ArdourXchange

[johne53]

Is this a good place for catching the attention of the Wine developers? If not, can somebody put me in touch with them?

I'm the developer of a Windows utility called ArdourXchange. It's used with an application called Mixbus which is a popular DAW, available for Linux, OS-X and Windows. On OS-X we package ArdourXchange with something called WineBottler. The Windows and OS-X versions work just fine. AxC was built with Visual C++ 6.0 and it uses MFC. Either of those facts may or may not be significant.

ArdourXchange used to run perfectly in Linux / Wine (this was a long time ago - back around ver 0.9.8 ). But since Wine went to ver 1.x, ArdourXchange has never worked with it. However, many users report success of they swap out 2 specific DLLs (MSVCP60.dll and MSVCRT.dll). If users replace the Wine versions and use the official Microsoft versions, AxC springs back to life again. Unfortunately, this solution doesn't work for everyone. At my end, I don't use Linux at all so I can't help much. I can only pass on these anecdotal pieces of advice that I've received from other Linux users.

However, I'd be more than happy to provide some complimentary copies of ArdourXchange if any Wine devs are interested in making it work again. It's possibly worth mentioning that AxC is a pretty simple utility. All it does is open a file, read its contents and write some other files (displaying a progress bar as it goes along). Some users tell me (again this is all anecdotal) that the problem appears to be an unimplemented function in MSVCP60.dll.

[johne53]

Sadly, as of yesterday, we've taken the decision to remove Wine as a supported platform.

This problem first came to light around 2 years ago (circa Wine ver 1.5.x). Since then I've tried the following 3 methods for flagging it up to the Wine developers:-

1) This forum
2) Entering a bug report in WineHQ Bugzilla (when the problem first came to light)
3) Emailing the developers directly

Unfortunately there's been no progress in finding a resolution. In fact, I've yet to receive even an acknowledgement from anyone connected with Wine. I can be contacted at the following email address though, if anyone on the development team wishes to pursue this in the future:-

john [at] creativepost [dot] co [dot] uk

[dimesio]

Sadly, as of yesterday, we've taken the decision to remove Wine as a supported platform.

This problem first came to light around 2 years ago (circa Wine ver 1.5.x). Since then I've tried the following 3 methods for flagging it up to the Wine developers:-

1) This forum
2) Entering a bug report in WineHQ Bugzilla (when the problem first came to light)
3) Emailing the developers directly

Unfortunately there's been no progress in finding a resolution. In fact, I've yet to receive even an acknowledgement from anyone connected with Wine. I can be contacted at the following email address though, if anyone on the development team wishes to pursue this in the future:-

Is this your post to wine-devel? http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-de ... 95932.html

If that's you, then not only did you receive responses, but you were told that this was a known bug, and instructed to leave a comment in http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27109 noting that the problem also affected ArdourXchange, which you failed to do.

That bug was closed as fixed in 1.5.15. If ArdourXchange still doesn't work, you should have filed a bug for it. I searched bugzilla, and did not find any bugs, open or closed, that mention ArdourXchange. Don't expect bugs to be fixed if you don't report them.

[johne53]

I was asked to start Wine from a command line and provide some feedback - but as I'd already mentioned, I am NOT a Linux user. Nevertheless I could provide a free copy of the app to anyone who's willing to investigate the problem.

[dimesio]

Plain Wine can be run from the command line on MacOSX, too, and should have the same problem(s).

Perhaps it's the search terms I'm using, but I can't find any evidence that you followed up on your posts from 2012 until now, so IMO complaining that the wine developers haven't done anything is wholly inappropriate.

Developers rarely read the forum; this is not the place to contact them. You could post your offer of a free copy of the program to wine-devel, but I recommend testing the app in the current development release (if you haven't already) before doing so. There has been a great deal of work on Wine's vcrun in the past couple of years, and using an outdated Wine version is the most common reason for problems. Reporting that a problem started with "1.x" is just going to get you ignored--there have been 156 releases since 1.0.

[johne53]

For my own information, is there any connection between WineHQ and wine-devel? Or are they separate entities?

[dimesio]

They are both part of the Wine Project. WineHQ is the website, wine-devel is the developer's mailing list. Other than bugzilla, developers don't use the website much; support on this forum is provided by experienced users like myself.

I have to say that one thing that really strikes me about your app is its complete absence from every part of this website. There is no AppDB entry, no bugs filed, and your post is the first and only one on the forum to mention it. There is absolutely no reason why anyone here would ever be aware there was a problem with it. You really need to tell your users to start filing bugs and submitting AppDB test reports.