Plugdata is a rabbit hole, but thankfully you only need to learn a few dozen of the most common objects to start making things. It took me a week of low effort learning before I could make patches without needing tutorials or outside help. The built-in documentation is all you need after that.

Does that plugin have a distinct sound you like? To be honest I’ve never moved beyond my DAW’s stock eq and compressor. And god, iLok is a scourge.

Native Linux audio plugins are frustratingly uncommon. I’m gradually trying to replace my Windows plugins with Linux native ones but it’s hard to do sometimes. My thing lately has been building my own replacements with plugdata.

Happy music making (:

So I recently reinstalled Linux on my machine but hadn’t bothered to reinstall Analog Lab, so I just did that now to confirm it still works. It was really easy.

From their website I got the installer, and ran Analog Lab V Setup.exe with Wine. I went through the setup wizard just like you would on Windows, and then manually moved the vst file from the Wine directories into my normal vst location (~/.vst). After this, I generated the .so file with yabridge. This is also a really simple process. If you are using yabridge for the first time, you need to tell it where your plugins are:

$ yabridgectl add path/to/vst

After that, generate the .so files:

$ yabridgectl sync

Once this is done, your DAW of choice should be able to find and open the plugin. For me, Analog Lab V opened without issue and prompted me for my account info. Here’s Analog Lab V on my machine:

Edit: I forgot to mention my copy is legit and it activated no problem.

Are you familiar with yabridge? It can take a windows vst (.DLL) and create a Linux counterpart (.so) that daws can scan and open normally.

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

In my experience, it works pretty much perfectly about 80% of the time, and the remaining 20% are buggy but useable, or rarely completely broken. I don’t have Arturia’s V Collection, but I have Analog Lab 5 and that runs without bugs. If they are built with similar technology, then you might expect V Collection to work as well.