On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Edward Diehl <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > > Ha. I strongly suggest you try lisaloqt. It does not involve LinuxSampler in any way. Also, if you need a stand alone LV2 host, try Carla, it's quite a bit more stable and lighter weight than Ardour, and it also supports NSM.
