I’ve been trying to get a few windows VST’s running on an Arch linux installation and it has just not been cooperating. I’ve tried installing both dssi-vst and fst but neither of these will properly configure themselves.
It’s worth mentioning that all I’ve done with Wine is downloaded it and run the initial configuration, I haven’t done anything else by hand. As far as I can tell I shouldn’t really need to do much of anything and the problems I’m getting don’t appear to have anything to do with Wine anyways, but if I’m somehow wrong on I would be very pleased if you could correct me.
FST won’t even ‘make’ - I’ve downloaded the latest version of all three of the various VST SDK’s, which would be “2.3/2.4”, “Audio Plugins SDK 3.5.1”, and “Module Architecture SDK” (currently located here: http://www.steinberg.net/nc/en/company/developer/sdk_download_portal.html). Nobody really mentions which of these is necessary and which aren’t, so I just grabbed all three and unzipped the .zip’s into the directory that was created after extracting the .tar that FST 1.8 came in. (I feel that there could just as easily be a step missing here which is causing FST some grief).
Despite this, when I enter the FST directory and enter the command ‘make’ it only returns this:
cp -a `find . | grep 'vstsdk[^/]*\$'`/source/common ./vst
cp: target './vst' is not a directory
make: *** [hackheaders] Error 1
And I really don’t know what to make of that. I created a directory called “vst” just to see what would happen, but it then returns (bearing in mind “vst” is an empty directory:
cp -a `find . | grep 'vstsdk[^/]*\$'`/source/common ./vst
cp: cannot stat './vstsdk351_11_11_2011_build_96/VST3': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'SDK/doc/vstsdk': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat './vstsdk351_11_11_2011_build_96/VST3': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'SDK/doc/vstsdk/vstsdk.tag': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat './vst_sdk2_4_rev2/vstsdk2.4/source/common': No such file or directory
make: *** [hackheaders] Error 1
I don’t know where the directory “SDK” is supposed to come from, the directory vstsdk2.4 (which is properly located as a subordinate directory of the “2.3/2.4” SDK) apparently doesn’t contain the folders that it needs to, which also goes for the “3.5.1” SDK which also named all its subdirectories incorrectly or something. I could just rename everything properly but I don’t imagine that would solve much as there are apparently a large number of actual files missing here.
And something tells me that this is all just because I’m using the wrong version of the VST SDK. Can anybody tell me where I might get the proper versions or how to configure FST so that it properly ‘makes’ using the SDK that I’ve currently got?
DSSI-VST, on the other hand, comes in a neat PKGBUILD that installs very nicely and doesn’t return any errors until you actually start trying to run the VST’s. As I currently understand it, these are the steps required to run a DSSI:
- open a DSSI host, like Renoise
- run the following in a terminal
vsthost plugin_name.dll
(assuming that your $VST_PATH is configured to point at the directory which contains the .dll files, I should only have to enter the filename and not the full path from the home directory to the .dll, correct?)
Now, the unfortunate problem is that this is often the return:
Returning file identifiers: gbPrjTWf4z8PazpIXMIsPQMJ
Failed to find dssi-vst-server.exe: No such file or directory
vsthost: bailing out
Upon installation dssi-vst host is apparently supposed to create a trio of files called “dssi-vst-server.exe.so”, “dssi-vst-scanner.exe.so”, and “dssi-vst_gui”, all of which are required to run the VST’s and all of which I found perched in the folder /usr/local/lib/dssi/dssi-vst. I assumed that I was just telling dssi-vst to look in the wrong place for these files and accordingly set my $DSSI_PATH to look in the folder /usr/local/lib/dssi (pointing it towards the actual /dssi-vst folder doesn’t work, it needs to be one directory up). Still nothing. Then, I realized that it wasn’t looking for “dssi-vst-server.exe.so”, it was looking for “dssi-vst-server.exe”; I created a copy of both dssi-vst-server.exe.so and dssi-vst-scanner.exe.so with the “.so” suffix removed and then ran the vsthost command again:
RemoteVSTClient: executing /usr/local/lib/dssi/dssi-vst/dssi-vst-server.exe -g /home/brett/programs/renoise/plugins/vst/ymVST_1.0.dll,gw1l15G5iAUX1OGONPOM92GH
Plugin server timed out on startup: No such device or address
vsthost: bailing out
(it sits on “executing …” for some time, which I take to mean that it has found the proper file, “dssi-vst-server.exe”, but that this file is somehow unsatisfactory or incomplete)
I really don’t know where to go from there. I think that if somebody could guide me through it step by step (from step 1, rather than from my current position), it’d be a much easier time of things.
I’ve been tearing my hair out over here because every guide I look at on running Windows VST’s in linux just magically assumes that you set up everything correctly, when that is often the hardest part. Can anybody who’s actually accomplished this ridiculous feat impart me some of their wisdom?