SUSHI

Headless plugin host for ELK Audio OS.

Usage

See sushi -h for a complete list of options. Common use cases are:

Test in offline mode with I/O from audio file:

$ sushi -o -i input_file.wav -c config_file.json

Use Coreaudio on macOS for realtime audio, with the default devices:

$ sushi --coreaudio -c config_file.json

Use JACK for realtime audio:

$ sushi -j -c config_file.json

With JACK, Sushi creates 8 virtual input and output ports that you can connect to other programs or system outputs.

Sushi macOS

Since version 1.0, Sushi can be built natively for macOS as a native binary with all the dependencies statically linked to it.

There is a new Coreaudio frontend (selectable with the --coreaudio command-line option) to interface directly with Coreaudio. As an alternative, a Portaudio frontend is also available (with the --portaudio flag).

With Coreaudio, you can select other devices than the default with the --audio-input-device-uid and --audio-output-device-uid options. To find out the right number there, you can launch Sushi with the --dump-portaudio-devs to get a list in JSON format printed to stdout.

MIDI support is provided through RtMidi and can access directly CoreMidi devices.

LV2 support is currently not available for macOS.

Example Sushi configuration files in repository

Under misc/config_files in this repository, we have a large variety of example Sushi configuration files.

The first one to try to check if everything is running properly, would be this one that uses the internal sequencer & synthesizer to generate a sequence:

$ ./sushi --coreaudio -c config_files/play_brickworks_synth.json

(on Linux with JACK, replace --coreaudio with --jack).

Many of the examples use the mda-vst3 plugins which are built when building Sushi. If you are running one of the prebuilt packages (available on the releases sections on Github), you have everything inside the sushi folder there. For example, on macOS you should be able to get a simple working synthesizer with:

Otherwise, if you are building from source, the plugins used by the examples can be found under:

build/debug/VST3/Debug, or build/release/VST3/Release respectively, for debug and release builds.

To run Sushi with an example configuration, you simply invoke it while pointing to one of the above paths.

On Ubuntu that could be:

$ ./sushi -j -c ../../misc/config_files/play_vst3.json --base-plugin-path VST3/Debug

Or, from a macOS terminal:

$ ./sushi --coreaudio -c ../../misc/config_files/play_vst3.json --base-plugin-path VST3/Release

Extra documentation

Configuration files are used for global host configs, track and plugins configuration, MIDI routing and mapping, events sequencing.

More in-depth documentation is available at the Elk Audio OS official docs page.

Building

Sushi builds are supported for native Linux systems, Yocto/OE cross-compiling toolchains targeting Elk Audio OS systems, and macOS.

Make sure that Sushi is cloned with the --recursive flag to fetch all required submodules for building. Alternatively run git submodule update --init --recursive after cloning.

Sushi requires a compiler with support for C++17 features. The recommended compilers are GCC version 10 or higher, and clang version 13 or higher.

Native Linux dependencies

Sushi handles most dependencies with vcpkg (or as submodules) and will build and link with them automatically. A few dependencies are not included however and must be provided or installed system-wide. See the list below (debian packages names):

• libasound2-dev

• libjack-jackd2-dev

• For VST 2:

  • Vst 2.4 SDK - Needs to be provided externally as it is not available from Steinberg anymore.

• For LV2:

  • liblilv-dev - at least version 0.24.4. Lilv is an official wrapper for LV2.

  • lilv-utils - at least version 0.24.5.

  • lv2-dev - at least version 1.18.2. The main LV2 library.

    The official Ubuntu repositories do not have these latest versions at the time of writing. The best source for them is instead the KX Studio repositories, which you need to enable manually.

  • For LV2 unit tests:

    • lv2-examples - at least version 1.18.2.
    • mda-lv2 - at least version 1.2.4 of drobilla's port - not that from Mod Devices or others.

Building with vcpkg (native Linux & macOS)

Instructions:

$ mkdir build && cd build 
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../third-party/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake ..

This might take some time for the first build since all the vcpkg dependencies will have to be built first.

Building with Yocto for Elk Audio OS

Sushi can be built either with the provided Elk Audio OS SDK, or as part of a full Elk Audio OS image build with bitbake.

Follow the instructions in those repositories to set up a cross-compiling SDK and build Sushi for a given target.

Useful CMake build options

Option	Value	Notes
SUSHI_AUDIO_BUFFER_SIZE	8 - 512	The buffer size used in the audio processing. Needs to be a power of 2 (8, 16, 32, 64, 128...).
SUSHI_WITH_XENOMAI	on / off	Build Sushi with Xenomai RT-kernel support, only for ElkPowered hardware.
SUSHI_WITH_JACK	on / off	Build Sushi with Jack Audio support, only for standard Linux distributions and macOS.
SUSHI_WITH_PORTAUDIO	on / off	Build Sushi with Portaudio support.
SUSHI_WITH_ALSA_MIDI	on / off	Build Sushi with Alsa sequencer support for MIDI (Linux only).
SUSHI_WITH_RT_MIDI	on / off	Build Sushi with RtMidi support for MIDI. Cannot be selected if SUSHI_WITH_ALSA_MIDI is set.
SUSHI_WITH_LINK	on / off	Build Sushi with Ableton Link support.
SUSHI_WITH_VST2	on / off	Include support for loading Vst 2.x plugins in Sushi.
SUSHI_WITH_VST3	on / off	Include support for loading Vst 3.x plugins in Sushi.
SUSHI_WITH_LV2	on / off	Include support for loading LV2 plugins in Sushi.
SUSHI_WITH_RPC_INTERFACE	on / off	Build gRPC external control interface, requires gRPC development files.
SUSHI_BUILD_TWINE	on / off	Build and link with the included version of TWINE, otherwise tries to link with system wide if the option is disabled.
SUSHI_TWINE_STATIC	on / off	Link statically against TWINE (not recommended, useful only in a few cases).
SUSHI_WITH_UNIT_TESTS	on / off	Build and run unit tests together with building Sushi.
SUSHI_WITH_LV2_MDA_TESTS	on / off	Include LV2 unit tests which depends on the LV2 drobilla port of the mda plugins being installed.
SUSHI_VST2_SDK_PATH	path	Path to external Vst 2.4 SDK. Not included and required if WITH_VST2 is enabled.
SUSHI_WITH_SENTRY	on / off	Build Sushi with Sentry error logging support.
SUSHI_SENTRY_DSN	url	URL to the default value for the Sushi Sentry logging DSN. This can still be passed as a runtime terminal argument.
SUSHI_DISABLE_MULTICORE_UNIT_TESTS	on / off	Disable unit-tests dependent on multi-core processing.
The default values for the options are platform-specific (native Linux, Yocto/OE, macOS).

Note:

before version 1.0, the Cmake options didn't have the SUSHI_ prefix. The old names (e.g. WITH_JACK) are not supported anymore and should be changed to the new format.

Running Unit tests separately

Some Sushi's unit tests depend on test data, which is found through the environment variable SUSHI_TEST_DATA_DIR. You will need to define this if you want to run the unit test explicitly, e.g. while debugging:

$ export SUSHI_TEST_DATA_DIR=/path/to/sushi/repo/test/data

License

Sushi is licensed under Affero General Public License (“AGPLv3”). See LICENSE document for the full details of the license. For contributing code to Sushi, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Copyright 2017-2023 Elk Audio AB, Stockholm, Sweden.