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Here's what I use:
multitracking: Ardour
MIDI sequencer: Rosegarden
editor: Audacity
drums: Hydrogen
softsynths: Alsa Modular and QSynth

There's really a ton of stuff out there . . . it just (like almost all free/OSS) doesn't get as much exposure as commercial work.

Here's what I use:
multitracking: Ardour
MIDI sequencer: Rosegarden
editor: Audacity
drums: Hydrogen
softsynths: Alsa Modular and QSynth

There's really a ton of stuff out there . . . it just (like almost all free/OSS) doesn't get as much exposure as commercial work.

While I think the notation editor really only creates rough draught scores rather than professional, you could check out Rosegarden-4 for GNU/Linux.

It also exports to Lilypond format, which does do professional score typesetting.

Other options can be found here, though some of the apps are bit obscure.

It's nice to dream, but for now and the forseeable future, the software just isn't there

I dunno. There seems to be a lot popping up all over these days.

They give it two years. That's a while, especially if they put a couple of engineers into helping out projects they want included.

There are a couple of MIDI sequencers out there. I'm not a musician, so I haven't played with them, but Rosegarden is from Guillame Laurent, one of the guys behind gtkmm. There's a sound font editor -- Smurf. I was just talking with someone about some mixing/synth software that's supposed to be pretty good for Linux, though the name escapes me ATM.

A host of improvements in Linux 2.6 (which should be out by then), including much better latency (better than Windows) and ALSA (with good hardware mixing and hardware synth support) are just around the corner.

Finally, a Linux box is a nice, stable, you-can-depend-on-it-to-just-work system. If you've got a team, you can tie together boxes to do interesting processing on the audio. Linux is inexpensive, and free (as in beer) software is very attractive, compared to the normally pricy software in the audio field.

Having open source drivers usually means that even old hardware stays supported. This can be a big deal to musicians, who often have a lot of expensive, old audio hardware that they'd like to keep using.

I'd say RH could make a pretty good play. This is assuming that RH is willing to support this to musician types, that they're willing to make a decent setup environment to handle all this, and that they're willing to fund development to fill the few holes in the lineup.

I work in an electronic music studio. I'd love to use Linux, but the apps just aren't there.
The fact that there's almost no development community addressing this potentially enormous market amazes me to no end.

On the linux-audio-dev mailing list, many things are discussed and software developed such as Ardour, digital audio workstation software for Linux, JACK (JACK Audio Connection Kit), a low-latency infrastructure for connecting audio applications, and several wave editors. Dave Phillips maintains a list of Linux sound applications--many are not that advanced but some are.

Work in this area is progressing, and many smart people are involved. In particular, Paul Barton-Davis, author of Ardour and the main force behind JACK, seems to be pursuing commercial possibilities of selling linux-based sound workstations under a company named Linux Audio Systems. You can read Paul's slashdot comments to see some of his opinions on the situation of Linux audio.

It's a bit curious that you mention sound. The content in themes.org is very graphics-centric. Lately I've been thinking why it is so.

Maybe the problem is software. Sure there are lots of GNU/Linux audio software, but none of it has really reached the same level of sophistication and integration as Gimp.

• RTcmix - a real time sound synthesis/processing language/library. RTcmix is dope. I don't think the newest version (2.1), which adds really good Linux support, is publicly available yet, but it should be out the door real soon if it isn't yet. RTcmix can be easily interfaced with applications, because it can listen for commands on a TCP/IP socket. Trust me, it's very cool, and much easier to use/learn than CSOUND. Dave Topper (topper@virginia.edu) is the primary maintainer or RTcmix, as far as I know.
• Max - jMax was released by IRCAM under the GPL recently, but it needs crazy work in order to get to the state that the Mac version is in. Max is probably the coolest music application ever written. For those of you who don't know, it is a visual programming environment for real time control of anything MIDI controllable. Work is underway, as far as I know, to hook up RTcmix to Max as a signal processing engine (similar to MSP).
• Rt - Paul Lansky's real-time digital mixing program is a fabulous tool for mixing sounds. I haven't used it for performances yet, but it is damn good for constructing certain kinds of pieces. Several attempts at porting to Linux are in progress, but none of them are terribly stable yet. Check out Dave Phillips' page for more info.