[Wine] Wine 1.2 breaking VSTs, making unusable/glitchy. these plugins have been platinum for a long time :( now are almost useless

[Peter L Jones]

Hi Jordan,

The WINE guys pay very little attention to WineASIO and real-time JACK usage as
it's not one of their larger support demands - games and office apps hugely
dominate.  (If you look at the small number of people who use a PC for doing
"real" media work, you'll see why.)

When WineASIO was being developed, there was some push for changes in WINE and,
as I understand it, these changes were made or patches applied.

However, WineASIO isn't currently under development (I'm maintaining the source
on sourceforge but I rarely have Linux running).

The other group you'd expect to have an interest are the JACK users and
developers.  However, they have more interest in getting Linux "up to speed" as
a full media system without reliance on Windows software, so again have little
interest in spending time on WineASIO.  Again, changes in JACK can be pushed
for and made.

What's needed here is someone with the development skills, time and motivation
to keep WineASIO current with both WINE and JACK, identifying changes needed
either in WineASIO or the projects its dependent upon and getting these made.

And that's where it falls down, unfortunately -- unless someone steps up and
takes that challenge, WineASIO will slowly fall into dereliction.

I've a wishlist of things I plan to do should I ever get time to work on
WineASIO (getting it working in 64bit has recently been added as I imagine it
doesn't show up to 64bit apps).  One of them is merging in JackWASIO - which
seems more actively maintained.  Indeed, my approach might be to generate a
patch to JackWASIO and close down WineASIO.

Hope this helps you understand the situation.  I'm afraid I can't help with the
frustration it causes.

-- Peter

On 22/07/2010 13:34, jordan johnston wrote:
> hi,
> 
> I posted about a week ago, when i had updated to wine1.2-rc6.
> 
> I had warned that i had seen regressions in wine. This applied to
> Commercial VST instruments that i have been using in linux for about 2
> years.
> At first, when using Jack-audio-connection kit (after the upgrade) i
> began to notice certain plugins were now causing Xruns, when they
> started up.
> this never used to happen. so i posted.
> 
> Now the situation is even worse. In particular, a plugin i had
> mentioned before Native Instruments FM8, is now causing xruns whenever
> i am switching
> to a new preset - this makes it now useless!!  It is a sound app and
> you can't have it causing audio glitches/xruns.
> I don't know what has changed in Wine recently, but what i do know is
> that i posted before and didn't get a single response on the issue,
> and now it
> is worse. -  i wonder if i had been posting about a game, if the
> result would have been the same? ;)
> 
> I not only did a fresh Wine install, but also I have re-installed
> linux (i was planning to anyway).   and this problem is still present.
> Clearly, it must be
> a regression in Wine.....
> 
> I don't play video games in wine, frankly, i don't see the point in
> hacking a game to run under linux at the cost of 30% fps drop in
> performance.
> Now, i didn't get a single reply with to my problem, which is
> ridiculous when you watch this list filled with replies on how to make
> some stupid game half-work
> with it's crappiest "low as possible" GFX settings.  This is ironic,
> when you consider That there are more Linux Distro's geared towards
> Pro-audio (most of which are using Wineasio) then there ever will be
> linux gaming distro's. A lot of linux musicians require wine, as Linux
> doesn't exaclty have a lot of Pro - type plugins and yet VST support
> hasn't changed much, and i think is actually getting worse. (it's
> frustrating).
> 
> I use wine for Photoshop, but mostly for VSTs using WineASIO + jack.
> 
> For the latter, i would be more than willing to give any information
> needed to sort out some of these new issues, that are slowly ruining
> my Pro-audio setup.
> something new in wine is causing the problem, i don't know how to get
> to the bottom of it. but i am more than willing to help and provide
> any information that might be useful, in fixing these issues. I just
> need to know how to go about it, properly.
> 
> sorry, if i come off a bit frustrated. But man, to have something work
> well for so long, and then
> have it be absolutely useless....it's a real hard one...not to mention
> that i use this setup in live shows (music/band).
> 
> Lastly, this is important to me becuase i am running a VST hardware
> platform, and if wine goes to crap for my Commercial VST instruments,
> There won't be any point in me using it. to the point, that i might as
> well just use OSX - which has way more overhead, and doesn't achieve
> as low
> of latency on my hardware :(
> 
> thanx
> 
> jordan
> 
>