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Yes. Depending on what you are attempting to accomplish it may not be for you. I use an m-audio delta 44 and have been using it to make music for a couple years now. Have some links, if you are interested:

Jack - Low latency audio server. Allows you to connect together sound applications. Arguably the coolest thing about audio in linux.

Ardour - Multi-track sequencer

Hydrogen - Drum machine

Jamin - Mastering software

LAPSDA - Plugin API

DSSI-VST - Way to run windows compiled VSTs on linux (of course its not always going to work)

Linux has plenty of other software out there. These are just some links to get you started.

There are many reasons one might not want to choose linux for audio tasks. With a windows and mac setup you have many more choices in regards to soundcards, software, plugins, and virtual instruments. It also may take a little effort to setup properly. To get proper latency you may need to use a real-time kernel. You may need to spend a little time configuring jack to get the best results out of your card. A finely tuned linux system can be excellent for creating music. It may not be the best choice, but it works for me and I can avoid dual booting.

Package: cmt
Priority: optional
Section: sound
Installed-Size: 232
Maintainer: Anand Kumria
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.15-1
Provides: ladspa-plugin
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.1-1), libgcc1 (>= 1:3.2.3-0pre6), libstdc++5 (>= 1:3.2.3-0pre6)
Filename: pool/main/c/cmt/cmt_1.15-1_i386.deb
Size: 58704
MD5sum: ccff75c4945cd4cf1e12bf37cb7b7930
Description: Computer Music Toolkit (cmt) a collection of LADSPA plugins
cmt -- Computer Music Toolkit -- is a collection of LADSPA compatible
plugins that any conforming program may take advantage of.
.
Plugins available are: low/high pass filters, echo/feedback delay filters
with configurable delays from 0.01 to 60 seconds, amplifies, white and
ping noise generators, compressors, expanders, limiters, b/fmh encoders,
drum synthesizers, lofi (low fidelity), phase modulator (phasemod) and
many more
.
These plugins are only usable in host applications, of which glame,
sweep and others can be found in Debian.
.
For further information on cmt see http://www.ladspa.org/cmt/

I don't know how you define "pro audio apps", but Ardour is pretty "pro" IMO - and ecasound is as well (but not as user-friendly). And personally I record/make a lot of music on my Debian box with Jack, Jack-Rack, Ardour, Ecasound, Hydrogen and other stuff.

E.g. with Jack I can route the output from Hydrogen into a Jack-Rack and apply effects (in real time) and then output it to another Jack-Rack that just serves as a limiter and apply common effects to all output and outputs to Alsa. At the same time I can have a mic connected to a third Jack-Rack, apply effects, route the audio into the common Jack-Rack and output. And then I can some sort of synth (e.g. spiralsynthmodular) and route the sound through a fourth Jack-Rack, then through the common Jack-Rack and out. And I could go on like this forever...
And then finally, I could record it all (real time) with ecasound.
I can even interconnect the various Jack-aware apps (and ANY app is potentially Jack-aware) and do other crazy stuff...

Show me that flexibility and those possibilities on any other platform...

And with Planet CCRMA Linux is a pro audio studio. Heck, we even have a VST "clone" in LADSPA...

• NRPN's to CC's and back again.

• Program a graphical interface to MIDI gear

• Track automation layers.

• MIDI plugins

LADSPA has been around for a long time. It is not meant to duplicate VST, but it is a simple plugin interface just "good enough" to chain together effects like freeverb, compression, etc. It relies on the host (audio program that uses the plugin) to provide a user interface of the parameters to program the plugin. The plugins tend to come in a bundle, from dedicated plugin developers, such as Steve Harris and Richard Furse, who are experienced in DSP. There is also some kind of XML-based GUI description for LADSPA plugins around, but I'm not on the state of the art affair on that.

You can use the ALSA drivers for your 1010, and use Ardour for the mixing/recording...
As for the VST stuff, you can use LADSPA, with Ardour's built-in host architecture, or you can use JACK Rack.
All this is connected together with the JACK Audio Connection Kit, a low-latency sound server.
It works just as well as the win32 solution.

additionally, you might be interested in the many hundreds of LADSPA plugins

While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.

I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),

The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.

The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)

I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.

Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.

Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.

Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.

To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that

While you're right that there's no inherent benefit in quality, the issue is that _many_ more effects plug-ins are available as VSTs (and people forced to rely on DirectX complain about the lack of availability). Also, many people have a considerable investment in VST plug-ins, so they're understandably not too enthused about having to throw money away to move to a different platform.

Hmm, Audacity does LADSPA on all three platforms. Of course, there aren't any LADSPA plugins that run in Windows right now, don't know about Mac. ;) In any case, there's so many LADSPA plugins it's unreal. Check out Steve Harris's library (I forget the URL, google for Steve harris ladspa and you'll fint it) and CMT. LADPSA.org has a page with links to known plugins, and there's tons more besides that.

Personally, Audacity's last in my chain of programs. Everything I do starts with ecasound and works its way through to Audacity, where I do the final mix-down. Multi-track is nice, but my computer is such a slow ass that I'd rather do my recording from the command line. :) Let's see a Windows app beat that....

One of the advantages of 1.2 over 1.0 is that it finally supports LADSPA plugins.

I can recommend the freely-available plugin packs, such as Computer Music Toolkit (It has Dynamic Sledgehammer, what the hell else you need? =) and Steve Harris' Plugins (Likewise one can't live without Barry's Satan Maximizer =)

In Debian, just try apt-get install blop cmt tap-plugins swh-plugins and blammo, you have tons of cool plugins that work out of box in Ardour, Audacity and Sweep...

Check out Ardour for your mixer/recorder, JACK for your input framework, Hydrogen for drum machine (You'll love the samples at ns_kit) JACK-rack to stack your amps & effects, which you can get tons of at LADSPA.

But even after that you haven't spent your $50 yet!

If folks are going to make open source DAWs, where is the open plugin API?

It's here. And it's around 2 years old, with lots of plugins available. Sure, there are more VST plugins out there, and some may be "better" that the equivalent LADSPA ones, but there's already a lot of interesting LADSPA plugins out there.

The standard for effects on linux is LADSPA. Think of it as a VST done right (the API is ultra clean), but currently without a GUI standard so the GUIs will be not that pretty but useable nonetheless. They are of course useable with ARDOUR.
As concerns simple (and not so simple) GPLed effects, the most important source for them is swh plugins. They were either programmed or compiled by steve harris, and can be found at http://plugin.org.uk . Available effects (from a total of 70 !) are for example :
flanger, crossover distorsion, gate, multivoice chorus, three compressors ...

Really not sure what you mean: Alsa? Jack (same architecture as CoreAudio, oh, and PortAudio does the same thing BTW)? MusicKit? LADSPA?

GStreamer is a project I and another person are currently working on pretty much full time (I'm between jobs and he's on vacation) at the moment. It's been around for a bit over a year, and has grown considerably since in that time. It's a pipeline-based architecture somewhat similar to M$'s DirectShow, allowing arbitrary graphs of plugin filters, processing just about any kind of streamable media you can think of.

This lends itself quite a bit to distributed processing, since you simply (for now) code up an element pair that will enable you to join two pipelines over the network, via TCP or somesuch. Eventually we plan to have CORBA interfaces wrapped around everything, which while slowing down data tranfers, has the potential to make everything even easier.

A release is planned for the beginning of next year (midnight, Jan 1st, Millennium Release), which should provide people with a stable enough API to start writing apps with it. There are still going to be some major changes like a shift to GObject (currently uses GtkObject, so it's tied to X, bleagh), and some major feature enhancements like the graphical pipeline editor. Changes to the system should affect plugin writers mostly, as the "user-level" API should remain basically the same.

The two of us are interested in audio and video respectively. I want to build a live mixing system, he wants to build an NLE. The two have much overlap even ignoring the GStreamer core, so things should get interesting. There are some other people with some pretty cool ideas that we'll try to incorporate, one of which is distributed processing.

Anyone interested in this project should head over to http://www.gstreamer.net/ and sign onto the mailing list (gstreamer-devel). We'll be busy coding through the end of the year, but we welcome anyone who would like to use the system. The scheduling system is currently being re-written for the 4th or 5th (and hopefully last) time, so anyone with specific use cases can help the process along by enumerating them to make sure the scheduler can deal with even the most bizarre cases.

As far as VST and other plugins, there's a project called LADSPA that's building a plugin interface similar to VST. Quite a few plugins are already available, including FreeVerb. The problem with VST is that it embeds the Windows-based GUI into the plugin. This might be shimmed with libwine or something, but is a tough problem. If someone would liket o tackle that, please, step right up, we'll help you as much as we possibly can.