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

[Quentin Harley]

Daniel James wrote:
> 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.

The only problem I see regarding this is that proprietary developers are 
generally a lazy lot, especially the Redmond crowd.  They make the 
software, and if it works for them, so be it to the rest.  This is not 
confined to Linux, but the Mac guys are also suffering in this regard.  
There are quite a few quite good free vst's available for use.  I agree 
that we should try and promote the LV2 platform, but in the mean time 
there is a whole world of people that still thinks *nix systems are for 
servers only.

LV2 looks pretty cool though.  I wish I knew more about DSP programming 
so I could write a few plugins myself!

Cheers,
Quentin