Airwave is a WINE-based VST bridge, that allows to use Windows VST 2.4 plugins
with Linux VST hosts.

Due to use of shared memory, only one extra copying is made for each data
transfer. Airwave also uses the XEMBED protocol to embed the plugin
editor into the host window.

It is the initial version that has many things, which are not implemented yet
and of course it can contain a lot of bugs. However, it allows to work good
enough with many VST plugins.

Tested VST hosts:
- Bitwig Studio - works good
- Renoise Tracker (demo) - works, only the few basic tests were made

Tested VST plugins:
- Synth1 by Ichiro Toda - works good
- Image-Line Harmless - works good
- Image-Line Sytrus - works good
- u-he Zebra2 - works good
- u-he Diva - has some sound glitches due to the high cpu load
- u-he ACE - works good
- ReFX Vanguard - works good, has some little redrawing issues
- Native Instruments FM8 - works good

Known issues:
- There is some hack for embedding the editor window. You have a chance to get
  the black window instead of plugin editor ;-)

1. Requirements
- WINE, supporting XEMBED protocol (versions greater than 1.7.19 were tested,
  but earlier versions also may work).

- Qt4 for building the GUI utility application.

- Multilib-enabled toolchain for building 32-bit binaries on the x86_64.

- CMake >= 2.8 for building.

- GIT for getting the project source code.


2. Building the source
If you use the Arch Linux, then you can get the latest development version
by installing airwave-git package from the AUR. In other case use the following
instructions for building:

First of all, you should unpack Steinberg VST 2.4 SDK archive to the source
directory. Currently, Steinberg website allows download only VST3 SDK and if you
unable to get 2.4 version, you could use the latest SDK, as it contains VST 2.4
headers anyway. Check the http://www.steinberg.net/en/company/developers.html
for proceed.

Second, the following commands should be executed from the source directory
(substitute your values ​inside of the angle brackets):

mkdir build && cd build

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<installation prefix> \
         -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release"                 \
         -DVSTSDK_PATH=<path to VST SDK>
make
make install

Please note, that some runtime-critical paths are hard-coded relative to the
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX at compile-time. So you should install files properly, and
not just build and left them in place.


3. How does it work?
The project consist of four components:
- native VST plugin shared library (airwave-plugin-<arch>.so).
- winelib VST host binary (airwave-host-<arch>.exe.so and
  airwave-host-<arch>.exe launcher script).
- configuration file (${XDG_CONFIG_PATH}/airwave/airwave.conf), where all link
  information is stored.
- GUI configuration utility (airwave-utility).

When the airwave-plugin gets loaded, it obtains its own full path and use it
for extracting from the configuration file the record of bound VST dll. If this
record is found, airwave-plugin executes the airwave-host process, passing it
the path to the real VST dll file. After that, airwave-plugin and airwave-host
acts together like a proxy, translating commands between the real VST host and
the real VST plugin.


4. How to use it?
Use the airwave-utility for create links to VST dlls. To do this, select the VST
dll file in the left view, then in the right view go to the directory, where you
want to place your link file, and then press the "create link" button. After
link is created, you cannot just move created link files to other directories
manually, as the configuration file should be updated accordingly. So it is
easier to do all link management with the help of the airwave-utility
application. Also note, that after updating the airwave to the newer version,
all your link files should be recreated. You can do this in airwave-utility by
clicking on the "recreate all links" button.