Guitarix modules as VST?

[gimmeapill]

I didn't find any thread on the topic, and it's been itching me for a while:
Was it ever considered to port some of the main guitarix modules (like amp and cab sim) to vst as it was done for lv2?

I can think of 2 major closed source hosts for which this would make sense:
Bitwig and Renoise.

I have no particular problem connecting the standalone guitarix to either, and do what I have to do with good performance, but I have from time to time some dreams of integration and like the way it's working in Ardour.

As for lv2, the use case would be:
- Record dry signal into the DAW, apply effect chain later on
- Use the great guitarix tube simulations as regular effects per track
- Save settings with the song/file.

This can probably be already achieved with Carla, but a native vst would maybe be more future proof.
On the other hand, this would certainly not help LV2 gain traction, so I can also see the point in not doing it...

[brummer10]

I didn't find any thread on the topic, and it's been itching me for a while:
Was it ever considered to port some of the main guitarix modules (like amp and cab sim) to vst as it was done for lv2?

No.

On the other hand, this would certainly not help LV2 gain traction, so I can also see the point in not doing it...

Well, a point, but not so important to me.
It's just, my to do list is full, I like to do a new release of guitarix, but a lot of stuff needs to be done before.
I barley use the LV2 plugs, and even less I would use VST ports of them.
However, building VST's from the guitarix dsp sources will be easy, as we provide them as faust sources, and faust, could generate VST plugins from them for you.

regards
hermann

[gimmeapill]

Hi Hermann,

Thanks for the clarification & fair enough, better take care of the important stuff.
I'll see if I can get somewhere with the FAUST compiler - thx for the hint

Cheers,

LX

[gimmeapill]

Was easy indeed: as a first shot I went the lazy way and built everything I found under the faust directory with faust-vst (the native faust distribution doesn't list Linux vsts as a supported target).
Result: 33 vst effects with working controls
Tested in Renoise so far, they seem rather sweet sounding and light on cpu.
Some of them are a bit wonky, the more complex ones failed (fuzzface, gx amp) & it doesn't seem all the building blocks make sense as individual plugins, but that's a rather encouraging start.

Next steps: I cannot help with a real port to vst, as there seem to be a lot outside of faust. But once I figure out who does what, I'll see how far it is possible to go with the build scripts for LV2, and automate things in a arch pkgbuild.

Stay tuned!

[brummer10]

Well, the amps and fuzz plugins use a so called foreign function, for the amps, it is defined in valve.h and for the fuzzes it is defined in trany.h
The files been located in /src/gx_head/engine you need to edit the include path of the faust build script, so that faust could find this files. Then it should work.

Indeed, some of the faust sources just be parts of other plugs, which we have written in C++, check the wscript file in the faust folder to find out which dsp files we really use for plugins.

regards
hermann

[gimmeapill]

Thanks for the pointers.
I didn't need to go that far though: I made a quick pkgbuild to compile as vst the whole faust folder and excluded the modules that didn't present much interest individually or were failing (that left about 15-20 out of 60 sometinhg), then tested further in Renoise.
It appears that although the faust modules are lightweight, I'm quickly hitting performance limitations in Renoise itself when using vsts, as I'm running at very low latency (96k 64sample 3periods =~ 2ms), so I'll stick to a standalone guitarix instance for now (Ardour + Guitarix LV2 fares slightly better but not much).

Cheers,

LX