A very significant development from the Issue Tracker.
Native VST plugin support just resolved!
http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=3278
Have anyone yet used Kontakt player or/and Yellow tools Independence free library on Ardour?
The next major Midi advance imo would be the resolve of issue below.
http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=4324
The Ardour team is shaping version 3 up to be a phenomenal achievement.
there’s a native Linux VST version of Kontakt player?
I’ve played around a bit with the free Native Instruments Kontakt5 player which comes with 500 GB of sounds (demo version - only works 15 min in one session). I have not used it as a VSTi within Ardour3, since I’m running A3a10) but rather as a VSTi loaded in Festige, and in its standalone version directly in wine. In this mode I connect the midi input from Ardour3 (or from my keyboard). I’m using AVLinux5 with wine 1.3.27. The Konkakt5 player does work reasonably well, and the sounds are quite good, which is quite attractive. However, I see there are many features on the Kontakt5 player (which I do not understand, having no previous experience), but I found that it was easy to get the player in a hung state if you tried to many menus. But I did learn how to load an instrument and that worked reliably.
I found that the Jack performance was not very good. Running even at high latency (46ms) resulted in frequent xruns if more than 1 instrument was loaded (and even with some single instruments). Ok, this was with my crappy laptop soundcard. I’ll have to try with my firewire interface which should work better. With this latency, live playing is not really possible (but maybe it is not realistic to use such samplers for live playing?). In contrast I can load several
instruments in LinuxSampler and have no xruns at all (though these instruments, except for SalamanderPiano, are probably not big as those in NativeInstruments). I don’t know how much difference one might expect running as a VSTi in Ardour (actually probably this is not possible anyway, because Kontakt is not a native linux VST). I tend to doubt it work very differently. Perhaps I can better optimize my wine-asio setup or something else to improve things.
The sounds available with Native Instruments are quite appealing. However, I’d say at this point I’m leery of spending a lot of money for software what only partly works. However, maybe with some tuning of my system and updated software maybe it can be made to work reasonable well.
I looked a little at Yellow Tools. I notice Yellow tools requires a USB dongle to run (which it seems you have to pay separately for). I’m concerned that the dongle would work in Linux, so that pretty much rules out Yellow Tools for me.
O…i did not know you need a VST written for Linux.
I wonder what the challenges are (in terms of time and amount of code) for a VST programmer to port their plugin to Linux
Depends on how they wrote their plugin. There is no one simple answer for that.
Seablade
Note that Kontakt also give away quite a few free instruments which don’t time out: some basses, couple of guitars, “jazz organ”, drum kits, and more.
I also get quite a few dropouts… (Athlon II x3).
I agree with the OP that a quick and easy way to adjust the velocity of a range of notes is a standout missing MIDI feature and I would imagine that a non-graphical velocity interpolation feature would be pretty easy to implement and certainly do-able by 3.0.
The other big missing feature (apart from the oft-requested tempo ramps which sadly isn’t going to make it into 3.0) is MIDI export. Personally I don’t have much need for MIDI export but it just seems incomplete without.
Paul - I think there are going to be lots of disappointed Ardour fans if you don’t include lxvst support in the next (beta) release. You are going to have it enabled in future release builds aren’t you? Please!
Try rt kernels. I’m running ubuntu with liquorix kernel and have no xruns at 128 samples latency with KONTAKT on my old intel T2400 1.8 GHz mobile processor.
Note that Kontakt also give away quite a few free instruments
Try IK Multimedia Sampletank free. It also have about 500 MB free samples but it can load AKAI samples without limitatons!
I think that there is a confusion with the word “native”. So it’s good to say “native linux” or “native windows”. Some people think that “native” is related to windows, because most of the vst are developed on this OS. But there are mac and linux builds also. I used to be against linux vsts, but I have to admit there are now good ones (Loomer products for instance). So a support for native linux vsts is a good thing for Ardour.
Festige is a very good tool, but it will remain dependant on wine, and has its technical limits. Each new update in wine may cause trouble with Festige, so I would not include it in Ardour.
My 2cts.