Hi everyone. I want to follow up here that I’ve gone back and forth with VCV support and am happy to say that I’ve managed to get VCV plugins to work in Bitwig 4.4.10. The short of what was causing my problems: I was trying to use the plugins which I had purchased and downloaded from vcvrack.com alongside using vcvrack-bin from the AUR which is (understandably) just the free VCV Rack version. The plugins are NOT compatible with the free version. You must use the VCV Rack Pro version you download along with the plugins, and it must either be placed in one of the directories specified in the INSTALL.txt (in my case, I copied the Rack2Pro directory to /usr/share/VCV/Rack2Pro) or specify a RACK_SYSTEM_DIR that points to where your Rack2Pro directory is.
Once I had done this, any of the VST/VST3/Clap versions all now work properly for me in Bitwig. VST and Clap versions now show, and the VST3 plugin’s error of ‘Plugin host died: Could not read async reply: End of stream’ no longer occurs. It should report something much more relevant, and the VCV team is aware of this suggestion.
I’m curious if this is the root issue for you @melondruie and @darkstar01uk ? I ultimately did not need to downgrade system dependencies at all (on the latest Manjaro XFCE and kernel 6.3.5-2)