Scaler 2 for Linux

Scaler 2 Feature Requests
1

Is there any plans for a linux version of Scaler 2?
If not is there a way to install the plugin without the exe file? That way I could run it in Carla and accomplish the same thing.

2 Likes
2

So, I’m not an employee of Scalar, so this may not be the response you’re looking for, but with this being said, there is a way to get some windows vsts running under linux and in carla. To achieve this end, you will need two things:

  • The latest version of Wine-staging.
  • Some kind of bridging software.

Wine serves as a sort of translation layer for Windows APIs, allowing some Windows apps to run under Linux. Wine-staging, is the latest available version of Wine. Think of it as Wine’s release candidate. It is available on every distribution under the sun, but in some cases the latest version may not be available in the default repos. Here you’ll have to do a google search including the terms Wine-staging and your distro of choice.

Now, about the bridging software. Carla has some extensions that bring Windows VSTs into it’s ecosystem. In Debian and Arch-Based systems, I think they’re named carla-bridge-win32 and carla-bridge-win64. Once those plugins are installed, it’s just a matter of pointing carla to the VST directories where the Windows VST plugins live, do a fresh scan for plugins including the win32 and win64 options and launching that plugin from within Carla like you would any other plugin.

Alternately, if the carla bridges are not available in your distro (I’m looking at you, Fedora) you can try to install yabridge and its command-line interface, yabridgectl. Once again, it’s available on almost every distro under the sun but may take a few extra steps to install. And …yeah, google may be your friend here too. But once it’s installed it’s a matter of typing in a couple of commands. The first command points yabridge to the directory where your windows plugins.

yabridgectl add

The next command makes a copy of the Windows VSTs from the added directory, wraps them so they look like a run of the mill Linux VSTs and copies them to where the rest of your Linux VSTs live.

yabridgectl sync

Once again, you’ll need to refresh your plugin list in Carla, but since yabridge is doing the heavy lifting, there are no additional options to select.

So to recap :

  • Install wine-staging
  • Install Scalar2 using wine
  • Install yabridge, or carla-bridges
  • Do a fresh plugin scan with Carla

As for a native port of Scalar. I think that pro audio software under Linux in general looks like gaming under Linux before Valve threw a substantial amount of money at the problem. In order to improve Linux support, a big company will need to create a marketplace solution that is similar to Steam with proton, get major buy in by some of the biggest names in the industry like Ableton, Imageline, Native Instruments and IK multimedia, and maybe even create a quality hardware solution.

In the meantime, us Linux users have to resort to all kinds of hackery to get our software to work. It’s a sad reality, but most companies, for better or worse do not see value in creating a Linux port.

3

I’d like to bump this thread - although I completely understand that the user base working on Linux is a lot smaller than the amount of users working on Mac OS and Windows machines, it still is there. I have a perfectly working setup with a 2015 MacBook Pro running Ubuntu and Bitwig with an old M-Audio Fast Track Pro interface that I dug out and was unused for years. This is now my go-to creative workstation. Maybe in the past you would need “hackery” but I didn’t have to do much for Bitwig - basically nothing special. I only needed to do some setup for the audio device and that was it.

As for the major players entering the Linux space, who knows. Bitwig Studio is still not as popular as the other DAWs, but Reaper works great on Linux too. u-he have their whole catalog working on Linux, Audio Thing have many of their plugins too. It would be great to see Scaler going the same route, along with Valhalla DSP, Sonarworks, GoodHertz and Arturia (that would be one major player). And if we won’t be expressing this demand out loud, the chances for Linux versions of these plugins would be even smaller :slight_smile: