MUS: LV2 plugin hosts

2023/01/19

A comparison of the audio plugin hosts out there, for use in my guitar jamming. I also look at plugins themselves. (LV2 plugins only)

TL;DR: This document is work in progress. The plugin host I use is ????

TODO:

Introduction

Motivation

Currently, I’m using ardour for applying audio plugins (e.g. reverb, overdrive etc), but ardour takes a while to load and connect to JACK. For situations in which I’d like to just jam, this takes too long to be practican, considering that as part of the setup I first need to plug the guitar in, plug in the amp simulator power, and the mixer power.

This might sound like not that big a deal, but I think that if I reduce the time it takes me to set up for electric guitar playing, it will make it easier for me to practice more frequently.

Note: Another option is to get a headphone amp, e.g. a VOX or a Fender, but this wouldn’t let me use the PC for the looping.

After a web search, I found some resources which I’ll use as a starting point because they contain a list of plugin hosts that I can try:

Plugin standards: LV2, LADSPA, VST etc

There are a few plugin standards:

Note: I only included the standards which I can use on Linux

In this article, I’m going to focus only on the LV2 hosts and plugins.

References:

Plugin hosts

I’m going to consider:

Discarded hosts

host reason
JACK Rack (jack-rack) LADSPA-only
zynjacku/lv2rack website is down (http://home.gna.org/zynjacku/)

Carla

homepage: https://kx.studio/Applications:Carla
source: https://github.com/falkTX/Carla
licence: GPLv2

This plugin host looks very nice and powerful.

Installation

Follow steps from https://kx.studio/Repositories and https://kx.studio/Repositories:Applications to add the ks.studio deb repo, and then install Carla with sudo apt install carla.

Usage

There is a nice patchbay and an ‘Add plugin’ view similar to Ardour.

TODO: image of the rack here

patchbay

add plugin

Plugins

Here I will consider:

Not considering:

Note: Common paths for LV2 plugin locations are /usr/lib/lv2, /usr/local/lib/lv2, ~/.lv2. See the settings in Carla for various paths for different plugin standards.

Calf Studio Gear

see:

Troubleshooting

Carla

The installation is quite big:

$ sudo apt install carla
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  linux-image-4.19.0-13-amd64
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following additional packages will be installed:
  carla-data libqt5designer5 libqt5opengl5 python3-isodate python3-liblo
  python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtopengl python3-pyqt5.qtsvg python3-pyqt5.sip
  python3-rdflib python3-sparqlwrapper
Suggested packages:
  pyliblo-utils python-liblo-docs python3-pyqt5-dbg python-rdflib-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  carla carla-data libqt5designer5 libqt5opengl5 python3-isodate python3-liblo
  python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtopengl python3-pyqt5.qtsvg python3-pyqt5.sip
  python3-rdflib python3-sparqlwrapper
0 upgraded, 12 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 73.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 254 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Problem When installing the repo, I saw error.

 kxstudio-repos pre-depends on libc6 (>= 2.31~)
  libc6:amd64 is installed, but is version 2.28-10+deb10u1.

which means that Carla requires libc6 <= 2.31~ but I only have 2.28.

I first tried sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade, and that brought the version up to 2.28-10+deb10u2, which is still not good enough so I did sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

in repo:

for plugins:

References