All Airwindows Plugins Now Run Natively on Raspberry Pi
TL;DW: you heard me!
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
MediaFire backup of LinuxARMVSTs.zip
I’m Chris from Airwindows, and you can do this… ON A SIXTY DOLLAR COMPUTER.
That would be a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4 gigs of RAM, effectively the same as the Raspberry Pi 400 I’m using in this video. Oh… also, though the system is apparently locked at 48K sampling rate to match the HDMI audio output I’m using, these tracks are all 24/96 and are running just fine. You might get more performance than I got if you’re not using 96k tracks.
Take these plugins and put them in the VST folder that Reaper is looking at. You can either use the hidden folder that’s default (“.vst” which doesn’t relate to what suffix the plugin has: they’re still .so files, but the FOLDER starts with a period to hide it in the Linux file manager) or point Reaper to the folder you’re keeping the plugins in.
That’s it. Now you can use all the Airwindows plugins… repeat ALL the plugins, all 290 or so of them, and all new ones going forward… on Raspberry Pi, with Reaper or any other DAW that’s legally allowed to use VST2 plugins (me and Reaper have licenses for this, so it looks like we’re good to go). All the plugins, free and open source, on a sixty dollar computer (or eighty if you want more RAM, or around a hundred to a hundred and sixty if you want the Pi 400 like I have, and also want to get all its peripherals as part of a kit)
Seems to work pretty good. Tell your Pi-using friends, and there will be more where those came from. This is now an officially supported platform. :)
This happened because my Patreon let me do the much more demanding update of a few weeks ago (including crucial Linux fixes) and then go out and get a Pi to make these on. The procedure is the same as compiling the plugins on x86 Linux. But you won’t have to, just use the ones I made for you :)
Installed on a RPi 8gig, I think I have them all scanned in in the correct place, however any plugin I select seems to mute the entire chain. If I remove the plugin, audio is restored.Any tips??
That’s not processing at 96kHz. You see those “i” boxes on each item? If you roll your pointer over them, you’ll see how the items are merely resampled on the fly (probably using a low fidelity method, such as linear interpolation). Internally, Reaper is working at 48kHz because the “audio interface” doesn’t go any higher than that, but Reaper being Reaper, you can actually mix and match audio files of different sampling rates and they will all be automatically resampled to the target sample rate. I’m afraid there is no easy way (yet) to run plugins at 96kHz; in a few releases, Reaper should gain native oversampling capabilities (per single plugin or for the whole FX chain) and that way you can run everything at 96kHz (but with oversampling, of course; by oversampling the entire chain, though, you will have less filtering artifacts because it will only happen once, at the end of the chain).
Will plugins only run smoothly on a Pi 4 w/decent RAM? Supply chain issues have pushed Pi 4 restocks back to April 2023, but I do have a Pi 2B+ & a couple Pi Zeroes kicking around…
are these for aarm7l or also for aarch64 (the 64 bit version of raspberry pi os)? in my experience the 64 bit os upgrade is worth it because everything just works much smoother!
i meant armhf or aarch64
32bit armhf
aarch64 would be nice for other ARM devices as well, like Odroid N2, N2+ etc.
I’ll try a build sometime, someday.
64bit would be incredible
I recently got an Orange Pi 5 up and running well using the Ubuntu OS. I’m a real noob at this as well as anything Linux based. I tried these plugins but while Reaper seemed to scan them correctly, they don’t show up in Reaper’s plugin list. I guess they will need to be aarch64 to work? Like I said…total noob to this! Thanks for all of the hard work to expand these incredible plugins.
They are built on a Pi 400. If I learn how to build them for aarch64 then I will do so :)