Are cross platform projects possible?

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foul_owl
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Are cross platform projects possible?

Post by foul_owl »

Using reaper as my DAW.

I have friends running both windows and macos that would like to be able to edit projects I am working on. (On the tracking / composition side, not the mixing side, for mixing I understand too many cooks etc, beyond the scope of this post)

Consider the following cases for plugins:

1. Plugin is open source, ie, dragonfly reverb. No issues here, everything should work fine. (I hope!)

2. Plugin is carla, simply being used to play soundfonts. Seems like the windows and macos users could simply get a version of carla built for windows or macos (does this exist?) and everything *could* work fine here.

3. Plugin is carla, being used to run windows plugin via wine bridge. I can't imagine how this could be cross platform unless carla can somehow go "ok, I'm in windows, rather than running the plugin in wine, I can just natively run the plugin". An option could be to simply include two instances of the plugin, one in carla and one natively. When the windows user loads the project, they simply disable all instances of carla (unchecking the "enabled plugin" box in reaper) and when I load the project in Linux, the windows native versions of the plugins simply don't load. Then it would be a matter of keeping the knobs the same between the two, which would be annoying to say the least.

Has anyone collaborated with someone running windows or macos, running into any of the above three cases? How well did this work?
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milo
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Re: Are cross platform projects possible?

Post by milo »

You run into headaches whenever you try to do anything beyond exporting and sharing wav files, even when your collaborator is using the same DAW and OS.
Basslint
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Re: Are cross platform projects possible?

Post by Basslint »

2) could be eliminated by using the same soundfont loader instead of Carla.

That leaves 3). Reaper is scriptable and I think one solution would be to write a script that automatically keeps the Carla and DLL parameters synced.
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JamesPeters
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Re: Are cross platform projects possible?

Post by JamesPeters »

Case 1 works. If the plugin is the same (same plugin name, same version number, same VST version) but compiled for a different OS, Reaper for each OS will know what plugin to use and recall the settings. Whether it's open source or not doesn't matter.

If a plugin is a different version number it may work but that depends on how different the plugin is from version to version. If it's a VST 2 version versus a VST 3 version*, it's considered a different plugin. If it's a version for 32 bit versus 64 bit**, it's also considered a different plugin. These situations apply to any DAW on any OS with any plugin though, whether switching to a different OS or not. So that has nothing to do with switching from one OS to another and using Reaper on those different OSes.

* and **: These particular considerations aren't relevant with the Reaper JS plugin format. These plugins are cross platform compatible.

To facilitate compatibility between OSes for the Reaper project I'd recommend using the included "Rea-" plugins and JS plugins whenever possible. There are some really good JS plugins available to add to Reaper too.
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Re: Are cross platform projects possible?

Post by tripomatic »

I use bitwig on windows laptop and my studio desktop pc runs debian.
I use the projects on both devices. Have the same plugins(opensource and closed) , but only have to watch out that i use vst2 plugins in bitwig for windows so i don't have issues when opening the project on my debian studio pc.

On the projects with vst3 bitwig on desktop will says that the plugins can't be found because vst2 version is not the same as vst3.

But more vst3 plugins are coming for linux , so problem will dissapear in the future i guess :).
foul_owl
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Re: Are cross platform projects possible?

Post by foul_owl »

JamesPeters wrote: Mon Sep 28, 2020 12:36 pm If the plugin is the same (same plugin name, same version number, same VST version) but compiled for a different OS, Reaper for each OS will know what plugin to use and recall the settings.

Thank you!! This is extremely helpful!!
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