Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

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Rezgi
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Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by Rezgi »

Hi everyone,
I've been trying to install Native Access but no success after many tries. I'm still a bit new to Linux & Wine, so here's my status :

- I'm running Pop_OS 20.10 with native Reaper and Studio Controls to manage audio & midi, it's working fine
- I tried installing Native Access but I get stuck at the update screen (I never reached the iso download screen)
- I tried using wine-staging then wine-stable which I'm using now : wine-5.0 (Ubuntu 5.0-3ubuntu1). I had the same issue with both
- I tried installing the web drivers as in this wine NativeAccess review page but I get this error message when using WineTricks to install said drivers : sha256sum mismatch! Rename /home/rezgipop/.cache/winetricks/win7sp1/windows6.1-KB976932-X86.exe and try again. Which I do, I renamed the file and run winetricks again to install them but I get the same error over again.

I've read many posts about Kontakt & Spitfire and I can't really grasp the whole process, I'd be glad if someone could help me along the setup. I'm so jealous of guys who have Spitfire & Kontakt running :) Thanks !!
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NomadJago
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by NomadJago »

Let's try Spitfire first--- I had great success with that just the other day. Make sure you have just about all things wine you can find in synaptic. And install carla git packages from synaptic include carla bidge (there are several), carla vst wine, carla vst, carla lv2, carla git data.

Make sure you have a lot of JACK stuff installed from synaptic, including Qjackctl.

Then go download the Spitfire library manager app from their site (spitfireaudio.com). Then you can either install/download LABS and purchased products, or what I did was simply copy my products from my other disc that store their products on for use with Windows 10, to a folder in .wine/users/me/Spitfire Then I would repair the installs from the spitfire app.

I found I was able to get all the LABS, all the ORIGINALS, and BBCSO working in my Daw. To be honest that is all the disc space I had on my 1 TB SSD that I have MX Linux on, so do not want to even try installing any more libs from spitfire.

Then I run Qjackctl and configure jack there to use my audio device of choice. Then I start jack there with the start button.

Then I run Reaper for Linux, my DAW. The on a track I load Carla for my FX (I had to tell my daw in its preferences what paths to use to search for plugins including Carla and the wine directory).

With Carla loaded, I load up a Spitfire product like LABS. Here is where it is crucial to find the wine folder where the .dll is located, NOT the .vst. Typically you find the dll for a spitfire product somewhere in the .wine folder in its ProgramFiles folder in either the Vstplugins or the Common Files folder. But you use the .dll not the .vst
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NomadJago
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by NomadJago »

Once you have wine installed you should be able to download and install the Native Access (NA) install app on your Linux system.

I had problems downloading and installing Kontakt from NA on Linux, so what I did was just copy Kontakt as well as a couple of NI instruments from my Windows install of them into a folder in wine, e.g. ~/.wine/NativeInstruments Then I ran NA and simply told it where to locate Kontakt and an instrument on my Linux wine setup.

I can run Kontakt, load an instrument, but if I try putting Kontakt on a track in my daw it works but it is not persistent between uses of my daw so I gave up on that and am sticking with Spitfire. However apparently there is way to remedy that problem and I am going to work on it today.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php ... ost2379955

KEEP UP THE HOPE because you can definitely get your Spitfire libs working in Linux, if I could do it you can. Start easy, start with the LABS. And Originals.
Rezgi
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by Rezgi »

Hi there, thank you very much for the encouraging words! Funny thing is that I alread did what you wrote as my first try for Spitfire and Kontakt, (copying them from windows and loading them in Carla) and I had Spitfire & Kontakt load but not finding the libraries. I'll try again with the tricks you gave me !

I also had the same issue with Carla and persistent VSTs between sessions, it was very annoying. If you find any solution please share !

I'll try stuff and update here. Thanks a lot !
glowrak guy
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by glowrak guy »

The recent Ubuntu Studio and AVLinux distros should allow installing Native Access.
AVLinux comes with wineHQ wine-staging 5.22, if or if Ubuntu studio or other distro is used,
confirm that any installed wine is indeed from the wineHQ repository, and with a V 5.22 or
newer release. (naming went from 5.22 to 6.0, as I recall, now at 6.03) I know some use
Kontakt daily on older wine V 4.x so a lot is possible.

There are some tips in the list below that will help your quest, in the long run, and for today.
The list is rules that no doubt have many exceptions experienced by those much smarter than me,
but as a whole, will be good luck for most people. I didn't think this stuff up.
I read and assimilated the wisdom of those who actually knew and shared. I'm a parrot at best.

I've found a few things over many years, that generally hold true when running complex
windows apps in wine, and noticed choices users make that might thwart or diminish success.
These are not in a particular order, and assume one is willing to sell and buy or trade for
hardware things that are beneficial or needed....

1. One linux setup is not enough. Three might be, and four or five will be liberating,
allowing for risk-free and diverse usage and testing, with the main setup carved in stone,
used only for the creative process. This carving, for me, is based on the ability to run registered
Native Instruments, and IK Multimedia products. Yours may vary, of course.
But draw the line somewhere, and don't cross it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! DO NOT fix it...
(I've got the T-shirt, and it didn't come from NAMM :wink: )

2.The setups must be focussed on audio production. Games, graphics, sowshull needia
and office apps belong elsewhere, along with their dependencies.

3. Install an nVidia graphics card, and official nVidia 3D driver.
Fancy plugins work better in fancy surroundings. There are nVidia compatibility myths
out there, because some people with big heads, are not as skilled at coding, as others are.

4, Get an audio/midi interface with basic i/o that works 24/7. Extra bells and whistles
might be supported someday, but first get a track down, and then another, and another...

5. Install a login manager that let's you freely switch between system gui's

6. Use a system gui where main menus are under the left and right mouse buttons,
wherever the pointer is on unoccupied desktop space. Got repetitive stress issues?
Make it easier on your joints.

7. Use wine-staging from wineHQ installed in a linux that has had no other wine installed...ever

8. No winetricks

9. Create folders in wine, rather than links to linux folders of the same name.
(mkdir /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/Downloads
mkdir /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/Documents ) etc

10. use mkdir to replicate the fundamental windows paths, in your .wine,
on behalf of occasionally half-baked installers. Folders like 'Documents and Settings',
and /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/AppData/Roaming etc

11. Back-up your good .wine folders

12. Redefine 'DAW' to be your computer(s) ...software commonly niknamed 'daw',
will be 'downgraded' into being just very powerful and useful software tools, among many
other tools. This tends toward liberty.

13. Get healthy. Boozing, doping, stuffing your face with junk food are so very very 13.
Good health, mental and physical, are key to maximizing creative potential.

15. Simplify your wine vst paths, to ease use of the LinVst plugin wrapper.
Make backups of vst folders without the linvst generated .so files, so it's
simple to use linvstvconverttree command to freshly wrap a bare plugin collection
in a new or repaired setup, with a few quick steps. Beats hand-deletion from folder to folder.
A script to recursively delete files with a .so extension could be used on vst path folders
...carefully.

16. Pick linux distros that are actually simple by design. Creating a 'super easy to use' linux,
inputs vast complexities that will mostly just get in the way of wine trying to run
a complex windows app.

17. Size matters, but not as much as skill. A carefully crafted mini distro, and a carefully crafted
mega-distro, can both be better for audio production than distros designed
for general-purpose duties. Different needs, different tools. Poorly crafted distros
of any label are generally just good for seagull tosses at the beach.

18. Closed source is not a devil. Open source is not an angel. As forum guests, our communications can pollute, or enhance an online environment. We should avoid inciting needless arguments
just because we can. Anyone can make a forum, if they feel the need...

19. Pay attention to experts. Save the good parts, as the future shouts "INCOMING!!!!"
at mostly innoportune moments. And a big folder of tips and how-2's is golden.

20. weed out the start-up apps. It's a DAW, not a coffee shop...

21. reboot before you record.

22. run winecfg before you start a software daw.

23. Learn about your computer bios, cooling,and sundry managers,
and shut down things that might cause glitches during a great riff

24. Name folders you regularly use with a leading .aaa or .2020 etc
so you never ever have to scroll for them in a filemanager. Ever.

25. Save textfiles of longish command-lines that you rely on occasionally.
Final score: Pasting text 42, brainwracking 3.

26. Take a break when frustrated or tired. It will still be there 20 minutes from now.

27. Backup your songs, your projects, and your tools.
on physical media, discs AND drives AND sticks AND sd's,
and have backups of backups some distance away with trusted folk,
so flood or fire or earthquake or thief or war, can't win out.

28. Screenshot your major online purchases, the details, the confirmations,
the registration pages, the serial-numbers etc as proof should proof be needed.

29. Live like next Tuesday really matters, love like next Tuesday ain't gonna happen...
glowrak guy
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by glowrak guy »

I'm currently using the Native Instruments 2020 Christmas gift,
the Gangqin Kontakt 6 Player library, a type of dulcimer, and it's
great fun, quite beautiful in tonality, and supplied with an abundance of
articulations and scales, 14 instruments to enhance whatever western chromatic
performances one might come up with. Must get sticky dots to mark
the keys with articulations :wink:

An example: Native Access attempts to download Gangqin.iso but fails.
Actually the file is there in /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/Downloads/Yangqin.iso

but bugs are on the loose. We must mount that .iso in a certain way
to extract it's content where the installer can be run by wine. So...

sudo mkdir /media/cdrom

sudo mount -t udf /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/Downloads/Yangqin.iso -o unhide /media/cdrom

ls

Now you'll see listed the Gangqin installer and data packages exposed from within the .iso
and issue the wine command to the name of the installer:

wine "Yangqin 1.0.0 Setup PC.exe"

(note that quotes must surround windows paths containing spaces)

After the installer completes it's run, restart Native Access, and the new library
will show up as a registered product, no serial number involved.
You can edit, use, and save the above command for any future products
that come as .iso files. There is an 'Add a serial' button on Native Access gui,
for products requiring one.

Cheers
glowrak guy
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by glowrak guy »

Also, in Reaper, people might have to limit cpu and threads to 1
as some Kontakt items in Reaper can't handle multi-core/multi-thread.
A bummer, but K6 does pretty well on limited resources, and there may be
workarounds out there I've not heard of.
Rezgi
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by Rezgi »

Hi there, thank you very much for all the advices and tips. I feel like I'm not very far from all the recommandations but I still have a hard time wrapping my head aroud the process. Where do I start from ? Here's my current status :

- I've got wine-5.0 on my Pop_OS 20.10 distro
- Before I installed the latest wine-staging, removed it and put stable in my system. Is it bad ? So now I should install wine-staging ?
- My distro is for game development : Unreal Engine, Reaper and Blender are installed, with an external sound card with 4 inputs
- I run my audio setup through Studio Controls, which manages jack, a2jmidi and pulseaudio for me
- I already have Carla installed and could run Spitfire Labs but without it finding any downloaded samples, I had it installed in Windows and just tried launching it through Carla
- Carla makes some windows VSTs work (Blue Cat Amp, TAL reverb..) even though I never used LinVST, BUT it doesn't remember the settings between sessions which is pretty bothersome. Any clue about that ?

Could you please just walk me through the process from here ? What do I need to do in sequence to have Kontakt ? I couldn't even launch the Native Access app even today.

Thanks !
glowrak guy
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by glowrak guy »

Hi, what happens often is that there are varieties of wine dependencies
and componants accumulated through what seem to be common sense attempts
to install things, but they wind up in conflict. From what you say, your system probably
needs to have all traces of wine uninstalled, using synaptic package manager.

You'll want to rename or move your current .wine folder. Keep in mind that
a one gig Kontakt library will need 5 gig of contiguous disk space
to run it's installer.

In synaptic preferences, choose the option to keep downloaded files in
the cache (located in /var/cache/apt/archives )

Use synaptic search button to list wine, and start removing things. There may be
prompts describing various results, and the order you delete things may need to change,
as synaptic sometimes refuses to allow a given operation for some reason.

So write down any non-wine things that will be deleted that you rely on.
They can be reinstalled, time consuming, but not difficult.
Once your system is clean go to the wineHQ and follow the setup steps.

https://wiki.winehq.org/Download

This is where having extra linux setups, bootable external drives, usb card-readers etc
come in handy. You can put a clean Ubuntu Studio and Avlinux on removable media,
and preserve your main system. AVLinux has wine-staging 5.22 pre-installed.

After wine-staging is installed, run winecfg, which will create a fesh .wine folder,
and make your choices, make sure in the drive panel,
to tick the 'dotfiles' option. Download and install Native Access, for example,

wine "Native Access 1.13.0 Setup PC.exe" Quotes must surround paths/titles
containing spaces. I would install all your NI things right away, with a policy that
a 'working Kontakt' is better than next months newest Kontakt that invokes
the Native Access auto-update 'feature' ...it almost always works, but I like to
play it safe.

You'll want to use Reaper in many cases. Once Kontakt is working in wine/Reaper,
you can use the LinVst wrapper to create a linux-native Kontakt, which should work
in linux Bitwig, Harrison Mixbus, Reaper, Carla, Ardour, and Qtractor, among others.
Keep posting the results, and things will get sorted.
Cheers
glowrak guy
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by glowrak guy »

:( I totally forgot to mention wineasio, available from kx-studio repository:

https://kx.studio/Repositories

(use the copy/paste steps there to add the repository
to synaptic. If installing wineasio with synaptic wants to install
a wine version, don't, but instead use the synaptic option
to 'download only'. The wineasio .deb file should be in

/var/cache/apt/archives

and can be installed with

sudo dpkg -i nameof.deb

I have these two files installed, and two symbolic links:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wine/wineasio.dll.so

/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/wine/wineasio.dll.so

and these links:

/opt/wine-staging/lib/wine/wineasio.dll.so

/opt/wine-staging/lib64/wine/wineasio.dll.so

so command

sudo ln -s path-to-target-file path-to-destination-folder:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wine/wineasio.dll.so /opt/wine-staging/lib64/wine
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/wine/wineasio.dll.so /opt/wine-staging/lib/wine
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After this is ready, run two similar commands, both will report success or failure:

wine64 regsvr32 wineasio.dll

wine regsvr32 wineasio.dll

This will allow a windows daw software, typically reaper, to choose wineasio
as it's asio driver in it's setup preferences.

Midi ports will need to be configured in qjackctl, and reaper MIDI Device preferences.

(we'll see what else I forget...
Rezgi
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by Rezgi »

Hi there, thank you for the very detailed process that helps a lot.

- I downloaded Synaptic and indeed I have different wine packages installed : carla-bridge, libwine, wine-staging and wine. Should I remove everything and install only wine-staging ?
- I'm on Pop_OS and can't really install another distro, is it safe to do it directly on my working OS ?
- I have Carla, Jack, PulseAudio and all this stuff installed and managed by StudioControls, and Reaper used JACK in its settings and it works fine. Should I let this as is ?
- Since I installed Studio Controls, do I still need to install the kx-studio repo ?
- How do you install wineasio.dll.so only ? Find .deb packages online and install them manually ? Will Reaper & Kontakt only work with WineAsio ?

Again thanks a lot, I will try all these steps asap. Will get back to you.
glowrak guy
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by glowrak guy »

( I took a short bird-watching vacation, no phone, no internet, just
ducks, geese, cormorants, coots, gulls and terns etc
with some clam chowder at mealtimes...)

A safe inexpensive way to move forward would be with a new installation
on a usbstick, usb-sd-card-reader + sd card, or a usb sata case, with a spare drive or ssd
put inside. I have a Sabrent brand usb case where drives or ssd's slide into the connectors,
works fine. It has a hinged lid, and a blue flashing power button, pretty slick gizmo 8)
It has Ubuntu Studio 20.04. Around $30 for the case
I put AVLinux on a 3-in-one usb card reader, boots fine, and a 128 gig mini SD card
that was included holds a lot of samples and recordings. Even cheaper.

https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/usb-card-readers

You can also burn downloaded iso images to dvd, and boot the related live dvds,
and do all sorts of tests and dry runs, and get a feel for the options,
keeping powered up throughtout testing if going well.

I always add kx-studio where I can, most compatability issues between distros
and 3rd party repositories are around core linux system libraries, so plugins and audio utilities,
that might rarely be a mismatch, are not likely to cause a big problem.
falkTX is maintaining jackd, wineasio, with several major projects moving forward,
and has been on both the distro, and repository sides of providing solutions.
...as the say down under (at least in the movies), 'No fears, mate'.

A linux daw won't list asio in it's Device preferences, having jack, alsa and pulse
as options. But when windows Reaper using wine is configured, selecting asio as the
driver, will detect and list a working wineasio so it can be chosen. This has proven to be
the most consistant and most compatible way to use windows plugins, but now that the
LinVst plugin wrapper is quite mature, it is an excellent alternative, also with very good results.

https://github.com/osxmidi/LinVst/releases

Installing Linvst will place five or more items in /usr/bin.
From those, I copy linvst.so, linvstconvert, and linvstconverttree to /home/me
I doubleclick the linvstconvert in pcmanfm filemanager.
It presents a small gui that asks you to browse
1. the path to linvst.so
2. path to a vst folder (select other, the last option in the list), and browse your hidden folders
for where the plugins exist, typically somewhere in .wine or .vst etc
3. Press 'Start', and instantly most discovered windows vsts will have a linux version with a .so extension
right next to them. Linvstconverttree does the same, but can search recursively in folders,
as the case might call for sometimes
Then have your plugin host do it's version of a full scan.

I suggest keeping your POP-os as is, and test with alternatives mentioned.
But if you choose to get wine a clean slate in POP-os, make sure you backup
your home folder keepers a couple of times. Synaptic will have it's demands,
perhaps a certain order for uninstalls to be made, so keeping notes of what is uninstalled
will help guide any reinstalls.

Wine-staging installs in /opt, but distros and software may expect wine and wineasio.dll to be
somewhere in /usr/lib, so I have links created to cover that possibility, and it shortens commands from

/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine
to just
wine
Cheers
Rezgi
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Re: Need help to install Kontakt & Spitfire on Pop_OS 20.10

Post by Rezgi »

Hi there, happy new year !

Thanks, I'll need to take some time to try all of this, I have lots of Wine packages and I can't start from a new OS install. I'll try to clean up wine packages but it's a bit messy since I installed Lutris and stuff like that. I'll post my update soon asap.
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