🐧 Introducing yabridge, Yet Another way to run Windows VST2 plugins under Linux

I really enjoy using Linux for pretty much anything, and thanks to some more recent developments like Proton there's no reason for me personally anymore to dual boot. The only thing I enjoy doing that's sadly not that great yet on Linux is music production. Aside from a few awesome companies such as Bitwig and U-He, there's sadly (but understandably) very little commercial support for audio production on Linux. Luckily, some very awesome people have come up with ways to use Windows VST plugins under Linux. I've been happily using these for the past few years but there have always been a few small hiccups such as certain plugins not working, or plugins missing specific functionality (such as MIDI key labels for drum machines). Other times everything works mostly fine, but with some minor annoyances such as slow startup times and broken GUI resizing. That brings me to this post.

I spent the last two months working on yabridge as yet another way to run Windows VST2 plugins under Linux. Yabridge has been able to handle any plugin I've thrown at it, with the exception of plugins that use APIs that are not yet implemented by Wine such as iZotope's newer plugins. It also comes with a bitbridge, meaning that you can run old 32-bit only Windows VST2 plugins in a modern 64-bit Linux VST host. The main goal of the project is to be as transparent as possible; if a plugin is able to run under Wine at all, then it should also be able to run using yabridge. This makes the project both comparatively simple and easy to debug and maintain. I've been really happy with the way the project has turned out. Please let me know if you gave yabridge a shot and ran into any issues!

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge