How To Use A Vst Plugin In Lmms
Anyways most of the tuts I have seen, are pretty old, and tell LMMS newbies like me, to put the VST's in LMMS plug ins folder.
But in this video.....'How to use VST plug ins to make Indian instrumental sound loops for free.' I noticed the tutorial guy had his VSTs in a Desktop folder.
My question is, could I Make a custom folder for my Indian Dreams Vst and others etc. and put it anywhere, on my Notebook and link LMMS to it in the settings menu?
Or do I have to put the Indian Dreams Vst and others etc, in the same LMMS plug ins folder, where all the default LMMS plug in stuff is, so I wouldn't confuse myself and have to switch back and forth?
After writing this confusing scenario, I'm just 'Beaned.' ( Thats my slang by the way. Original huh?)
I'm using LMMS 64 Bit on Windows 7 64 bit.
Hope you guys can help. Bye.
How To Use A Vst Plugin In Lmms
While doing some more research on VST plugins I came across an alternative way of running native Linux VSTs in LMMS ( rather than using WINE ). It’s not very well publicised in my opinion and I found it via an incomplete LMMS wiki page.
The key piece of software is called Carla which is written and maintained by Filipe Coelho as part of the KXStudio Linux distribution. Carla is open source and can be found on GitHub.
Carla has two modes of operation, as described by the LMMS wiki page:
How To Use Vst Plugins In Lmms
- In the Carla Rack instrument, loaded plugins will show up in a virtual rack as units with control buttons and VU-meters. The internal midi and audio routing is fixed in this mode, and goes from top to bottom.
- In the Carla Patchbay instrument, plugins are loaded as units with inputs and outputs onto a canvas. Midi and audio can be routed anywhere to anywhere giving an enormous flexibility to this mode. Rack mode view is also available in the Patchbay instrument.
But note that if you’re using ALSA like I do then only Rack mode is available so Carla Patchbay is not discussed further in this post. However it does look quite powerful.
Size 17.2 MB LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. Some VST or plugins, especially synths, will come as either standalone applications or plugins. You can download them, install them, and run them outside your DAW. The only problem with standalone applications is that you can record them into your mix because you’re not using your DAW. Always use the send to active instrument option when ever you need to load a VST instrument preset (more on this: How to use VST instrument presets). When you insert an instrument, the instrument's GUI editor window will open. You can also see this GUI by clicking on the instruments grey name button in the Song or Beat+Bassline Editor.
- From what I can observe, you are trying to achieve midi-generating, sequencer-like behavior out of a VST plugin which I'm not sure LMMS plays well with. Let me explain a bit more.
- Full Wine is installed, so VST should work. All VST plugins cause LMMS to hang. However, the dials and such on the plugins are responsive, so I think its a problem with LMMS. For that matter VST works perfectly under Reaper, which is a platinum rated Windows program running under Wine.
Installation
You can obviously build from source from GitHub but the KXStudio site also has some of its own repositories with instructions on how to install on various flavours of Linux. I added this repository to my installation using the instructions on that page then installed Carla with:
Usage
Once Carla is installed then running LMMS will show two extra instrument plugin options as shown on the left.
Dragging the Carla Rack to the Song Editor and double clicking it brings up its Settings window. Clicking on “Show GUI” then brings up the Carla rack control.
Native Linux VSTs ( usually .so files ) are loaded using the file navigator pane and the controls for the loaded VSTs are shown on the right. Clicking the cog icon on each entry then brings up the same UI as for the Windows VST version.
Conclusion
Installing the Dexed VST was probably easier this way than using the normal Wine based VST support in LMMS. However there are not many native Linux VSTs available but then again not all Windows VSTs work under Wine 🙂
For me, if there’s a Linux version available then I think that it will be more reliable to use it with Carla. If a Linux version is not available then you’re at the mercy of the Wine compatibility.