Kristian Amlie's home page

I do all my music making in Linux, but it’s no secret that the number of available plugins is vastly larger for the Windows platform than for Linux. Luckily, Alexandre Bique has made the nifty vst-bridge that enables you to make a bridge from a Linux VST host to a Windows VST plugin. I won’t go into the details of how to use it, since this is already well covered in its README, and is not very complicated to begin with.

What I want to talk about is getting good performance out of it. It has recently received some patches that make it better at performing in realtime, but there are some caveats, and I am going to talk about two in particular. Continue reading →

I’m an avid user of Dropbox, and also of the fantastic layered filesystem UnionFS-FUSE. However, I found that they don’t work well together. Whenever I tried to mount a unionfs folder somewhere where Dropbox could see it, Dropbox would seemingly randomly omit files from upload. Scary! This is supposed to be my backup!

It took me a long time of trial and error, but fortunately I was able to find the magic flags to make it work. If you mount your directory with these options:

unionfs-fuse myfolder=RW ~/Dropbox/union-folder -o big_writes,large_read,readdir_ino

…then Dropbox and UnionFS-FUSE should work together happily once again!

A new version of Jack2DSSI, version 0.2, has been released. For those not in the know, Jack2DSSI is a DSSI plugin that can host Jack audio clients inside it.

It adds several fixes and compatibility options to make it even easier to use with your favorite Jack client. Check it out at the project page.

Jacktube v0.31 is out, which is a bugfix release, and it should be much more stable thanks to this. Check it out at the Jacktube homepage.

For a long time it annoyed me that certain Jack applications in Linux did not have a plugin version, so it could not be used inside a DAW without manual port routing and launch scripts, etc. Yoshimi is one example, and there are many commercial examples. While it would be possible to add plugin support for the open source variants, this is not possible for the commercial ones.

I wanted a more general solution, so for a while I’ve been working on a project to be able to use any Jack client as a plugin. The result is Jack2DSSI, which is a DSSI plugin that can host Jack applications inside it. So for example, if you want to use Yoshimi in your DAW project, but you don’t want to launch it manually every time you open the project, use the Jack2DSSI plugin instead. It will save together with your project¹, and the plugin makes sure the Jack client is relaunched later.

Check it out on the project homepage.

¹ Not everything is saved. See the Caveats section on the project page.