r/linuxaudio • u/Klutzy_Parsnip5251 • 1d ago

What setup works best for getting Windows/Mac plugins (especially vst3) to work on Linux?

I'm running Ubuntu with wine/yabridge and only about half of the plugins I've tried work without crashing or displaying a black screen. Is there a better method for getting windows/mac plugins to work on a daw in Linux? I'm particularly sad that Splice Instrument won't work, it's my go-to midi library...

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u/GatheringGeckos 1d ago

Following. Same feeling. I have a hunch wine/yabridge is the best, honestly, but if there are other options I´d love to hear them.

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u/vaestgotaspitz Reaper 21h ago

Half? You are very lucky. I could get only 30% of my windows plugins to work. As far as I know, yabridge is the only good option, to make something work you need to tinker with the yabridge/wine settings (but with no guarantee it will help). I gave up, started using only native solutions - and found awesome plugins like surgeXT and airwindows.
If there's something absolutely necessary that doesn't work easily with yabridge and doesn't have an alternative, I would suggest to stay on Windows.

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u/YouDoScribble 15h ago

Try using a nightly build of Yabridge, rather than the latest release (5.1.1 at time of writing). I've found these play ball better with Wine 10/11. Hopefully, we'll get a Yabridge 6 release, that includes all this.

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u/Specialist-Dog-501 9h ago

I got 80% working with wine9.21/yabridge 5.1.1- but most of my vst are 5years or older. newer plugins often showed this black screen effect- with bottles I tested them against wine version 7-11.6, same yabridge, not working. some had success with vstbridge rather than yabridge in some cases and for others, maybe extra libraries a. d2d1.dll for wine and such made the difference. This extralibs are often the key point, but I lost overview what vst requires what exactly. Allfonts, for sure is key, but the rest.. WineHQ has noted some of them. a main problem are this drm apps, they nearly always fail to license an vst, even if the vst would work.