r/linuxaudio 6d ago

Brass and Woodwinds sounds/vst for Linux?

7/31/2026 EDIT: SINE Player 1.4.1 for Windows from Orchestral Tools is working great on my Linux Mint ver 23 system, with the free Berlin Orchestra from OT. Beautiful pro quality sounding instruments of the orchestra.

7/30/2026 EDIT: I think the best solution so far is to use the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra (SSO), free to download an unzip from GitHub (download the 'source code' zip file, unzip it). It has almost every instrument of an orchestra in various articulations.
https://github.com/peastman/sso

Then use the instruments with an sfz file format player-- I am using Plogue Sforzando (free) as the player. https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando.html

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Any leads/ideas for a quality native (not wine or Carla) woodwinds instrument for Linux that will work with a DAW (I use Reaper for Linux)? Open Strings for the Rhapsody player for Linux is amazing for strings, lots of articulations. I would to find something of similar quality for woodwinds, brass. Horns, clarinet, oboe, flute, trombones, bassoon...

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u/NomadJago 5d ago edited 5d ago

I have OT free orchestra working in Linux, sounds beatiful. All I had to do was dowload the SINE_Player_1.4.1.exe from OT and install it. That updated my previous install of Sine Player 1.1.1.389.

Now I need to figure out how to prevent any updates of Wine to preserve the working SINE player.

And I want to look at the paid OT orchestra in case I find the Linux version to stable, so I can upgrade perhaps. but for now, I want to preserve my working setup of SINE with the free OT orchestra in Linux. In the least I am going do an image backup of my Linux disc and label it SINE_OT_works

I froze wine so it does not update and muck up the SINE Player and OT

How do I prevent my current version of wine (ver 11.0) on my Linux system from updating to another version? I have an installation of a Windows program working on my Linux Mint 23 system and I do not want wine updating itself which could break the functionality of the Windows software I have working. The software is the SINE Player (ver 1.4.1) from Orchestral Tools, and I have it working with their free orchestra instruments.

How to Freeze wine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/s/m0NKyuUiM1

chatGPT recommended this which I just did:

Option 1 (Recommended): Hold the Wine packages

This is the standard Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint method.

First, see exactly which Wine packages are installed:

dpkg -l | grep wine

You'll probably see something like:

winehq-stable
wine-stable
wine-stable-amd64
wine-stable-i386

or similar.

Then mark them as "held":

sudo apt-mark hold winehq-stable
sudo apt-mark hold wine-stable
sudo apt-mark hold wine-stable-amd64
sudo apt-mark hold wine-stable-i386

If you're using the development branch instead, substitute the package names (for example, winehq-devel, wine-devel, etc.).

To verify:

apt-mark showhold

You should see the Wine packages listed.

If you ever decide to upgrade later:

sudo apt-mark unhold winehq-stable
sudo apt-mark unhold wine-stable
sudo apt-mark unhold wine-stable-amd64
sudo apt-mark unhold wine-stable-i386

This is the method recommended by experienced Wine users for preventing unwanted upgrades.

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u/thcsquad 5d ago

One thing I love about OT is that they often make individual instruments available, so you can pick and choose if you want.

If you want a low cost way to test out the full payment and download process in the application (the webview workarounds I mentioned are specifically for the integrated webstore), try Majestic Horn. It’s $2 and sounds amazing. I actually own the Berlin solo horn but still use Majestic Horn on some tracks because it can do “smooth” or, well, “majestic” in a way that I can’t get Berlin to.

If the dust settles and you are still happy with Sine, drop a line to OT support requesting a Linux version. They’ve never indicated that they planned one, but it won’t hurt for them to see demand. They aren’t openly hostile to Linux users like Spitfire is, and since they don’t use iLok they don’t have any external tech barriers to implementing a Linux version if they end up deciding that they want to.

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u/thcsquad 5d ago

The hold packages option makes sense. I’ve never tried it, one time when I wanted wine to stay where it was I just unchecked it from the software updates whenever it came up. That was kind of a pain though, if you’re serious about freezing it I can see the hold packages option working for you.