that I've already mentioned, the other real big problem with 5.0.2 is that it includes a number of dodgy (mainly VST) plugins and plugin packages such as linuxvst-plugin-pack. No arguments, this package is just a plain mess! It would seem, according to A3, that the worst offender within that package is soundcrab.so as A3 specifically warns about that one in the log window:

[WARNING]: Cannot get linuxVST information from /usr/local/lib/linux_vst/soundcrab.so

As far as I can tell, soundcrab is broken.

At the end of this review you'll see the startup log from he latest A3 running under a fresh 5.0.2 install compete with a hefty helping of nasty vst plugin errors!

Most if not all of those "errors" are messages to inform you the plugins are running in demo mode.  The way to fix them is to purchase / install a valid license for the plugin.

Failed to expand qname `linuxdsp:linuxdspVCBStereoPlugin'
Which of course can be resolved by uninstalling linuxdsp-lv2-demos

No.  "It can of course" be fixed by removing the VC2B plugin, which the message refers to, rather than just blindly uninstalling the whole set of plugins.  I haven't noticed any errors with this plugin on my test builds of A3, but it seems that LV2 changes quite often, so there may be something that needs fixing in the .ttl file

It is my personal opinion (and one I know is shared by Paul Davis) that no VST plugins should be included and distributed with AV Linux that are also available as LV2 plugins- people should be encouraged to use and support the much more open and likely more reliable (eventually, at least) LV2 format instead.

It is my personal opinion that (especially if there appear to be reliability issues with a version of a plugin) people should have the choice to use whichever version / format they want.  It's also my opinion that it's ultimately for the distro maintainer to decide which versions of plugins to include in the distro.

For the record, there is nothing inherently unreliable about VST (or LV2) as a standard.  It's perfectly possible to write plugins that behave badly using any plugin format, and for whatever reason, it appears that this is often used as a means to label VST as inherently "unreliable" which is not true.  (I have had similar (more) issues with many other LV2 (or LADSPA) plugins than with VST, but I don't perceive that as a failing with LV2, it just means there are LV2 plugins that need to be fixed)

[GMaq]

Hi,

On the CPU frequency issue I have added a note on the release announcement.

I found it quite humorous during a recording session last week I hurriedly set up may laptop and forgot to change the CPU governor, after 4+ hours of recording 10 tracks at once with a Mackie Onyx on firewire at 256fpp there was not 1 xrun reported by JACK. Certainly the performance governor is the way to go but not all setups will suffer equally if the 'incorrect' governor is used.

[danboid]

GMaq:

Thanks for explaining the LV2 errors and adding a note to the release announcement - thats put my mind at ease a bit but obviously its not as good as it being in the manual but chalk that as one to remember for AV6 or whatever. I agree with what you say about it parsing every folder as I'm sure that'd be easy to fix.

Its true, we did move to OSX as my band (and I) grew overly weary of FFADO fuckups and there was only so much experimentation and crashes we could bear but now we have a shiny new AV release complete with updated kernel and ffado I think its time we gave Linux/FFADO another chance this weekend with any luck. I'll let you know if this new release proves more stable than 5.0 for us.

The cpufreq issue is a bit tricky- like you trulan I use ondemand whenever I'm not using JACK to shut my fans up but the point here is that AV Linux users just need to be made aware that the CPU freq setting can impact JACKs stability.

linuxdsp:

Yes, sorry, I was actually aware that a lot of that log output was not actually errors just reminders to register but regardless MKII-GRAPH-EQ would cause A3 to crash at startup every second attempt or so- not sure where to point the finger with that one. Of course I realise I could've just removed VC2B instead of removing the whole package it was contained within- it was getting late and I'd already spent much longer writing my initial findings up than I had time for so there is more than a smidgen of rushed ramble in my Tolstoy-beating attempt

I can only agree with what you say about the reliability of plugins but I didn't mention the real reasons that I'd (and Paul) like to dissuade people from using VSTs under Linux. The main reason is that the VST headers and plugins compiled aren't GPL (or FOSS in general) compatible and hence can't be included in the repos of Linux distros and the second reason is that Steinberg don't make it easy to get hold of the headers- I tried via their official site and channels a few times with no luck so I eventually give up on being a good boy and got the headers via unofficial means - do one Steinberg! Apart from that, LV2 just seems like the right thing to promote and help advance in a Linux distro as its altogether more Linux and FOSS friendly if not as mature and widely supported.

Oh and whilst you're here linuxdsp, did you ever get chance to look into my 'showstopping' bug with LinuxVST support under A3?

http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=4390

I'm only using Noisemaker and Highlife because there are no directly comparable (or superior) LV2 equivalents yet but I know falktx is working on porting Noisemaker and the rest of his VST plugin repo to LV2 so I plan to switch soon as his LV2 ports become usable.

[linuxdsp]

@danboid: There is now a new version of the VC2B available - there was an error in the .ttl file that describes the plugin.  It did not originally produce any errors during extensive testing, with many different versions of A3 and or A2 on several different machines (using SLV2 or lilv etc) so I can only assume that some aspect of the LV2 syntax checking has become more strict.

I can only agree with what you say about the reliability of plugins but I didn't mention the real reasons that I'd (and Paul) like to dissuade people from using VSTs under Linux. The main reason is that the VST headers and plugins compiled aren't GPL (or FOSS in general) compatible and hence can't be included in the repos of Linux distros and the second reason is that Steinberg don't make it easy to get hold of the headers- I tried via their official site and channels a few times with no luck so I eventually give up on being a good boy and got the headers via unofficial means

The steinberg license has always been an issue for GPL projects, which is unfortunate, however I put a great deal of time and effort into debugging and adding several workarounds to the Ardour linuxVST support specifically so that it would work with the existing Vestige headers (especially on 64Bit), which I believe are used in other GPL'd projects.  As to the availability of the SDK, you have to register with steinberg, but it should still be available from their site - however, as I have said, for most projects that include VST support, vestige is now perfectly adequate.

Oh and whilst you're here linuxdsp, did you ever get chance to look into my 'showstopping' bug with LinuxVST support under A3?

I haven't looked into that personally as I can't reproduce the problem, and other users are not reporting similar problems (as far as I'm aware).  It may get looked at eventually, but what I think is important to point out here is that bug fixing VST support in A3 (which is still alpha software) is a very low priority at the moment, simply because it tends to become a massive drain on (very limited) resources.
The hope was that by providing a basically working VST implementation, others may improve upon it during the general A3 development cycle.

That said, there is VST support in our build of A2 now, so if ongoing improvements there turn up something of use to A3, it will be submitted back to ardour.org (Active development will continue on our build of A2, but it largely depends on the level of financial support it receives)

[danboid]

Hi LinuxDSP!

Thanks for your informative and extensive reply- that answered many of my questions and you certainly know as much about Linux audio plugins as anyone else so who better to answer! As you can see I'm more a pro-LV2 kinda guy but I greatly appreciate your adding of native VST support to Ardour as it opens the door to easy porting of 1000s of plugins. You are a music geek legend of the highest order squire!

I've not tried this special build of A2 you have put together yet- does it differ in any other way than having lxvst support? How about MP3 and wavpack import?

GMaq:

So do you have a reason for favouring jsampler over qsampler and whats your stance on including sunvox in the next release if the author is OK with it (and why wouldn't he be)?

Have a great weekend all!

[varpa]

I have a few comments on the above:

- I was playing with A3+TAL-noisemaker last night and it worked great for me.  I was quite impressed with the range of sounds it produced.  In general there are a lot of variables as to whether something works or not.  Obviously since A3 is alpha there still is may be problems with specific versions.

- I am also partial to qsampler so I installed a version from synaptic which also pulled in lscp2.   Not surprisingly, this version of qsampler did not work because it was compiled against older libgig/linuxsampler.  So I removed qsampler and lscp2 but then found to my horror that linuxsampler now segfaulted.   I carefully checked the installed files from qsampler and lscp2 and saw that they should not overwrite anything from AVLinux version of linuxsampler or lscp6 so I really do not know what happened.   I might have liked to re-install the AVLinux linuxsampler related deb files, but as far as I can tell these deb files are not available anywhere which is a bit of shortcoming I think, but could be easily remedied.  In the end I removed libgig and linuxsampler packages and built them myself and fixed my problem.    So, it might be nice if qsampler were provided also, and to put all the AVLinux deb files in some server so one could recover from breaking packages.

- I also installed some additional linuxVSTs from http://distrho.sourceforge.net/ (more excellent falktx work).   I put them in /usr/local/lib/lxvst (which I had to create).  Some worked, others not, (argotlinuner).   I get these sorts of messages in A3 though:
ERROR]: ** WARNING ** VSTFX : Can't write info file /usr/local/lib/lxvst/.HybridReverb2.fsi
Obviously, this is not an AVLinux bug but is some due to the fact that running as a regular user I cannot write to /usr/local/lib/lxvst.   This seems to be a harmless error however - Hybrid reverb (which is excellent, by the way) works fine.

- My other minute complaint is that Musescore does not come with an example score already loaded.  I was exceedingly impressed when I built Musescore myself and it opened with a score which could be played out of the box.  This could be quite impressive for new users.  But maybe you have to include a big soundfont file to enable this and it does not fit on the DVD.
 

[GMaq]

Hi,

@varpa

Re: The new linuxsampler deb packages. I just haven't got around to uploading them yet and am a little leery because they require Wheezy dependencies that make them a bit difficult for inexperienced AV Linux 5.0 users. I didn't build Qsampler because Fantasia is there and the last time I messed with Qsampler from SVN it wouldn't build with any optional features which made it quite useless. I was under the impression that QSampler was quite ancient and wasn't really maintained by Rui any more and that Fantasia was the preferred frontend. (obviously I'm not a big LS user). I can have a look at QSampler again I suppose.

You can easily make your lxvst folder writeable, the default 'linux_vst' folder in AV Linux is. Simply go to your folder with PCManFM and make yourself Root, right click on the lxvst folder and select the properties tab and change the properties from 'root' to your username and to read and write for your user and group.

[linuxdsp]

@varpa: The /usr/lib/lxvst folder needs to be writeable because it is used to store cache files about each VST (these are the <plugin_name>.fsi files (which are normally hidden).  

Normally when you start A3 (or any ardour build with my linuxVST mods) it will look in the default locations of /usr/lib/lxvst:/usr/local/lib/lxvst:/usr/lib64/lxvst:/usr/local/lib64/lxvst OR if environment variable $LXVST_PATH is defined it will follow that.

For each plugin .so file it discovers, it will first look to see if a corresponding .fsi file exists, and if so it will use the information cached within it to populate the list of available linuxVST plugins (in the plugin manager).  If it does not find the .fsi it will load the plugin, and interrogate it to find out the required information and create a new .fsi file for it.

It is an unfortunate fact that some (improperly coded or faulty) VSTs do not react well to this 'scanning' process - this has been an issue for other hosts on other OS too - hence the reason for caching the plugin information.

You may therefore find that a plugin fails to load properly the first time it is scanned by Ardour, but if it has stayed alive long enough for the cache to be created, the next time you start Ardour everything should be fine and you often may find that the plugin will work fine during normal use.

If your lxvst folder is not writeable by you (as a normal user) the cache files will not be stored successfully, which isn't a 'failure' in and of itself, but reliability / startup speed should be improved if you chmod the folder to make it writeable.

[danboid]

Varpa:

I've been playing with TAL-Noisemaker a fair bit and I think its the best GPL synth available (although I've not got Helix to work yet and that may be even better?) so its a shame the build included with AV5.0.2 doesn't work although its forebear TAL-Elektro does. In its current form I find Noisemaker very unreliable if I have JACK RT mode enabled and it also doesn't work at samplerates above 48Khz. I have been in touch with the original author and he suspects he knows the cause so hopefully falktx will fix this RT prob when he gets round to porting it to LV2.

I've not tried Musescore recently or the version included on AV 5.0.2 but it does include a soundfont that could (should) be used with Musescore already on the DVD as this is what I used to test LS with.

Gmaq:

I have experienced zero issues with qsampler and don't know what these additional features that don't work are that you mention. I had to dig out a guide to understand how to use fantasia but qsampler was much more intuitive not to mention the program loads instantly and it soundfonts instantly compared to the sluggishness and delays doing the same with fantasia. Yes, do give qsampler another go! If I've ever found any genuine probs in any of Rui's apps he's always been very quick to respond and fix them, as you may have experienced yourself.

EDIT

Also, would you know where I could get the code for TAL-Elektro (not Noisemaker) if I want to compile it for 64-bit?

[GMaq]

Hi,

falkTX would be the guy to ask for sources, I got most of my ported VST's from him. Regarding QSampler I'll have a look tonight at packaging it I'm working most of today at my 'real' job.

[GMaq]

OK,

Here is an updated QSampler package for 5.0.2 users: http://bandshed.net/custom/qsampler_0.2.2+SVN2281avlinux-1_i386.deb

Here is the complete LINUXSAMPLER-CVSavlinux package bundle (including the new QSampler) for AV Linux 5.0(.1) users: http://bandshed.net/custom/LINUXSAMPLER-CVSavlinux.zip

[GMaq]

Hi,

Here is an updated LinuxVST plugin pack with all the latest stuff from DISTRHO (including HybridReverb2), the most recent Kunitoki JUCE Plugins I could find, mda Ports and TAL Plugins

*PLEASE NOTE* I don't maintain plugins, I maintain packages. If a plugin is buggy with certain hosts then use a different one. Ardour3 and linuxDSP's custom Ardour2 build are Alpha/Beta software and are not yet accurate yardsticks to use for measuring reliability. Keeping track of hundreds of plugins in LADSPA. DSSI, LV2 and LinuxVST is extremely time consuming so please be patient and if you have trouble ask the plugin developers first, they are the ones who write the code.

*IMPORTANT* Replacing this package will require the host to re-write whatever cached data is necessary so you may have to launch your host more than once to complete that task before it will run properly

Get it here: http://bandshed.net/custom/linuxvst-plugin-pack_20111106avlinux-1_i386.deb

[danboid]

Thanks GMaq, I'll hopefully give those a try later today!