[64studio-devel] fst is in the testing branch.. and wineasio too :)

[Daniel James]

Hi Free, hi Quentin,

>   QH> Why can we run i386 software in 64bit debian (via emulation) but not
>   QH> wineasio with vst's as well?
> 
> As far as I can tell, the problem is that at the present state jack
> doesn't like a server running at 64bit (your normal jackd on a amd64
> system) and clients running at 32bit (your wine/VST application
> running in emulation mode on a amd64 system).

I think nspluginwrapper proves that it's possible, but it would need 
some work. fst and wine-asio (and the alternative dssi-vst) don't seem 
to be actively developed; none has had a release this year, as far as I 
can tell. The Steinberg header licensing problem doesn't encourage 
further development, of course, although I think Free's self-building 
package of fst is the neatest solution yet.

My personal feeling is that it would be better to spend time and 
resources on helping finalise the LV2 standard, and working on plugins 
and GUIs for it. Running VSTs and VSTi's on a platform they weren't 
designed for is always going to be unpredictable, and WINE is something 
of a moving target (particularly since the WINE developers decided 
against incorporating wine-asio into their project).

Once LV2 is in good shape, with support in programs like Ardour, the 
proprietary plug-in developers will have the option to port their 
plugins to the new format. I think that's a better long-term solution 
than attempting to support 32-bit binaries originally written for 
Windows 98.

Cheers!

Daniel