Yabridgectl can be downloaded from the releases section on GitHub and can run from anywhere. All of the information below can also be found through yabridgectl --help.

Yabridge path

Yabrdgectl will need to know where it can find libyabridge.so. By default it will look for it in both ~/.local/share/yabridge (the recommended installation directory when using the prebuilt binaries) and in /usr/lib. You can use the command below to override this behaviour and to use a custom installation directory instead.

yabridgectl set --path=<path/to/directory/containing/yabridge/files>

Installation methods

By default, yabridgectl will use the copy-based installation method for yabridge since this installation method works with any VST host. If you are using a DAW that supports individually sandboxed plugins such as Bitwig Studio, then you can choose between using copies and symlinks using the command below.

yabridgectl set --method=<copy|symlink>

Managing directories

Yabridgectl manage Windows VST plugin install locations for you. To add, remove and list directories, or to list the plugins currently installed inside one of those directories, you can use the command below.

# Add a location containing plugins
# For instance, use the below command for the most common VST2 plugin directory
# yabridgectl add "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steinberg/VstPlugins"
yabridgectl add <path/to/plugins>
# Remove a plugin location, this will ask you if you want to remove any leftover yabridge files
yabridgectl rm <path/to/plugins>
# List the current plugin locations
yabridgectl list
# Show the current settings and the installation status for all plugins found
yabridgectl status

Installing and updating

Finally you can tell yabridgectl to set up or update yabridge for all of your plugins at once using the commands below. By default yabridgectl will warn you if it finds leftover .so files, but it will only delete those when ran using the --prune option.

# Set up copies or symlinks of yabridge for all plugins under the watched directories
yabridgectl sync
# Set up yabridge, and also remove any '.so' still leftover after removing a plugin
yabridgectl sync --prune

Alternatives

If you want to script your own installation behaviour and don't feel like using yabridgectl, then you could use one of the below bash snippets as a base. This approach is slightly less robust and does not do any problem detection or status reporting, but it will get you started.

# For use with symlinks
yabridge_home=$HOME/.local/share/yabridge
plugin_dir="$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steinberg/VstPlugins"

find -L "$plugin_dir" -type f -iname '*.dll' -print0 |
  xargs -0 -P$(nproc) -I{} bash -c "(winedump -j export '{}' | grep -qE 'VSTPluginMain|main|main_plugin') && printf '{}\0'" |
  sed -z 's/\.dll$/.so/' |
  xargs -0 -n1 ln -sf "$yabridge_home/libyabridge.so"

# For use with copies
yabridge_home=$HOME/.local/share/yabridge
plugin_dir="$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steinberg/VstPlugins"

find -L "$plugin_dir" -type f -iname '*.dll' -print0 |
  xargs -0 -P$(nproc) -I{} bash -c "(winedump -j export '{}' | grep -qE 'VSTPluginMain|main|main_plugin') && printf '{}\0'" |
  sed -z 's/\.dll$/.so/' |
  xargs -0 -n1 cp "$yabridge_home/libyabridge.so"

Building

After installing Rust, simply run the command below to compile and run:

cargo run --release