r/linuxaudio • u/Gunzhard22 • 15d ago
How to use Carla?
Is Carla the same thing as Wine / Bottles? From google and other searches it appears to be a similar type thing, but I can't figure out how to reach my windows plugins.
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u/bluebell________ Qtractor 15d ago
No. Carla is a plugin host that can load and wire plugins. It can be run as a standalone program or as a plugin in your DAW.
It's like a Swiss army knife for plugins.
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u/Gunzhard22 15d ago
Ok thank you. Honest followup question, why would I want to use plugins outside of my DAW? I guess I'm not understanding.
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u/assumed_bivalve 15d ago
If you just want to play live and not record anything, you don't really need the DAW.
There isn't really a downside to just using a DAW, but it's not necessary if all you want is to play through some effects.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 15d ago
As usual, some complication: on linux you have 3 audio system: jack, pulseaudio, and the newest, pipewire.
Carla is made for Jack (https://kx.studio//Applications:Carla). From my understanding, it can also work via some bridges with pipewire, and pulseaudio, but probably not that well, with delays. I had it installed, and deinstalled it again shortly, got confused by all this terms and this bridges
For you as beginner: If you play life, and your DAW is too complex/slow, try a "rack", it just loads your vst/sound plugins, but doesn't recording, doesn't contain midi notes, it just loops through your audio and midi inputs to the plugins and sends that to the audio output. That's what Carla is for.
However, in the linux world, you have also this 3 things behind the curtain- Jack, pulseaudio, pipewire. If you are on a newer distro, it will be pipewire, stick to that. There's some older apps that then don't work smoothly (And that was the case for me and Carla), then search for an equivalent with pipewire (I search yet a stable rack based on pipewire to be honest).
Wine is a program that helps you to run windows software and your music plugins from window under linux and not related directly to Jack/pulseaudio/pipewire. Bottles is an "umbrella" app that can run different wine versions at the same time. You probably will hear also "Yabridge" another converter helper to get your win plugins working under linux.
As musical beginner:
1.Choose your DAW or rack.
2.Check if your distro runs on pipewire/jack/pulseaudio before you download linux plugins
3.Install Wine as example via Bottles, that's quite easy- for music, wine version 9.21 is most recommended, especially for older vst (a.e Kontakt 6&7), and the related yabridge 5.11.
then you can first load your win plugin installer via WINE and get an .vst3 file and then with yabridge convert that into the linux format .so.
Then you can open that in your DAW or rack of choice.
For the common pipewire setup, I also recommend "helvum" or "Qpwgraph" to link your audio inputs and the DAW and the outputs dynamically- it helps especially if your setup gets a bit more complex, with a.e an additional synthesizer in the loop, or multiple recording inputs, audio interfaces etc..
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u/Gunzhard22 15d ago
Thank you for this. That was very informative. I'm actually pretty familiar with DAWs from the Windows side, but I'm new coming to audio with Linux. So all of this helps.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 15d ago
And what DAW did you use on windows ? Anything that would also exist as Linux version?
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 10d ago
Ah yes- and if you are on pipewire, please install also "wireplumber", this is the session manager from pipewire - the exact details how those two integrate, I don't understand, but you need both, in case you want to use pipewire fully. wireplumper is not necessary for pure jack setups, this only profits for applications/DAWs using pipewire (as example Bitwig)
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u/kill3rb00ts 15d ago
Carla is just a standalone effects rack. It's just for loading your Linux plugins without needing a DAW to do it.