Calf Studio Gear
|
Calf's 12 band EQ Linux | |
| Developer(s) | Calf Studio Gear |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Linux |
| Website |
calf-studio-gear |
Calf Studio Gear, often referred to as Calf Plugins, is a set of open source LV2 plugins for the Linux platform. The suite intends to be a complete set of plugins for audio mixing, virtual instruments and mastering. As of version 0.0.60 there are 45 plugins in the suite.[1]
History
Calf Studio Gear development started at a time when the LV2 plugin standard was in its infancy. Calf Studio Gear was one of the first projects to bring graphical audio plugins to Linux.
The project was initiated by Krzysztof Foltman. Markus Schmidt later became interested in development of the plugin suite due to his frustration with proprietary software.[2] He has been a driving force behind the plugins ever since and has been responsible for the overall design of Calf Studio Gear, as well as being the brains behind the DSP of many of its plugins.
Included plugins
Calf Studio Gear is the most complete suite of plugins for Linux. Some of the included plugins are -
- EQ (5, 8, 12 and 30 band)
- Compressors (mono, stereo, sidechain, multiband)
- Gates and limiters
- Virtual instruments (organ, monosynth and wavetable)
- Soundfont loader
- Reverbs and delays
- Enhancers
- Analyzer
Criticisms
Some users, and developers, have criticized Calf Studio Gear for concentrating more on appearance than stability and quality.
Some developers, and users, of the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation have been critical of Calf Studio Gear as Calf plugins have, in the past, been known to cause crashes within Ardour.[3][4] This was primarily down to the use of the FFTW library, which until recently was not thread safe.
Since version 0.0.60, Calf Studio Gear have moved away from using the FFTW library.
The FFTW project has since provided a solution to this issue but as of June 2016, a stable release with this fix as not yet been released.[5]
While this issue is resolved for the most part, this problem persists for many users due to Linux distributions shipping with older, affected, versions of Calf Studio Gear plugins. For this reason, it is recommended for users to upgrade to newer releases.
The easiest solution for Debian-based distro users is to use the KXStudio repositories and install up to date versions of Calf Studio Gear from there.
References
- ↑ "Calf 0.0.60 Released! | Libre Music Production". libremusicproduction.com. Retrieved 2016-06-13.
- ↑ "LMP Asks #6: An interview with Markus Schmidt | Libre Music Production". libremusicproduction.com. Retrieved 2016-06-13.
- ↑ "Calf plugins stability - LinuxMusicians". linuxmusicians.com. Retrieved 2016-06-13.
- ↑ "Crash on File Open | ardour". community.ardour.org. Retrieved 2016-06-13.
- ↑ "Thread Safe Planner · Issue #16 · FFTW/fftw3". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-06-13.