If you want to use gigasampler or SFZ there is no substitution for linuxsampler. I know there is something called "calfbox" but that seems to be in an early stage of development, and I'm not sure if it involves using linuxsampler or not.
My current practice with linuxsampler and NSW is to use Ardour3 as the lv2 host along with NSM-session manager. Ardour3 does have NSM-session support. I think this set up has a lot of attractive features, though, it does not work entirely flawlessly at present. What is attractive is that by hosting linuxsampler (or other lv2 instruments) is that the you can easily add other effect plugins to the tracks and can set up other busses, like a reverb bus, and the entire setup is saved. I use this setup for live play, and route my keyboard to a lv2 tracks in Ardour, and can easily switch instruments through the midi enable button on each track in Ardour3. Also, you can turn off effects very easily via their enable/disable buttons in Ardour3. You can do a lot just within Ardour and only need NSM if you want to use other apps, which I do. As far as I can see using Ardour3 offers a lot of convenience which I have not found in other types of setup. You could also use qtractor as a lv2 host but it is more work to set up the midi routing, and there is no way to disable midi input on tracks like Ardour3. Or I could run instruments as standalone and use NSM mixer, but NSM mixer only supports Ladspa plugins, and there is no way to disable instruments easily, except by muting, which is not a good method because you still use CPU when muted, whereas in Ardour you can disable the midi input, so CPU is not used if an instrument is disabled. As for the shortfalls of this Ardour3 approach - Ardour3 is bit complex and requires more system resources, but if you have recent hardware I think it is not bad, and I am able to run stably at 4 ms (roundtrip) latency. Ardour3 + NSM + linuxsampler does not always work perfectly together but I'm not sure where the problem lies. Frequently, Ardour3, when started by NSM, claims to be recovering from a crash even though I saved the Ardour3 sessions before terminating the previous NSM session. Another issue is that Ardour3 seems to have problems crashing when using more than about 5-6 linuxsampler tracks. I use a modified linuxsampler lv2 plugin which on has 2 output channels, rather than the default 32. So it would appear that there is some issue between Ardour3 and linuxsampler when the track count is too high. Possibly this is related to me loading some large samples (I use 2 6 GB piano samples), though my memory usage does not seem maxed out, but this has nothing to do with NSM session. On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Studio Channing <[email protected]>wrote: > > have to point out that linuxsampler is not free software and its "special" > licensing prevents it from being included in debian and other distros - > that plus the complexity means it's never surprising to hear the other ways > in which it "fails to play nice with others" > > if you don't need the complexity however there are several simpler > samplers that do play nice with others and also work well with NSM: > > * Petrifoo > * Sampv1 > * SDDM > > > > On 06/27/2013 05:04 AM, Angus Wallace wrote: > >> Hello, and thanks for the great software. >> >> I'm wondering if there's a recommended way to use (eg) Linuxsampler with >> the non-session manager? I've seen someone commenting about a script ( >> http://comments.gmane.org/**gmane.comp.audio.linuxsampler.**devel/1027<http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.linuxsampler.devel/1027>), >> but it seems a bit awkward.. are there better options? >> >> I've looked in non-mixer, thinking that I may be able to load a >> linuxsampler.lv2 file, and save its state that way, but no dice.. >> >> Any help appreciated >> >> Thanks, Gus >> > > > >
