Hello, Ben
To use VST through ‘fst’ with Renoise, you need to use JACK (and Qjackctl) to route midi and audio signals. In short the actions for fst are:
(assuming you have fst, jack and renoise setup)
- Run Qjackctl and start jack
- Run the VST with fst
- Create the new instrument in Renoise
- Make sure that Renoise is using JACK and has enough inputs (in audio preferences of Renoise).
- Add ‘Line In’ device to it (Routing Devices - Renoise User Manual)
- In Qjackctl open 'Connections and on ‘ALSA’ tab route your MIDI device to the VST.
- In Qjackctl open ‘Connections’ and on the first tab route ouputs from your VST into corresponding inputs of Renoise.
- In Renoise open Instrument’s MIDI settings and choose the VST as MIDI device.
- It should work now!
However, I believe the approach above is quite cumbersome. You can use LASH to manage JACK sessions (I don’t have any experience with it), but there is another way to integrate Windows VST with Renoise - dssi-vst. If you can run your VST with dssi-vst, then try this:
(assuming you have dssi, dssi-vst, wine, jack and renoise setup)
- Configure ‘VST_PATH’ environment variable to point to the place where your VST .dll files are placed.
Some details:
- Environment variables are not consistent through all of the system, they are inherited from parent processes to childs. This means that if you want Renoise to know about VST_PATH, you need to set this variable for some process that would be (grand*)parent of it.
This command will set the variable (modify paths ofcourse):
export VST_PATH=“/your/path/to/vst:/one/more/path/to/different/vst/location” &
And there are several ways to pass it to Renoise:
a. If you are using ~/.xinitrc to initialize your X session, you can put the line above at the top of .xinitrc file.
b. You can just write custom .sh script that will first set the variable and then run Renoise:
#!/bin/bash
export VST_PATH=“/your/path/to/vst:/one/more/path/to/different/vst/location” &
renoise
- The path should point to the folder with .dll file, as far as I’ve seen subfolders are not parsed by Renoise, so if you have some VST in separate subfolder, add it to the VST_PATH as well (‘:’ is a delimiter for paths).
- Test the VST with ‘vsthost’ command. The syntaxis is ‘vsthost /path/to/the/dll/file’. If you run it like that, it will register VST in JACK, so you can route the MIDI controller to it (in ‘Connections’ → ‘ALSA’ tab) and test how it works.
- Festige is a handy tool to run VST plugins from GUI. It can with both ‘fst’ or dssi-vst, google for it if you want.
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Mark ‘Use VST plugins’ and ‘Use DSSI plugins’ in Plugins preferences of Renoise, then press ‘Rescan’ button.
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If the VST is an instrument, it will appear in the ‘Instrument settings’ tab, under ‘Plugins’ button. Choose it and play it. Button ‘Ext. editor’ will show the VST GUI.
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If the VST is an effect, it will appear in ‘Track DSPs’ under ‘DSSI’ section.
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Sometimes the plugin may crash and hand running and consuming resources. You need to find it and kill it:
ps aux | grep vst
…some output with PID of processes, you need the process that has ‘vsthost’ in it’s command.
kill
The second way is what I use, and it works good. You need to setup everything once, and then it just works right in Renoise.
I am writing this away from my home PC, straight from memory, so sorry if I messed up something.
Hope that would help!
PS. The first message in this thread shoud fill all the gaps in my explanation if you choose to use fst.
