Anyone using Virtualbox for audio production in 2020?

[keith]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has had luck using Virtualbox on a Linux host to run Windows/Mac guest for audio production?

There are too many different Windows/Mac only VSTs that I would really like to use, and getting even just one of them to work via Wine/Airwave was a struggle.

I've tried virtualization a couple times in the past, but quickly abandoned it in both instances due to latency.

It's been quite some time now though, and the machine I'm using has a good amount of compute power, so I thought it would be worth another shot. If I can get it to work fairly well, then it would definitely be preferred to the alternatives (dual-boot/buying a second machine + KVM switch).

Any thoughts?

A bit of background research turned up an ~8month old reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm ... for_music/) where some users reported having success, but the details are sparse and the thread is locked/archived.

In particular, if anyone is doing something like this on a regular basis, I was wondering if you have noticed any drawbacks/limitations? Also, what audio interface are you using?

Any insights would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

All the best,
Keith

[ChuggnBlues]

IMO, if I was that reliant on Windows VSTs I would just dual boot Windows. Or use Wine, which does work very well these days, but you said that was out of the running.

[keith]

Yea, I spent a while trying to get Serum working with Wine to no avail, and that was just the first of about 10 VST's to try to get to work. It's possible that the others would have fared better, but the experience didn't give me a lot of hope.

I will likely continue to dual boot for the time being. The main down-side (aside from the time to restart / swap between OS's), is that it means stop all work I'm doing in Linux, and then restore everything the next time I boot back into it.

It also means I can't keep jobs running while I'm using Bitwig, which hasn't been a problem with the CPU I have.