Wine with WineASIO, low-latency kernel on Lubuntu 19.04

Hi,

Been reading around a bit to get a music-recording/production home-studio setup done on my current Lubuntu 19.04 system. I wouldn’t like to set up an entirely separate setup for this purpose, and thus wondering if I could modify the current system to have a lowlatency kernel and setup Wine and WineASIO as explained in the instructions in this youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvHYqVLF5d8). It is based on kxstudio. Or is there a high risk that it might make the current system unstable, due to some known or suspected incompatibilities ?

There is no problem doing that, I’ve done it myself in the past. I installed lowlatency kernel and jack.

All the overhead of WINE for FL Studio? Nah, I wouldn’t bother. There’s plenty of great audio software in the open source world that you don’t need that. I do agree with @hmollercl that the low latency kernel and JACK is a requirement, but for a DAW, I’d suggest Ardour.

Thanks @wxl and @hmollercl. I am aware of the Linux audio softwares but there are a few for which the FOSS alternatives seem harder and laborious. I had a Ubuntu 16.04 + kxstudio setup, but before changing kernel to lowlatency one on 19.04, just wanted to doublecheck that there were no known compatibility issues. Especially if I point to the winehq.org’s development repo. Also WineASIO installation seems to require building from source, as I couldn’t find it via Muon.

No known compatibility issues but when you’re compiling from source and using development repos, you’re on your own.

Thanks again @wxl. Once I install the low-latency kernel, I suppose I’d still be able to go back to the regular kernel, right ?

Since the recommended method for getting wineasio (for low-latency driver support), was via ksxstudio, I tried installing kxstudio using the method mentioned on kxstudio website, i.e. by adding repositories using .deb file etc. However, after that, using Muon I can not install either kxstudio-meta-wine or wineasio. Selecting those packages via Muon, s.a. to do “Mark for Installation” on mouse right-click, seems to be silently ignored. Not sure what’s up.

yes, you can change kernel in grub every time you boot.

Why do you need wineasio? For daw, there is reapear native for linux now and there are a couple of option to load vst to linux (carla, linvst, etc…) but they need wine.

Thanks again. My understanding was that WineASIO is required for low latency where the Windows application (used through Wine) would otherwise expect ASIO. I am quite happy with Reaper as my DAW, but I am looking at getting the following Windows software to run on Linux (and thus need of Wine):

  • Mobius Looper
  • Band-in-a-boxs

I don’t know those software but if you use reaper I highly recommend to visit the reaper for linux forum
https://forum.cockos.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52

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Audacity and Musical MIDI Accompaniment should do the trick, with the added benefit of reducing latency inherent in using compatibility layers.

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Thanks again @wxl. Had missed MMA completely, will check it out. From a quick read, it looks like something that may be a decent replacement of Band-in-a-box. As for ‘Mobius Looper’, the thing that comes closest on Linux (AFAIK) is ‘Sooperlooper’, but from a past experience with it falls significantly short of Mobius. Mobius is fully MIDI mappable, and usable in live-performance mode, with MIDI foot-controllers, usage of presets, quantization, flexible mapping of inputs, outputs, tracks and layers. [Bonus point: Ed Sheeran uses Mobius Looper as VST in Ableton Live, on his Chewie II Monster custom-made pedal board]

Also, perhaps for the benefits of others looking to add kxstudio on Ubuntu 19.04 (and by extention Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc.), from the community it I get the feeling that there is work to be done. The project is on a haitus, and there are some compatibility issues with kxstudio on the project side, which need resolution. I’m not sure if the failed attempt to install kxstudio, followed by a cleanup of the .deb packages that added repositories, one meta-package, and removal of the repositories (ppa-purge, and key removal), still left some side-effects that weren’t correctly undone… but now I can no longer get a good wine install from standard Ubuntu repo either. Lot of dependency issues.

In short, people on Lubuntu 19.04 should steer-clear of kxstudio, for now.

Well, I wouldn’t recommend kxstudio anyways. Ubuntu Studio is a far more successful and cohesive effort to provide a wide variety of audio/video tools regardless of your desktop environment. It’s not only an official Ubuntu flavor, but it’s also a metapackage.

To expand on @wxl you can use the UbuntuStudio Installer on any official flavor (i.e. Lubuntu).

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Didn’t knew that @kc2bez, that’s a good option, I don’t like xfce.

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