Brian’s Bedroom

Hi,

Is that possible to run windoze VSTs like EZDrummer or Virtual Guitarist or Guitar Rig 3 and VSTs like these on Linux DAWs? If so please explain how.

Thanks in advance,

I’ve installed EZDrummer (and Drumkit From Hell eXpansion) using WINE but when i run it that gives an error “Failed to load ASIO driver” and the program produces no sounds.

BTW I was using a windows DAW (installed and running on WINE) to launch the VST. i have the VST dll and files installed to my HDD, now am I able to launch it by a linux DAW like Ardour?

It’s possible to compile ardour with VST-support through wine (which is actually not an emulator – wine is no emulator but a free implentation of the WIN-API. ;-) )

Maybe this will help!

Actually, WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator, but near enough

There are several ways of running VSTi and VST under Linux.

There’s DSSI-VST, which I’ve not used in a long, long time which wraps VST(i)s so that they appear as DSSI plugins to apps that use those e.g. I used to use this option for loading VST instruments in Rosegarden. There’s info around on the net about this.

Then there’s FST (FreeST) which allows you to run VST(i)s as standalone applications which you can connect to other sound apps using JACK. It used to be necessary to obtain the VST software development kit from Steinberg (free of charge) for some header files which FST was built against. Because of Steinberg’s licence, having precompiled FST (such as a .deb you could install) was a bit of a grey area. These days there’s something called the VeSTige headers which obviate the need for the VST SDK which makes life easier — I think there might now be DEB files of FST that you can simply install with a package manager. Again, I’ve not used this in quite a while for reasons that will follow. Again, there’s info around on the net if you search.

These days I use Wine for everything VST related. The big breakthrough is wine-asio: this presents itself to Windows apps as an ASIO sound driver (some sound apps won’t run at all if they don’t detect an ASIO driver) and shows up in qjackctl as Wine-ASIO-JACK-client so you can connect them to whatever else shows up in JACK. Again, there’s info and .deb packages around on the net, but the latter are not always that easy to find. There are also command line er… commands that need to be typed to set up wine-asio, but IIRC it’s just a single command.

Many people have had success with the free (beer, not speech) VST Host but I’ve never managed to get that working. Instead, I’ve been using Cantabile Lite as a VST host — fire that up using Wine and then run VST(i)s within that, it’s worked great for me. Other VST hosts probably work fine also (check the Linux VST compatibility list and Wine app database for info).

Recently I’ve also had success using the Windows native standalone versions of various VSTs including, of interest to the OP, NI’s B4 II Hammond organ emulator, Akoustik Piano and free Kore Player (and hopefully also Elektrik Piano when it arrives!). NI’s Service Center activation tool worked flawlessly once I upgraded to the latest stable version of Wine (I’m still using Ubustu 8.04 so my Wine had turned to vinegar :D ). I’ve also had the standalone versions of GForce’s M-Tron, M-Tron Pro, Virtual String Machine and Oddity working fine. With wine-asio they all show up as wine-asio clients in JACK, it’s just a matter of selecting my controller keyboard as a midi input, either within the synth or in JACK.

Your mileage may, of course, vary (I have a very heavy right foot!) but I hope this helps.

Q