How to get Serum and FL Studio working on Ubuntu Linux 

crazy how easy it would be too all they need is zig/mingw/cmake or whatever

@@prodxwoah idk what that means but it would be nice if they added native Linux support. So if that's what they need to do it then I agree lol.

On the website www.image-line.com/downloads/flstudiodownload.html I can only find a download version for Windows or macOS. Which one do you install?

Ahhh.. Know i saw, that you have to use Windows :)

Hey, your comment kinda fell off my radar because it wasn't a question, just noticed it now. I haven't been able to get it working on Ubuntu 17.10/FL20. Did you do anything different from the video, and what WINE version are you using? Also, 64 or 32 bits?

i'm somewhat confused but i'll take it as a compliment

i get it lmao cause of the distorted audio

you still on linux haha?

@@bananadog111 Yep, never looked back since the switch! :D

@@bananadog111 linux better than windows in terms of performance

@@krlvbn2105 Only if you use an appropriate low-latency kernel, for example. Generic kernels are server-friendly.

hey mate, do you also use other types of plugins like kilohearts, ozones, kontakt, massive, and all those type of VSTs ? I am also thinking about switching to linux, but I have a shitload of VSTs, and I also professionally use them. This is the most important question i think I've ever asked someone related to linux aha

Is it still working? I found people saying that Wine is not that good for FL Studio and can make it crash sometimes.

Congratulations on making the switch!

Are you using the trial or the full paid version?

Is LMMS's sequencer as good as FL Studio's?

@@jousboxx9532 Isn't open source free :)

Glad I could help :)

Try installing Pro Tools the same way I installed FL. If you encounter any problems, I can give you some suggestions. Unfortunately, since Pro Tools tends to be more oriented toward live recording and real instruments, it will be difficult to get full functionality under WINE. The latency and overhead are quite significant on the setup in this video, and stuff like MIDI, live recording, etc doesn't work at all.

support.image-line.com/jshop/shop.php :-----)

Nooo, you're going to need to wade through that on a case-by-case basis :/

No, and the latency is quite bad. If you're going to be using a MIDI controller, I would recommend you stick with Windows. Hopefully this will improve in the future.

cursed sound

I haven't tried Nexus and I don't plan to. Sylenth1 should run, but I haven't tried it (yet). If you try either of them, please let me know how it goes!

I know that you can use your normal typing keyboard as a piano through WINE, but I haven't been able to get my Akai MPK Mini II working.

you could possibly install the windows driver for the keyboard via wine as well.

Here's your specifically-for-music Linux distro: kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/ As far as latency, It's not great but with some effort and headbanging you can probably get it down to a reasonable amount.

Thanks homie!

@@jousboxx9532 there is a thing in it that's called wineasio.. check it out

A guy in the comments said he got it working on Ubuntu 17.10 and FL20, but I haven't been able to use it with that configuration. If I do find something new, I'll add something in the description and post a new video if necessary. I'll also ping you on this comment :)

@@jousboxx9532 Hey! Thank you for your answer, I'll wait for your ping, thanks for that too!

In WineCFG, (just run command winecfg) try selecting different Windows versions. If I recall correctly, 7 has been the default for awhile but they probably changed it to 10. XP and later should work with FL, so try all of them. Also, try launching the 32 bit version of FL. You might have somehow gotten the 32 bit Wine.

There might be, but I haven't been able to figure it out. If you're able to get your MIDI device working with WINE, it *should* work with FL and any plugins in FL.

I just installed a Korg microkey for testing and just grabbed the windows 10 drivers and installed it through wine that seemed to work im using Manjaro

First of all, as of when I made this video, you could only use 64 or 32 bit VSTs - but not both at the same time. Make sure you're using the right bits FL Studio to match your VSTs. If that isn't the issue, specifically which VSTs are you trying?

@@jousboxx9532 I'm running fl studio 20 x64 through wine & winetricks and trying to open the original dblue glitch plugin. P.S.: I really appreciate you responded to a comment on such an old video :D

The registration doesn't seem to work on Ubuntu versions later than 16.04. The only workaround I know of is to install 16.04, register Serum, and then upgrade to whatever Ubuntu version you want to use. It's very inconvenient, but I've tested it and it works.

i tried this command and it worked wine start regedit.exe /home/myname/path/foo.reg and the startup sound is fixed in 18.04 ubuntu version

I think so. the ASIO4ALL Installation starts at 2:12 in the video. I don't have that much experience with realtime audio, but I know there is a thing called WINEAsio that you might want to look into.

w w h h y y

The performance is significantly worse, or at least it was when I last tested it about 8 months ago. In Windows, the FL demo song Fausta by OZIASO usually gets up to about 30% CPU usage on the gauge in FL Studio (on my PC). On Ubuntu, it got to 60-80% and sometimes stuttered. The performance hit on Serum doesn't seem to be quite as bad, but I haven't really tried to measure it. Hopefully updates to Wine will improve this, but it's still a major dealbreaker :(

@@jousboxx9532 oh wao ok thanks

Bummer. Can you be more specific about what happened please? -What version of WINE are you using? -What is the exact error message? -What's the timestamp in the video of the equivalent step that you're getting the error on?

@not hing share it here

There is no Linux version of FL studio or Serum. Which part of the video are you having trouble on?

welp, no matter, lol the fonts are ALL there now .thanks

@@Headfonez1 Glad you figured it out!

I couldn't even get that far on PlayOnLinux, I would recommend you follow the video as closely as possible -- that procedure is the result of a *lot* of trial and error. Also, I couldn't get the activation working on Ubuntu later than 16.04. 17.04, 17.10 and 18.04 don't work. I think someone said that it worked on 18.10, but I haven't confirmed yet.

Yes, IIRC the procedure is exactly the same except for the weird thing with the window embedding. Sorry I didn't see this comment 7 months ago...

At the time I made the video, 2.0.3 was the most recent stable version, and what I was using. You should use the current version though, trying to roll back to an older one almost certainly won't fix your problems :/

What version of Wine are you running? d2d1 has been in the list from 1.6 forward, and probably earlier. Also, make sure you're using the 64 bit VST with 64 bit FL (or 32/32). Different bits VST/FL doesn't work at all in Linux.

Jousboxx OK thats my problem then, 32 bit plugins. Whenever it tries to bridge them it bites it. For some reason I cant make the 32 bit FL run properly but the 64 bit runs great. It appears it would work with primary sound driver and play through my laptop speakers but...

Jousboxx also the plugins do appear to work fine in 32 bit with primary sound driver.

Yeah, the same thing was happening to me. Try to find 64 bit versions of your plugins and use those instead, a brand as big as NI should have both versions available for download. There a few smaller plugins that I am going to have to find replacements for once I switch to Linux though :'(

@@jousboxx9532 found any workflow where you can copy the same project file from a 64bit instance of FL to a 32bit version to be able to run those 32bit VSTs?

This comment is what the inside of my mind sounds like on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I haven't learned anything new since releasing this video. I'm still producing on Windows because this method just has too many annoying problems and workarounds. I will be sure to update you if anything changes on the FL/Ubuntu situation...

You might want to try using KXStudio. I've never tried it, but I know it's already set up for professional low-latency audio work, so maybe it would work better as far as latency is concerned

Thanks for replies! Maybe I'll try it as soon as I'll try Linux.

You are correct. I only found out about the performance issues after releasing the video. Hopefully, we will get a Linux build of FL someday, but until then, stick to Windows for serious production.

If you're trying to drag sounds in, that might not work. Try putting the sounds in your serum wavetables folder and opening thru Serum's menu. Also, it might work better if you drag the sounds out of FL's browser instead of out of whatever Linux file browser you're using.

I don't know why, but Serum doesn't want to work with standard FL Studio sounds. I just checked with my recording and Serum started to "see" this sound. Thanks anyway.

They made a Mac version, so I can't imagine Linux would be that difficult either way. Hopefully in the coming years there will be enough demand for them to do it, but don't hold your breath.

I can’t seem to find the release key on the Wine website too. Help me

Just tried it in a VM this morning, the performance doesn't seem to have changed much. It's possible that it's because of the VM, I will try it bare metal sometime soon. As soon as anything changes (even if it takes years) I will post a follow-up video.

I don't know... sorry

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten any MIDI devices working under WINE, nor have I put much time or effort into it. I wish you luck, but I can't offer much help regarding MIDI stuff :/

Fair warning: The performance under Wine is significantly worse than Windows. If you're planning to do serious music production I would recommend dual booting.

@@jousboxx9532 Thank you for the warning, I appreciate it =)

Did you try setting the Windows version in winecfg to Windows XP?

Unfortunately, not that I know of :/. There are a few things you can try that might help, though. 1) Try each device in the menu in FL Studio. I've had pretty mixed results with audio stuff in Linux, sometimes ASIO is actually better... 2) If this problem only occurs in certain projects, it might be related to a VST. Some VSTs have ridiculous overhead under WINE, so if you can find them and switch them out it can really help. Try using Tools->Macros->Switch smart disable for all plugins. Then, play the song until it starts getting crackly and find what plugins are put into use during that section. 3) Make sure you're on the most recent version of WINE! I'm guessing you didn't go out of your way to use the version I used in the video, but if you did then you shouldn't have. Also try the latest staging and development versions from WineHQ, I've found that they are usually pretty stable and bring a lot of improvements. Non-OS specific stuff that is still worth mentioning: 4) Turn your buffer size all the way up and turn on triple buffer. 5) If you have a Multithreaded CPU, go into your BIOS or UEFI settings and turn off Multithreading/Hyperthreading. Music production will often get significantly better performance with each thread dedicated to a single CPU core. Keep in mind that this will hurt performance on other tasks like video editing. Finally, I would feel dishonest if I didn't tell you that I still do all my music production on Windows :p. I realllyyy want to make the switch, but honestly it's just too much of a hassle to deal with VST compatibility issues, performance overhead, and weird glitches for it to be practical. Linux is getting better in leaps and bounds, but for now if you're serious about music, I would recommend you stick to Windows or MacOS.

@@jousboxx9532 I found out it was just me with the whole having multiple tabs up. BUT! The other issue im finding now is that I can't drag and drop sound files. Like, You know where it says Kick Clap and etc, I can't add any more sounds to that list because the drag and drop features gets all bugged out and then makes the program run slow.

Sure! Where are you getting stuck?

@@jousboxx9532 well i am trying to install wine on samsung dex but it is not allowing me. Do you have any experience with this version of linux?

@@shaungreen5109 Unfortunately, I don't. The biggest limitation with smartphones is hardware rather than software, though. Smartphones use ARM processors and PCs use x86. So even if you were able to figure out all the WINE/Linux configuration, you wouldn't be able to run any apps unless they were compiled for ARM *or* if you were using some sort of emulation layer. Since pretty much all Windows apps are x86, it's possible that whatever WINE version they have for Android/ARM has x86 emulation built-in, but I didn't even know they had WINE for ARM before I read your comment, so sorry I can't be much help here. You might want to try a Virtual Machine app, (the app would pretend to be a PC and allow you to install Linux on it). There would be a pretty major performance hit, and the display scaling and peripheral support might be all messed up, but I can guarantee that would allow you to run WINE. A quick google also brings up this: www.linuxondex.com/. It's unclear from the site if this is a Virtual Machine or a container (similar to a VM, but no x86 emulation and less performance hit) but I think it's worth a try. Good luck, and please tell me how it goes. My next phone is probably going to have DeX, so I'm very interested to hear your results!

@@jousboxx9532 Hi. Thanks for your reply. Yes it seems that it is a container. I have very limited information for you as i only found this linux for samsung dex thing around a 2 weeks ago and have not had much look in getting anything installed on it. I am very interested in this video as i was a massive fruity loops user but based around a windows p.c and laptop. I have no idea how linux works, However with my laptop packing up i just did not need a desktop for anything else other than fruity loops so there was no point in buying one for the sake of fruity loops. When i saw that linux could be installed on samsung dex, this led me straight to this video and to buy a samsung dex pad. I would love nothing better than to run fruity loops through samsung dex on linux. But i believe it maybe limited (or i am doing something wrong). I think wine should work on it as i have read up that it runs on ubuntu 16.4, which is the version samsung dex runs. But i just cant get it on there because i dont really have a clue what to do. Also i have seen your video which proves fruity loops can be run on linux ubuntu 16.4. I think somebody with your knowledge could get this thing going.

So first of all, Fedora is primarily aimed at developers, system administrators, and people who do office work. That isn't to say that you can't produce music on Fedora, but unless you have a specific reason to use Fedora you should probably use a better supported general purpose distro like Ubuntu (or Kubuntu for KDE). You'll end up spending less time dealing with weird problems and more time producing. The interface drawing thing sounds like your Windows version is incorrect. Newer versions of Wine have updated their default version to Windows 7, but Windows XP tends to work better with Serum. You can see the setting in the lower left at 5:45. If you're using other apps with Wine, you can make a custom setting for Serum.dll instead of changing the global setting. I've never encountered Serum loading stuff in the background, but if you post some more details about how you found that out maybe I can offer you some ~~random~~ educated guesses.

Can you please share the best ways to do it now so that others can find them more easily?

@@jousboxx9532 Lutris or Bottles.

@@okay4634 I have tried both of those methods and they don't work for me at all, and its not easy to set up. This video here has been the only solution that has worked for me.

@@EthanMurphy2005 Both have script installers so I think most people should find it easier but not everyone I guess. For me even installing it manually with Lutris / Bottles is more convenient than with system Wine, default prefix and terminal.

@@okay4634Lutris just plain didn't do anything, I tried installing it there and nothing happens. And I've tried bottles but FL tends to be broken after that. The only way that I've managed to get FL to work is though wine.

Latency doesn't matter if you can't get MIDI to work....

@@jousboxx9532 Wait what you can't get MIDI working on Linux?

@@TheGr8scott you can.

Unfortunately no, because I don't know how to install it either. Sorry :(

@@jousboxx9532 that's aight, I appreciate u responded!

uhh just give it a name

Not sure. Usually plugins from the same brand or developer have similar results on Linux, so if I had to guess I would say yes, but you might have some trouble with registration.