SQsquarefoot·Dec 30, 2023
> To my knowledge all VST plugins can be used on Linux (via Wine). Is that not the case?
Yes, although I would recommend Yabridge rather than linvst.
https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge
It should be already packaged in some Linux distros, but building and installation are straightforward. Basically it installs some libraries and an executable which once called will convert a Windows plugin in .dll form to a Linux+WINE loadable .so library.
You install a windows plugin through WINE the usual way: setup.exe etc (or just drop the dll if that's the way it is distributed), then once it is installed, call yabridgectl adding the path of the new plugin dll, then call yabridgectl again but this time adding the option to convert plugins (going from memory, can't test it here), then you'll have the Linux loadable .so library in the same path of
Read the rest
the windows one. now just add the same place to your Linux DAW plugins path and it will automatically see and load the converted plugins. If you install a new windows plugin, just repeat the two above steps.
One nice and often overlooked feature of loading plugins through the WINE compatibility layer is that many 15+ years old still great plugins that stopped working on Windows ages ago now are perfectly usable again on Linux, with the only problem of having to work with a much smaller GUI since they were created when 1024x768 or smaller desktops were a thing, so they can appear stamp sized on today's monitors, but size aside they work fine.