New member attempting to run the DAW Reason in Wine on Debian

Questions about Wine on Linux
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wikholm
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New member attempting to run the DAW Reason in Wine on Debian

Post by wikholm »

Hi!

I didn't find a presentation section for new members, so I'm just diving right in here. I hope that is acceptable.

While I begun personally depending on Microsoft in the eighties and then as a full time developer in the nineties, I'm posting this from Bookworm, because an operating system should, by definition, manage computer resources in a fast, frugal, simple, smart, safe, sane and consensual manner while, like good typography, unobtrusively serving as a vehicle for what the user tries to do, but Windows is becoming a manipulative, intrusive late stage surveillance capitalism marketing machine, made of bloating forceware, increasingly unfit for purposes other than trying to domesticate somewhat paying users into obedient cattle, so, even though I can't blame them too much, given how little most people wants to pay for such immensely complex software and its maintenance, I need options and am thus moving to Debian, trying to replace what I can and bring what I can't, a process that, while largely working out, has me snagged on the DAW Reason.

I am learning Reaper. Yet, I'd still like to make Reason 13 work in Wine, ideally stand alone, so I can open existing songs. As I currently seem limited to one query per minute, searching these forums has so far not yielded much. I have tried eyeing the Wine documentation (I even glance at EULAs) but I seem stuck in not knowing enough to know where to look. At appdb, I found somewhat aged results suggesting reasonable success with Reason 12, so I have some hope.

My PC has a ASUS B460M Plus mobo (Intel AX200 for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), an Intel Core i9-10900 (with UHD Graphics 630), 32GB DDR4 RAM and a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD (current system bus is only PCIe-3). Connected is a Focusrite audio interface, some MIDI controllers, a 24" FHD touch monitor, a DVD writer and a Logitech Unifying keyboard and mouse receiver.

For now, I'm fine letting one program grab ALSA directly so I haven't (yet anyway) installed Pipewire or JACK. Threaded IRQ is on, rtprio is set for the audio group and Debian non-free-firmware, contrib and backports has been added.

I installed Wine Staging (9.18 back then) from WineHQ, accepted to install Mono and then installed Yabrigde 5.1.0 from GitHub. Based on an error I installed winbind. Not finding a new enough winetricks installer, I got dxvk from GitHub and copied files per the included instructions. Reason Companion 3.0.6 then installed decently. At first it didn't start from the console but running wine clock with the virtual desktop on and double-clicking the Companion shortcut worked. Since then, it runs and works.

Reason 13.0.2 installed fine, but wouldn't start. It just showed a small dialogue with the title Reason, showing a grey Windows error cross on a filled red circle, a quite unhelpful "Internal Error" and an OK button. Console output led me to install libvulkan1. While Yabridge works in Reaper, attempting to use the Reason Rack Plugin just shows the same error. That's where I'm stuck.

I'm currently on Wine Staging 10.0, which gives a JavaScript error when running Reason Companion 3.0.11 (but it still starts). Reason 13.1.0 still shows the internal error, while the console gives me this:

Code: Select all

002c:fixme:winediag:loader_init wine-staging 10.0 is a testing version containing experimental patches.
002c:fixme:winediag:loader_init Please mention your exact version when filing bug reports on winehq.org.
0130:fixme:dwrite:dwritefontface5_HasVariations 00000000022E4E30: stub
0140:fixme:kernelbase:AppPolicyGetThreadInitializationType FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFA, 000000000367FF50
0130:fixme:win:GetWindowDpiHostingBehavior (00000000000100A6): stub
0130:fixme:thread:QueryThreadCycleTime (FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFE,00000000003EC4D0): stub!
0130:fixme:kernelbase:AppPolicyGetProcessTerminationMethod FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFA, 00000000003FFE80
I have gotten two other Windows programs (Chromaphone 3 and Caustic 3.2) to run, make sound and accept MIDI input in Wine, so some things are working. Any hints or suggestions as to how I might proceed with Reason would be greatly appreciated. Though I have a few more secondary goals with Wine, getting Reason sorted would allow me to dump Windows at will.
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wikholm
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Re: New member attempting to run the DAW Reason in Wine on Debian

Post by wikholm »

Well, I can confirm that Wine Staging 10.1 seems to solve the JavaScript issue I had when running Reason Companion 3.0.11 on 10.0 before. Now it just starts cleanly, and as far as I can tell, it works. Reason, on the other hand, behaves almost exactly like before. Some of the hexadecimal numbers (internal offsets?) in the console output are a bit different and the version is now obviously 10.1 but other than that, I get the same fixme prompts in the same order.

The frustrating part is that those are basically all the hints I have. Fixme's are not errors, so afaik Wine isn't saying that anything is wrong. Reason.exe doesn't seem to log anything anywhere (not that I can find anyway), nor does it seem to have any meaningful command line options either. As a general question to more experienced Wine users, how does one go about troubleshooting in a case like this? What steps can I take to identify potential problems or at least harvest further clues?
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