I just signed up to add some help that I would have been glad to google up myself rather than hit against the bricks for so loong! Now I'm signed up I might have a bit of a wander round. I've been working with Linux audio and music for about 7 years now so I suppose I'm in the right place.
keywords are linuxsampler, bitwig, vst plugin disappearing.
linuxsampler does work with bitwig-studio, exactly as described on this thread.
What worked for me was:
Start bitwig, drop your linux-sampler vst plugin into your devices window. Aside: To get your vst plugin to appear in bitwig you will generally have added the plugin location /usr/bin/vst/ for indexing. I used the kxstudio linuxsampler-vst package before building from source myself, when I had some troubles. It turned out the the kxstudio package was not the problem.
So now you should have your plugin instance sitting there in the bitwig devices panel and a little square Xwindow, doing nothing, on top of the bitwig interface. You can close this one.
Now start Qsampler, add a Channel setting your instrument and using Plugin as the Audio and Midi device (or load up a saved QSampler instance you created with this earlier). I am personally playing around with the 1.3GB Salamander piano at
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/Piano/ which is probably a bit over the top! Upon loading or hitting OK on your channel changes it seems you will get an error message but if the instrument starts loading into the channel then you should still be good to go. You can just cancel the error.
Play around on your midi keyboard on bitwig. It seems everything works: velocity, pedal noise, and generally a much better midi recording and sound output interface than anything you've seen on linux before. (As it should be for $500).
Then it stops working. The plugin will no longer show in the VST folder you have added to bitwig.
I built linuxsampler with vst from source which was no easy feat. You have to sign up as a developer at Steinberg for one thing. The whole process of checking out, building with dependencies, getting the vst-sdk, working out the compile flags for linuxsampler etc. took a few hours.
I thought that had done the trick because my linuxsampler.so vst plugin was appearing once again in bitwig. Then it disappeared again. wtf!
Eventually I found the bitwig has a plugin management console in the Options dialog. You can bring up plugin errors, tick linuxsampler and ask for it to be rescanned.
You will probably have to do this regularly as the plugin seems to crash in bitwig and to crash bitwig itself in a few different gnarly ways. I am going to try some communication with the linuxsampler mob about these problems but I won't hold my breath.
Now I've spent my $ on bitwig I can't afford pianoteq which seems a lot more solid than linuxsampler as a vst plugin, and has a whole lot of parameters which can be automated and adjusted dynamically on bitwig - which is nice. The demo of pianoteq is pretty good anyway except you have to delete all your pianoteq plugins and redrop them every twenty minutes. Hopefully restarting bitwig would work as well (I haven't tried this yet) - that way any scripting or recording of midi events related to the pianoteq plugin could be preserved. Also pianoteq has velocity graphs which my cheap weighted Korg keyboard sorely needs.
My next bitwig mission is to find (perhaps create) a velocity graph vst midi plugin so I can get that same pianoteq effect with linux sampler. It really makes my Korg keyboard sound a lot better. Not sure how hard it would be to create or modify a linux vst plugin to do this. It seems none of the existing linux vst plugins can manage it. I'm not sure I really want to go down the Windows-VST via Wine route with my bitwig. If it gets that technical I may as well be back using Ardour, Rosegarden, and all the endless chains of linux apps I was tinkering with before bitwig got me back onto the musical side of playing with computer music.
Anyway, I hope all that is useful for someone in google land.
Thanks for the great thread and I hope this isn't too much of a hijack.
