Linux Audio Production

The future is here. I have moved my audio stack to Linux with no problems.

All the VST’s I used on Windows can be bridged to work on Linux.

The guide below assumes that the distro you’re using is Arch based (I use Manjaro) and the DAW is Reaper.

Note I had this working successfully with Ubuntu 20.04 but switched over to Manjaro for unrelated reasons. To reiterate, this will work on Ubuntu, the installation is a tiny bit more involved (though still not very, just follow the README and you’ll be fine) but that’s all.

Setup

Install yabridge and yabridgectl

Use yabridge and yabridgectl (much easier than linvst and the dev is on discord and very active)

If you’re on Arch or something similar

yay -S yabridge
yay -S yabridgectl

Tell yabridge where the plugin directories live

For Reaper the VST directories are ~/.vst and ~/.vst3 by default. Tell yabridge about these with the following:

yabridgectl add ~/.vst
yabridgectl add ~/.vst3

Install some plugins

Download some plugins and move them into ~/.vst.

Do the following to confirm

yabridgectl status

Once you’re happy, do

yabridgectl sync

To bridge them over and that’s it!

Start up Reaper and your windows plugins will be on your Linux machine <3

Plugins through wine

Some plugins like to be inconvenient and have .exe executables to run instead of a .DLL In that case, do this:

• Install the plugin using wine
• Make note of the VST plugin path (something like C://Users/Joe/Program Files/VST…)

This path lives in Linux under a .wine directory. Mine is

/home/joe/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/VstPlugIns

• Add this path with yabridgectl (You need to escape spaces and braces)

yabridgectl add /home/joer/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/VstPlugIns

Remember to add this path to Reaper too in preferences so that it knows to look here for plugins.

And there we go… again.