I upadated to the latest stable image, oram, downladed it from Zynthian: Open Synth Platform
Prior to that I used to put lv2 plugins in a lv2 folder, via the file browser, and then activate them in the webconfig, but I can’t remember where should I put the lv2 folder now..
Hi @funginum,
Depending on your OS version, the LV2 plugins should still be stored in usr/local/lib/lv2. Remember that you must search for engines in webconf, enable them and then reboot, for Zynthian to be able to see them. Besides, also consider that you should carefully add manually new plugins to the LV2 folder, even if they are compiled for Arm 64, because they must be tested beforehand on the Z, and there is no guarantee that they are compatible with this specific Raspberry system.
Regards
I must say that I don’t know the answer, but some plugins are stored in /usr/lib/lv2, others in /zynthian/zynthian-plugins.
Maybe we should think about a user plugin path to have an isolated location for that?
/usr/lib/lv2 is where the system installed plugins go. This is stuff like installed by debian package manager.
/zynthian/zynthian-plugins/lv2 is where custom plugins go. This is stuff like manually complied by zynthian setup.
I tend to put user built plugins in the zynthian directory. It keeps them seperate from the system ones and is easier to keep track of my work. If there are duplicates then I know where to look.
Does anything speak against adding zynthian-my-data/lv2 or similar to the system and the search paths?
Btw, on your typical unix system there would be /home/.lv2 sometimes. I don’t know if it’s integrated in zynthian and jalv search path.
Maybe, but let’s consider what makes most sense. We already have system plugins and custom plugins. Do we want/need a user plugins? And if we do, would it benefit from an easy install method, e.g. webconf? This sounds like a feature request in the making.
On zynthian, /root/.lv2 is a sym link to /zynthian/zynthian-plugins/lv2.
I used my V5 box with the image that came with it, read about putting lv2 plugins /somewhere in the discourse, can’t find it/ in a specific directory via the file borwser and applied it, some plugins worked some not. After isntalling the latest Oram image I noticed the structure is a little bit different. For example I was able to run this plugin with the previous image
As well some others
I would extend the feature request for other types of system related files. For example I’d love to have a zynthian-my-data/lv2-custom folder to write my own ttl files before I pull request them, because everytime I do the latter I have to manually delete them again before the merged files from the update can re-enter my zynthian.
For the user plugins: From the developers point of view it totally makes sense to differentiate between plugins distributed already with the OS or being apt-installed and the ones which are copied from the prebuild vault. But from the user perspective it totally makes sense to have a dedicated place to put your user installed plugins to not mix them with the “system integrated”. So:
zynthian-my-data/lv2 could be symlinked to /home/.lv2
By the way: Where do you put your source code to compile or other (temporally needed) user files?
I just installed avocado from Patchstorage (selecting the rpi-aarch64 download) to /zynthian/zynthian-plugins//lv2 and it works. I did have a glitch the first time I tried to add it to a chain which might be a bug or might be the state of my dev machine. (I am in the middle of debugging some other stuff.) But after a restart, avocado works fine.
Strange, on my system it is already symlinked there:
Sep 6 2024 .lv2 -> /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/presets/lv2
I’m not entirely sure anymore if I did that myself or if the symlink was already there. In any case, it works fine.
This is the presets directory, not a place for plugin binaries I suppose. I cannot imagine that this was symlinked by default, but if it was, it would conflict with the idea.
/root/.lv2 (i.e. /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/presets/lv2) contains 59 files, all presets
/zynthian/zynthian-plugins/lv2 contains 275 files, binaries.
And hundreds more on /usr/lib/lv2, all the nice ones 
Ah yes - it is to the presets and not the binaries. This is indeed symlinked by design… but we are not yet saying the design is optimal! We may need a grown-up to explain the logic here.