Using Guitar Rig 4 for free, the legal way :D

ezietsman

Hi!

Ok, the subject line is a little bit misleading but also not quite. Some of us don't use Windows. And some of the people who don't use Windows, don't have Macs either. And some of those that are left use Linux (FTW! btw). This means we sometimes kinda get left out when it comes to goodies we can run on our computers.

I looked on as other people started using Guitar Rig and Amplitube and the rest of them and thought "Meh, no Linux version" and so just ignored the whole thing. Silly me.

It turns out that Guitar Rig 4 has a Gold rating on the Wine Application Database. For those who don't know wine, it is an open source implementation of the windows libraries i.e. all those .dll files in c:\Windows\System32 or whatever. Wine allows you to run programs compiled for Windows, in Linux. Its not an emulator and, in many cases, will run your favourite windows app faster than windows does ? The friendly (and clever) wine developers have been going for more than 10 years and its getting really good. Now, the Gold rating means the application runs perfectly in wine, after some manual labour. In the case of Guitar Rig 4, the manual labour involves installing a single package that links the ASIO bits of the Windows app to the Linux Sound Server (JACK).

So I downloaded the Guitar Rig 4 Demo and followed the instructions given in the links on http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19783. I installed qjackcontrol and what would you know, it really does work ?

Here you can see the JACK control, Guitar Rig 4 Demo and Ardour (DAW) running (I can record the GR4 Demo sounds).

Here's a link to the full size pic.
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/qsuoaZs80bNg7pnIE-n-BA?feat=directlink

If you can't see it on the pic, the latency is 11ms with no buffer underruns (Not bad considering what I'm doing here). In other words, works like a bloody charm.

EDIT: I'm NOT using the low latency kernel. If I do that I can prob get the latency to < 2ms. Haven't tried it yet. The NVidia display driver doesn't like the low latency kernel so I'd have to switch to the open source driver every time I want to boot to the low latency kernel and frankly, 11ms is fine for weekly comps, jamming etc.

So I guess this post has no point really. If YOU are running Linux, or want to but are afraid GR won't work. Don't fear, you can happily use it in Linux. Apparently Reaper DAW also runs perfectly in wine.

The best part of all of this? Every single thing on the screenshot is free software, no money involved. The GR4 demo is fully functional except for quitting after 30mins and not allowing you to save presets. Linux of course, is free(most of the definitions of free, mind you)

Happy Jamming!

Notes:

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit on my Dell Laptop using the onboard sound device. The guitar goes into my Blackstar HT-5 and its emulated output goes into the mic jack of my laptop. Not the best setup but it works fine for jamming with GR.

If you want to try this and are stuck, give me a shout, I'll try to help.

Gearhead

Whenever I feel like spending a whole lot of time on compiling kernel variants, finding new dependencies and apt-get all night, I will certainly give this a shot :?
Then again, you're probably right and it works almost out of the box... :-\

ezietsman

In this case I only ran two apt-get commands. One to install qjackcontrol (which will then install jack and all it needs) and one to install wine. I double clicked the wineasio .deb file which installed and then had to run the final command which tells wine that there is a wineasio.dll file now. Pretty simple. No kernel compilations or anything like that. I assume you use Slackware or Gentoo if you need to compile kernel modules and all that stuff?

NorioDS

Good show! ? I'll give this a shot when I have some spare time.

Gearhead

ezietsman wrote: I assume you use Slackware or Gentoo if you need to compile kernel modules and all that stuff?

No I'm not that clever. I was just exaggerating, last time I compiled a kernel is about ten years ago because I wanted to see what all this realtime Linux was about, but did not want to give up on my RedHat setup. Failed miserably but did learn a lot ?

ezietsman

I see. Things have come along rather nicely since those days. I've never compiled my own kernel (that prob means I'm a n00b) Haha! The new distros are very simple to use these days. I use Ubuntu because its the most popular of the lot. With our decent-ish internet access the repos are accessible so that 'dependency hell' is non-existent for all intents and purposes.

NorioDS

I've been using Linux for around 10 years and, I must say, I haven't had to recompile a kernel in a long time. Most times, these days, what you need is already compiled-in or available as a module. I suppose that's particularly true if you're using the right distro for the job.

For desktop I use Ubuntu which includes all sorts of media enhancements, etc. For server it's Debian-stable all the way. Nothing like a lean, mean Debian box to make me drool as it adds years to its uptime ?