Solus LMMS maintainer guidelines

This document includes notes on maintaining and testing LMMS and its various features.

VST support

For VST support, LMMS uses Wine. It makes sense to pull Wine as a rundep as attempting to use Vestige without Wine results in a very broken-looking behavior and doesn't produce an error message except for command line. It should be noted that currently (as of 1.2-stable branch) LMMS supports only 32-bit VST plugins through Wine. 64-bit plugins will silently fail.

Testing VST support

There are several VST instruments known to work with LMMS. Synth1 is a good testing candidate, as it seems to work reliably on many DAWs. Synth1 is available at https://daichilab.sakura.ne.jp/softsynth/index.html#down A listing for tested VSTs can be found here https://lmms.io/wiki/index.php?title=Tested_VSTs

You should run LMMS once to have the configuration folders created to ~/Documents/lmms VST plugins go to ~/Documents/lmms/plugins/vst regardless of whether they are instruments or effects.

To test your plugin, drag Vestige to the Sound Editor or Beat+Bassline Editor and open its properties. Click on a green folder icon next to the "No VST-plugin loaded" text and search for your plugin. The plugin interface should pop up after loading and the plugin should produce a sound when playing with either keyboard or MIDI.

To test effect plugins, open FX-Mixer, click Add effect button on the effects chain and search for your plugin. The plugin should load without problems and alter the sound how it's supposed to.

Unknown symbol errors

The dependency discover phase shows errors for these libraries:

• libZynAddSubFxCore.so
• libgig.so.9
• libvstbase.so
• libZynAddSubFxCore.so

These can be ignored as they're private libraries used only by LMMS.