Hey everyone,
When I was previously on windows I had a lot of fun doing music production. My workflow took place in FL studio and used a lot of software synthesizers (VST files mainly).
After my switch to Linux, I am 95% better off. Everything is great except I have to rediscover a music workflow.
It’s quite painful because I had licenses to some very expensive software synth libraries (The Arturia V collection for example). I have done some reading and have found that while it is possible to get FL studio working in Linux, it still doesn’t have the greatest of results.
As far as that goes, I am not terribly concerned - Reaper, Bitwig, and other Linux DAW’s exist and I am fine using those instead even if it means purchasing a license for the paid ones.
But the real problem is the software centers/Licenses/installations for my software synths. It would be such a shame and a waste of money if I couldn’t get these working, but I don’t know much about dealing with this on Linux, so I am appealing to your collective knowledge.
I wanted to ask if anyone has successfully installed the Arturia V collection on Linux for use in a DAW, and if so, what you think I should know about it. I thought I read somewhere about some software these could be emulated/installed through (not wine), but I’m just really open to hearing about recommended options for something like this if anyone knows.
Otherwise, I wanted to ask my musical Linux friends here what they have for VST’s and what their workflow is on Linux, because it’s always fun to develop new work flows.
Thanks
What you really need is one of native DAWs you mentioned combined with Windows VST plugins run using Yabridge + WINE.
I remember running even complex VSTs along with realtime MIDI processing from e-drums with really good results and low latency.
Make sure your distro runs Pipewire and has pipewire-jack installed. Run your DAWs with JACK backend
You can check https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio for tips regarding audio performance. Don’t worry if you don’t use Arch-based distro. Most of it applies to any distro really
Install wine and yabridge follow setup instructions on how sync your plugins, which essentially takes specified locations with VST2/VST3 DLLs and creates .so equivalents (Linux dll format) under specified location that under the hood calls Wine, but makes it transparent. You add that location (with .so files) in your DAWs search paths and it should scan those plugins like if they were native.
Of course some compatibility issues are possible, but you should be able to run most stuff this way when it comes to plugins.