Saturday, December 28, 2019

Running Spitfire Audio LABS (and other Windows VSTs) on Linux with Carla + Wine

I'm slowly purging all things Windows and MacOS from my workflow, so was pretty happy to get Spitfire Audio LABS VSTs running on Linux. I thought I’d detail the steps I took (using KDE Neon 5.13) in case it’s helpful to anyone else.

1.
Make sure you have Carla + the Carla bridge packages installed. These can be installed via the Ubuntu Studio Backports PPA*. To add this type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntustudio-ppa/backports
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

Then to install Carla and Carla bridge packages required to run windows vsts:

sudo apt install carla 
sudo apt install carla-bridge-win32
sudo apt install carla-bridge-win64

2.
Make sure WINE** is installed so that we can open the Windows Spitfire Audio Downloader App: 

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main' 
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

3.
Install Windows Spitfire Audio App from: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/info/library-manager/

4. 
Run installer with Wine and follow prompts to setup paths for VSTs and download the instruments you want. 

5.
In Carla go to the Main settings menu, check ‘Enable experimental features’, then in the experimental tab, make sure  ‘Enable plugin bridges’ and ‘Enable Wine bridges’ are checked. 

6.
In the ‘Paths’ tab select VST from the drop down menu and add the correct path to the Spitfire VSTs

7.
Finally click ‘Add Plugin’ then‘Refresh’  (making sure windows 32 and windows 64 is selected), and Labs should appear.

* More info here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/BackportsPPA
** More info here: https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

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