Carla: Infinite loop of audio plugins

Carla is an audio plugin host that recently got a new feature added, a feature that really made my day (and blew my mind). Here is my story, along with some general Carla info.

Creator of Carla

KXStudio is the creator of Carla, a bunch of other applications, plugins and even maintain various other software. They also make a Linux distribution and provide repositories for you to use in your own Linux install. In short, working with audio on Linux is a lot easier thanks to the work of KXStudio. Carla and some of the other software/plugins are cross-platform and available on Mac and Windows as well.

Usage of Carla

A plugin host allows you to run audio plugins without using a full featured DAW. I guess that this would be useful if you, for example, work with live audio and want to process sounds / play software synthesizers through plugins. I'm guessing as this is not something I use myself...
Carla can load a wide range of plugin formats (VST, LV2, DSSI etc) and, on Linux, can even be used to load plugins created for Windows. Unsure how well this works as this is not something I use myself. There are more features, such as the patchbay, but I'll stop here.

Carla also comes as a plugin, meaning you can add Carla to any audio software that supports plugins. This is where it starts to get useful for me! The DAW I use supports VST and LADSAP plugins, but not LV2. Some really nice plugins, such as Guitarix and Calf, are only available as LV2. Thanks to Carla I can make use of them by adding Carla to a track and then the plugins I want to Carla!

Getting to the point

I have been doing some early music sketches for HiW
, but I found myself disappointed with not having any suitable drum-machine. I was thinking something along the lines of Propellerhead Software's Rebirth. After searching the Internets far and wide I found a real beauty, Hydrogen! The joy fell short... it is a standalone application and there was no way to sync or make the DAW and Hydrogen interact. Another session of searching for solutions later... I stumble upon that new Carla feature I've been meaning to talk about.

Rebirth

Hydrogen

The new feature

They added the ability to also add standalone applications into Carla. I quickly got the latest version, fired up my DAW and added Carla to a track. Opened Carla and tested adding Hydrogen... lo and behold, It worked! I can play the keyboard and Hydrogen responds, I record in the DAW and it writes to the DAW track and plays back just like with any other synthesizer plugin. Closing the project, opening it again and everything just works as I left it, with Hydrogen automatically launched and everything. I found it to be mind blowing. The perfect solution to my problem.

The take away

If you work with audio, having Carla around can't be a bad idea.

Images
carla.png from http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Applications:Carla
Rebirth_rb-338_screenshot.png from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBirth_RB-338
hydrogen.png from http://hydrogen-music.org/screenshots/