[Ardour-Dev] Need a 32 bit Ardour (with VSTs) on an x86_64 linux system

[Mike Mazarick]

Kjetil S. Matheussen wrote:

> Strange that it's harder to make VST's working in ardour today than 6
> years ago when the vstserver was still working. If someone just ported
> the vst->ladspa wrapper to dssi-vst, making special versions
> of ardour wouldn't be necessary. (No, I don't have time to do that. :-
> ))

I appreciate the observation, Kjetil!

I guess it's always possible to run some analog cables or an ADAT interface
to move the bits around between systems, or to do some other work-around
like implement a 'round robin' iscsi or ATAoE device that two systems can
take turns writing to.   No matter what solution is chosen, they all appear
to be similar degrees of difficulty.

As I mentioned, I am by no means 'married' to a VST solution, but even a
casual glance at what is available with VSTs shows that it should be pretty
easy to implement a different 'sample delay' per virtual source and add
several of virtual sources back into Ardour, particularly if you could use
Ardour as the VST host.

However, if someone has figured out how to do a multi-input 'sample delay'
(and maybe a multiplier) with a Linux DSSI/LADSPA or some other solution,
I'd be interested in hearing about it, even if it was 'conceptual' in nature
and wasn't proven out yet.   What we are essentially doing is putting a
small 'mini-Ardour' as the input to each of 32 Ardour channels and using the
resulting outputs from Ardour to feed the four 8 channel soundcards that are
"sync'd" together.   Although I don't happen to be using this brand, anyone
could do something similar with a bunch of Delta 1010s or RME 9652
soundcards.   It may even be feasible to 'fake out' one of the newer PCI
express 7.1 cards and sync several of them up (like using 4 Asus Xonar DX
and a Supermicro RSC-R2UU-A4E8 riser card).  I'll need to leave it to
someone who's witnessed the TU in Berlin (or similar) to comment on whether
or not the resulting sound is worth the effort someone would need to invest
to have a WFS system (regardless of the number of channels available).

My comments on VSTs and Paul's resulting reply on VSTs viability inside of
Ardour was pretty clear on the utility of this direction (along with the
lack of "I've tried it and it works great" testimonials).   I've already
spent enough time in 'dependency hell' to take Paul's words of caution
seriously (but, we all know compiling two target objects from the same
source is difficult but not impossible, particularly on Fedora).  Here are
the particular VSTs I was looking at implementing on a Ardour VST host:
http://acousmodules.free.fr/acousmodules4_en.htm
http://www.kvraudio.com/news/8247.html
http://www.audioease.com/Pages/RocketScience/OrbitMain.html

Outside of these particular VSTs (or ones that work in a very similar
fashion), I don't have a lot of interest in VSTs.  However, since it would
do this community a lot of good to embrace them (IMHO), I thought I'd bring
this topic up again, probably for the millionth time, but it's all new to
me. 

-Mike