Installing Serum 2 (synthesizer plugin) natively on linux

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Good news! Serum 2 now supports linux. I am leaving a few notes here if anyone is eager to try it immediately.

  1. Go to the beta on this page (you need to own serum and have an xfer account to access it): https://xferrecords.com/forums/serum/serum-2-linux-beta/

  2. Get both the vst3 and Presets folders and place them respectively in $HOME/.vst3/Serum2.vst3 and $HOME/Documents/Xfer/Serum 2 Presets/. Make sure the presets are at this exact location as Serum will otherwise prompt you for it but may fail to show the dialog window required to locate the presets directory.

  3. Serum 2 is missing some dependencies. To view them all, try:

cd .vst3/Serum2.vst3/Contents/x86_64-linux
patchelf --print-needed ./Serum2.so
ldd ./Serum2.so

Currently, installing the following dependencies with patchelf is enough to make Serum2.so compatible with NixOS:

nix-shell -p libsm libice libx11 libxext freetype libxcb libxcb-util libxcb-cursor libxcb-keysyms xkbutils libxfixes libxkbcommon glib cairo pango harfbuzz fontconfig expat libc curl openssl autoPatchelfHook --run "autoPatchelf ./Serum2.so"

Notes:

  • tested on reaper 7.88 from nixpkgs unstable
  • serum does not seem to work on Carla (serum loads but displays an error stating that “this host does not provide an IRunLoop via setHostContext”)
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