WineASIO post

content/blog/2024-01-05-wineasio-bottles-ableton.md

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+---
+title: WineASIO, Bottles, and Ableton
+description: How to run Ableton in a bottle with minimal latency
+date: 2024-01-05
+tags:
+  - linux
+  - wine
+  - music
+draft: true
+extra:
+  auto_center_images: true
+  excerpt: A post showing the process of installing WineASIO into a bottle
+aliases:
+  - /blog/wineasio-bottles-ableton
+---
+
+Ableton was not built to run inside Wine. Yet, I've been doing it anyways for the past 6-ish years with reasonable success anyways.
+
+Over those years, my one complaint about the setup is latency. No matter what I tweaked, I couldn't get audio input/monitoring to behave as well as it does on a supported operating system.
+
+Generally, when you encounter audio latency issues on Windows, the go-to solution is Steinberg's *Audio Stream Input/Output* (ASIO) API. Its effectively a direct pipe between software and your sound card, bypassing the Windows audio stack entirely. Could there be such a thing for Wine?
+
+## WineASIO
+
+Well, you read the title of this post, so I kinda already gave the answer to that question away.
+
+[WineASIO](https://github.com/wineasio/wineasio) is a project that implements the ASIO API inside Wine, and pipes the audio to the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) on the host system instead of a physical sound card.
+
+While you could just follow the instructions in the WineASIO project README and skip over the rest of this post, the WineASIO project is mainly designed to work with a standard Wine install and JACK running on the host system. Being a Fedora user, I have neither of these things.
+
+I instead use [Bottles](https://usebottles.com/) to manage multiple wineprefixes (*wineprefixi?*) and [PipeWire](https://www.pipewire.org/) to manage audio on my system. So, I had to do a bit of extra work to get WineASIO working.
+
+### Compiling
+
+Compiling WineASIO is quite simple. Firstly, grab the dependencies (the Wine and JACK headers):
+
+```sh
+sudo dnf install pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-devel wine-devel
+```
+
+Then, clone the WineASIO repo and compile it:
+
+```sh
+# Clone the repo
+cd /tmp
+git clone https://github.com/wineasio/wineasio
+cd wineasio
+git submodule update --init --recursive
+
+# Compile
+make 64
+```
+
+This will produce a pair of libraries in `./build64`. Copy them to Wine's library directories:
+
+```sh
+sudo cp ./build64/wineasio.dll /usr/lib64/wine/x86_64-windows/
+sudo cp ./build64/wineasio.dll.so /usr/lib64/wine/x86_64-unix/
+```
+
+### Installing into a Bottle
+
+Firstly, you need to know your bottle's `WINEPREFIX`. You can find this by taking the output of the command `bottles-cli info bottles-path` and appending the name of your bottle to it. For example, my Ableton installation looks like this:
+
+```sh
+# echo $(bottles-cli info bottles-path)/Ableton-11-Suite
+/home/ewpratten/.local/share/bottles/bottles/Ableton-11-Suite
+```
+
+With this path, set your `WINEPREFIX` environment variable, and run the WineASIO registration script:
+
+```sh
+export WINEPREFIX= ... # Your path here
+/tmp/wineasio/wineasio-register
+```
+
+Finally, copy the built libraries into your bottle:
+
+```sh
+cp /tmp/wineasio/build64/wineasio.dll.so $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/windows/system32/wineasio.dll
+cp /tmp/wineasio/build64/wineasio.dll.so $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/windows/system/wineasio.dll
+```
+
+## Using WineASIO
+
+Now that WineASIO is installed, Ableton will automatically detect it and list it in your audio drivers list. Simply select it, and you're good to go. (You even get [Ableton Link](https://www.ableton.com/en/link/) support when using WineASIO!)
+
+I personally have [a script](https://git.ewpratten.com/ewconfig/tree/scripts/ableton-linux) that handles this whole process for me automatically.
+
+*Oh, ya. Happy New Year btw.*