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Hi--
Will Mixbus4 in Linux load windows vsts?
For everyone that might be interested the windows version works with wine loading windows vsts but the dsp is always
between 90 and 100% with buffer set to 1024 samples.
Another less stable solution is airwave-vst where the plugins are all recognizable but crashes are usual. There is also carla but i havent tested it.
But it would be great if MB4 in linux can load windows vsts
Best--
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No, the Linux version won't be able to load Windows VST.
The dependence on Wine makes it almost impossible to support this feature. Wine's functionality generally improves over time, but any given release of Wine may behave worse with some or all Windows VST plugins. Particularly for some commercial/proprietary plugins which use special APIs for license checks that are not available via wine.
Step back and think about what "using Windows VSTs" really means: Taking bits of software written with only one idea in mind - running on the Windows platform - and then trying to use them on an entirely different platform. It is a bit of a miracle (largely thanks to the incredible work done by the Wine project) that it can work at all. But is this the basis of a stable, reliable DAW for a non-Windows platform? Getting Mixbus on Linux to pretend that its really a Windows application running on Windows? To make this possible Mixbus needs to become a windows binary (well, a wine-application) itself (not a linux ELF binary) and run entirely under Wine.
It's very similar to running the Mixbus Windows version inside wine (and you'll want wine-rt to begin with), except that as hybrid wine-application it could also load ELF plugins.
If you really depend on Windows VSTs, then remain on Windows, or potentially consider using an actual Windows VST host running inside of Wine and not require the the whole DAW to be under Wine's control.
The best option however is to appeal to Plugin manufacturers: Ask them for a Linux version. Several commercial Plugin developers have already ported their Plugins to Linux -- and some frameworks e.g. JUCE make this rather straight forward these days.
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I have not tried either, so I can't say which is better (for whatever definition of good in this context)
..but I gather that airwave is a single-plugin wrapper and exposes the plugin control ports for automation, while Carla is a multi-plugin rack where automation can only be done using MIDI-CC.
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I recommend Carla. It is maintained and do in addition have a lot of additional functions, like being a stable Linuxsampler front end and being a consistent interface for a lot of plugins an even sample libraries.
One of my happier moments lately was when I with the win64 plugin ran the amazing Roland JX-8P emulator: PG-8X from ML-VST. I even use Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 with Carla.