Topic by Grue

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Topic: Linux HOWTO?

Hi all, I'm not a customer yet but I became very interested in Pianoteq after hearing that it works well under Linux.

I just installed the demo under Wine and it seemed to play midi files fine.  However, it warned that my latency may be too high, and I haven't tried hooking it up to play from a piano in real-time.

Does anyone have some general tips about running Pianoteq under linux?  I've seen some references to Jacklab Audio Distribution, but I'd like to run Pianoteq with my normal, non-dedicated computer, which currently uses the Fedora distribution.

Reply by julien

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

I think you have two options:
- using wineasio ( http://people.jacklab.net/edogawa/files/wineasio/ ), which should provide a low latency asio driver for the pianoteq standalone (or any other windows vst host). I have never tried that, so I don't know if it is easy and/or reliable.
- using a linux vst host, such as fst ( http://www.joebutton.co.uk/fst/ ). I know that pianoteq runs fine with that.

julien's Website

Reply by etalmor

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

Hi, I thought of using linux on my music dedicated laptop - but I gave up as I thought I would not get all those cool software synths, in particular pianoteq ...

So now I feel I missed something big-time: how is this magic being done ? I didn't see any pianoteq release for linux ...

Thanks,
Eran

M-Audio Profire 610 / Roland Fp-3 / Reaper / PianoTeq!
www.myspace.com/etalmor

etalmor's Website

Reply by julien

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

Hi Eran, no there is no linux release of pianoteq. What is possible (but we do not support that) is to run it via the windows emulator "WINE" ( http://www.winehq.org/ ). Note that it is not an easy task to get everything set up correctly.

julien's Website

Reply by Grue

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

Thank you for your reply Julien.  It seemed easy to get Pianoteq to run with high latency, but our two options seem to be exactly right for running Pianoteq in real-time, and I was not aware of one of them until I read your message.

Unfortunately, you also seem to be correct about it not being an easy task to install under Linux.  I gave up after trying each option for several hours.  The basic problem seems to be that both the linux ASIO driver and the linux VST server require proprietary code from Steinberg.  This is not always bad of course (I obviously considered Pianoteq) but the licensing seems to prevent the usual sites from distributing pre-compiled packages.  So gave up when I couldn't get either fst or wineasio to compile.

On the other hand I was pleasantly surprised by all the other available linux software which installed easily.  (Nothing was similar to Pianoteq though.)


On an unrelated note, I also noticed that although Pianoteq's default C2 grand seemed overall to be smoother than my piano's (Kawai CA-51) default sound, I actually preferred the built-in bass to Pianoteq's, because it sounded richer/fuller.

Reply by fingers_n_thumbs

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

Hello folks,

   I have just downloaded and installed the free trial Pianoteq on my linux box, everything worked fine and was very quick and trouble free, of course I am using wine, which is not an emulator. (WINE actually stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator) It is just a compatability layer that redirects the exe.

  Obviously how well an install goes will rely heavily on which linux distro is being run. I am using Ubuntustudio, and the process was no more complicated than clicking the download button on the Pianoteq site, clicking open with wine in the window that pops up, and then simply following the usual Agree/Next and Finish buttons.

  I'm looking forward to spending the next month getting acquainted with Pianoteq, but already after just a few minutes I can see that it is much better than the Steinberg and Native Instruments programs, which I used with Windows and have given up trying to get those to work under Linux.

  That said, I can see no reason at this stage, why I won't be shelling out my hard earned next month.

Reply by Moby

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

Hello,

I also tried it with Ubuntu Studio (7.10). Here is what I found:

1) I had to switch from the proprietary NVidia graphics driver to the NV graphics driver. Otherwise Xorg does not start with the realtime kernel. The realtime kernel is essential to achieve low latency. However, with the real time kernel I have not managed using WLAN yet.

2) I downloaded a WineASIO binary rpm package from here:
http://forum.jacklab.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=563
and installed it with alien (you can either convert the rpm package with alien --to-deb to a deb package and install the deb package or directly install the rpm package with alien -i). After the installation I registered WineASIO with "regsvr32 wineasio.dll" and configured Wine. On the audio tab I only selected the ALSA driver. The ALSA driver is needed to receive MIDI messages.

3) Now the JACK audio server has to be set up with qjackctl. For my notebook (Toshiba Sattelite with Intel sound chip) I set:
Realtime switched on with priority 64
Frames/period = 128
Periods/buffer = 3 (It does not work with periods/buffer = 2 with the Intel sound chip!).
I get latency below 10 ms with these settings.

Other settings seem not to have much influence on my notebook. E.g. some tutorials recommend to set PCI latency settings with setpci or to increase IRQ priority which is possible with the realtime kernel. I did not see any effect when playing around with this.

4) now start the JACK server with qjackctl. Once it has been started, stop it and quit qjackctl. This saves the last working settings in the .jackdrc file.

5) now you can start Pianoteq and choose the WineASIO driver. Choosing WineAsio automatically starts JACK. It works very well on my notebook, especially with the latest Pianoteq 2.2.2 version. With this version I also can load the Pianoteq VST into Cantabile which does not work with version 2.2.1 and Linux.

I also have an external USB audio interface from Native Instruments. Here I have to set
Frames/period = 1024 (the ALSA sound card driver seems to have a problem with lower values  ("cannot set period size"). Perhaps I have to wait for the next driver update).
Periods/buffer = 3 (It does not work with periods/buffer = 2. This seems to be common to all USB sound cards).

Reply by daniele

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

I tried it with Fedora 8 in  VST mode with Reaper  Audio sequencer, it works well with a  latency of 2 ms.

Configuration:

*install Fedora 8

*install jack  and low latency kernel from Planet CCRMA at home; Planet CCRMA is a collection of rpms  that you can add to a computer running Fedora 8  to transform it into an audio workstation with a low-latency kernel

*install wine

*compile and install wineasio driver

*install reaper and pianoteq

Daniele

Reply by thorgal

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

Hi guys,

I have just been given an old Kawai L1 piano by a friend who had no use of it any longer. No need to say the integrated sampled sounds are not optimal. So I tried the demo version of pianoteq through wineasio (installation was a breeze on my debian sid system) ... it's another world!!! I am so impressed by the expression you can achieve! I decided to buy the thing, it's really worth it. And the nice thing is I didn't have to do anything to make it work. It simply patched the piano through MIDI automatically. Very impressed!

Reply by ethanay

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

I will add myself to the list of happy Linux Pianoteq users

Hardware:
Dell XPS m1330
1.5ghz Core 2 Duo
2gb ram
Intel HDA integrated sound (will compile firewire drivers soon...)
USB midi keyboard (plugs directly into laptop USB port, automatically recognized and no setup required)

Software:
64studio 32-bit
Wine 0.9.58
Jackd (not jackdmp)
WineASIO 0.7.4 (for Pianoteq standalone)
DSSI-vst 0.7 (to use the VST plugin)

Using 256 buffer/3frames, latency is not noticeable and pretty good for a cheap integrated sound card.  A few xruns here and there, but it improves as I tweak JACK and system settings.

Pianoteq setup is actually pretty straightforward on Linux, but learning Linux in the first place was a crash course for me! (Just a few months ago I was using Windows...)  On top of that, I am also new to "VST" "sequencer" "synthesizer" "latency" and all other software/hardware issues related to digitable audio production!  So I often feel pretty lost having to learn so much about so many different things (even about my new digital piano and its settings).

Some minor issues:
1) When using Pianoteq standalone with WineASIO, Pianoteq MUST start while jackd is stopped (jackctl can be running)
2) With Pianoteq VST plugin, there are some rendering problems: opening/closing panels (they get "stuck" until clicking somewhere else), and the "active" features don't update (polyphony, volume level meter, piano pedal diagram)

But the rest is perfect, stable, reliable, sounds wonderful and all the gui functions work well.  The VST is ultimately more stable and less susceptible to complaining/crashing from bad settings.  I should say now:  thanks much to the thoughtful Pianoteq team for writing a wonderful program that also works well with Linux   Pianoteq goes far beyond the "proof of concept" stage and in my opinion includes only useful features

Also as mentioned above, "Wine" stands for "Wine is NOT an emulator" because it is simply a Windows compatibility/translation layer.  In my opinion this is very different from an emulator, and incurs less performance loss than emulation.

Last edited by ethanay (31-05-2008 02:44)

Reply by ethanay

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Re: Linux HOWTO?

An update:

I STRONGLY suggest upgrading to Wine 1.0rcX (2-4 as of yet?) if you haven't.  It is looking much more solid.

Here is an interesting problem I encountered when reinstalling Pianoteq:
DO NOT start Pianoteq VST until AFTER you have already registered the program via Pianoteq Standalone.  It will cause an interface crash in the standalone with registry errors, and the VST is unusable.

To fix the problem, I simply uninstalled wine and removed the .wine folder (make sure there aren't any files you want saved!), reinstalled wine and my wine apps, and started Pianoteq in standalone mode first to register.  Perfect.

Now I have Pianoteq 2.2 Standalone and VST working in 64studio 3.0beta (Debian lenny), and it has never worked better