LinuxMusicians

The faster I can fire up a project I'm working on the more time I will spend on it. That seems pretty obvious, but if I can start a project in a matter of seconds there is a big bonus. If I only plan on spending 5-10 minutes working, what's the point if 3-5 minutes are spent setting up. But if it only takes 30 seconds to get to work, that's another story. Where the bonus comes in, is that very often my planned 5-10 minutes turns into 2 hours.

VSTs have been a bottleneck for awhile now. I would have to wait for everything else to start before I could load them in Festige. Recently, Carla has been recognizing one of my VSTs, but that still left me with one other.

I found a work around for this and it has been staring me in the face for months right in the Festige UI.



Festige gives the command it's going to use to open the highlighted VST where it says "Final Command:". I took that command and made a shell script: I put it in /usr/local/bin and made it executable and in Non-Session-Manager I added client "AmpliTube.sh".

Now all the applications I need start with a single mouse click.

UPDATE: I discovered another Festige trick! Using a script to load a previously saved state. (NOTE: I'm using a different VST for this example because it's particularly appropriate and it happens to be what I'm working on )

Festige (or more properly fst.exe if you look closely at the above script) gives you the ability to save the state of a VST when you are running it.



Start by saving the state to the folder ~/.ladish/festige. For my example, say I saved the above VST as "Piano" (because it's a sampler and I now have a piano sample loaded in it); fst.exe will add the extension .fps to that, so you will see ~/.ladish/festige/Piano.fps.

Now go back and edit the end of the script and change it from: to: The script will now open the saved state. If you need to update the saved state, just save using the same ~/.ladish/festige/filename.fps.

In this particular use case, being that it is a single slot sampler, you might want to run multiple instances, so when editing the original script don't "SAVE" but instead "SAVE AS" say as "Piano.sh". Then you can go back, run the original script again and load another instrument and repeat the process to create a script for that.

falkTX wrote:festige's fst support SIGUSR1 save, so you might want to use that instead of manually saving-as everytime.

I suspected this but hadn't got around to test it. All I've needed the saved state for is to load instruments. Non-Session-Manager sends the SIGUSR1 signal.

AnthonyCFox wrote:

falkTX wrote:festige's fst support SIGUSR1 save, so you might want to use that instead of manually saving-as everytime.

I suspected this but hadn't got around to test it. All I've needed the saved state for is to load instruments. Non-Session-Manager sends the SIGUSR1 signal.

Only NSM Proxy will send SIGUSR1. So you'll have to start your script via NSM Proxy (actually, you could define the whole thing in NSM Porxy if you set those WINE environment variables in your ~/.bash_profile or whatnot).

male wrote:Only NSM Proxy will send SIGUSR1. So you'll have to start your script via NSM Proxy (actually, you could define the whole thing in NSM Porxy if you set those WINE environment variables in your ~/.bash_profile or whatnot).

Ah, well that clears up things a bit for me. I thought about using NSM Proxy but I didn't really understand that this: is an environment variable and what I should do with it. And not being able to paste into the dialog box; it was just easier to make a shell script.

It doesn't matter much for what I'm doing right now; I don't edit the samplers after loading the instruments and any edits I make in AmpliTube I save as a matter of course.