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Linux as A Musician's OS?
lazyeye writes "Keyboard Magazine has an in-depth article about the state of music production on Linux. While it does introduce Linux to the average musician, the article does get into some of the available music applications and music-oriented Linux distributions out there. From the opening paragraph 'You might think there's no way a free operating system written by volunteers could compete when it comes to music production. But in the past couple of years, all the tools you need to make music have arrived on Linux.'"
and the problem he ran into was the lack of inexpensive hardware that worked on Linux.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You're forgetting the actual Jack tools (not the command line, the graphical ones), wonderful especially if you have large setups with lots of inputs/outputs
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Also Jokosher ( http://www.jokosher.org/ ) is on the verges of having a stable release, for people that use a Gnome based system and want something as simple and easy as Garageband then it could be just the thing if Ardour and some of the others are too much like Darth's Vador's bathroom.
(BTW, I have no association with any of these projects).
My little Linux and tech blog
I have just recorded and mixed a live album with this software on Ubuntu Feisty:
http://ardour.org/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://www.ffado.org/ (aka Freebob) with a Mackie Onyx desk & firewire interface
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/
Very very good indeed, I vastly prefer it to my previous Windows based Cubase setup.
wget is patient... :)
Linux: It's Not Just For Computer Geeks Anymore
By Carl Lumma | May 2007
You might think there's no way a free operating system written by volunteers could compete when it comes to music production. But in the past couple of years, all the tools you need to make music have arrived on Linux.
For years, Linux has enjoyed market leadership as a server operating system -- Google's servers run it, for starters -- while struggling with the stigma that it isn't polished enough for desktop use. Those days are over, and word is getting out. Linux is quickly becoming the OS you'd set up for your grandmother, with no fuss over activation, software updates, or viruses. Unlike any version of Windows or Mac OS, Linux is open-source. What does this mean to musicians? For starters, there are no company secrets to keep or non-disclosure agreements to sign, so software developers and users alike can get on the same page very quickly, speeding the flow of bug fixes and feature additions.
Linux demands more nuts-and-bolts computer knowledge for pro audio than for web browsing, but if you've ever tried to troubleshoot a latency or driver issue on a store-bought laptop, you're probably still listening. If you upgrade your hard drive, you won't have to reactivate all your apps due to the hardware change, and when you discover a cool tool or workflow, you can share it with friends without them shelling out hundreds of dollars or resorting to piracy. With the exception of Linux versions that include commercial tech support, most everything in the Linux world is free for the asking, Many developers accept voluntary donations, which we encourage you to make.
HOW IS IT DONE?
Let's look over the shoulder of Aaron Krister-Johnson, the keyboardist and choir director at Temple Sholom in Chicago. He also composes incidental music for local theater, and is half of the electronica duo Divide by Pi, Keyboard's June '04 unsigned artist of the month. The core of his home studio is a PC running Linux (see Figure 1).
To obtain Linux, you download a particular distribution or "distro," which is a particular version of Linux someone put together, for free or a donation. Some distros are available boxed at very low cost. Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) is popular for home-computer tasks, but Aaron uses Zenwalk (www.zenwalk.org). Software compiled for a particular distro will only run on that distro, so most come with several free applications that you can install along with the basic OS. We recommend Fedora (www.fedoraproject.org), because you can then install the Planet CCRMA package (ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software), which includes just about every Linux audio application in existence.
Speaking of music applications, the most popular DAW for Linux is Ardour, and Aaron also uses JACK (see "You Don't Know JACK?" below), a soft synth called ZynSubAddFx, and an arpeggiator he wrote called Pymidichaos. Some distros come with binaries -- apps that have been compiled, i.e. converted from the programming language the developers used to the ones and zeroes computers understand at their innermost level. Three such distros are meant to provide install-and-go solutions for Linux-curious musicians: Studio to Go (www.ferventsoftware.com), Musix (www.musix.org.ar/en) and 64Studio (www.64studio.com).
But sooner or later (most likely sooner), you're going to have to take some groovy, free program you've downloaded and compile it yourself. This is where musicians used to commercial software might get scared off. Fear not, and remember that all the actual pr
Rosegarden: Pretty good.
Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!
CSound: I like to leave my programming mind behind when I'm working on music.
Sooperlooper: very cool
Freewheeling: also cool
Music distros this summer ought to be pretty good - with new releases scheduled for many of the music distributions.
What bothers me the most these days is plugins and soft synths. There are not enough plugins, the ones we have (like swh-plugins, tap-plugins, caps-plugins, and cmt) aren't heavily optimized for modern architectures (I just spent a weekend working on that) and not enough people out there do dsp programming (myself included) to really gain critical mass for the "perfect EQ" or the "perfect reverb". Still, the plugin solutions are adaquate, just not generally something to rave about. If you know a dsp programmer bored in his day job, show him 64 studio or Studio to go and try to enlist his/her help!
Soft Synths are coming along. Linuxsampler is very nice. Bristol is coming along. There are quite a few more.
I think Linux music is on the brink of plausible promise. I've got 16 tracks of live audio working almost flawlessly right now.
I think you should be able to read it here.
As a musician myself, I really wouldn't bother. Each shows promise, but all of them have fatal flaws that make them useless for anything but the most basic recording - the most obvious being stability in the case of Rosegarden, and the poor quality of the plugins across the board. There's no equivalent of things like guitar amp simulations, or professional grade mastering tools such as Ozone that I could find.
None of this software comes anywhere close to stuff like Cubase, Logic, MOTU Digital Performer and the like. Even Garageband is superior IMO. I have a Linux machine for everyday work, but a Mac for music related stuff.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
I use drums++ (http://dpp.mikekohn.net/) to do my drum programming on Linux and record with either Timidity or a Dr. Rhythm drum machine into a Tascam digital 8 track.
I like to play music with my friends as a hobby, and looking for free options i stumbled upon Musix . Having used a mac with Reason and found it a little lacking and a bit expensive, i found Musix very usable. Not only it had most things that Reason had, but also came configured to use jackd server with a bunch of applications with no real work involved. Using it in a laptop I did have to use the command line to configure the wireless card but it was easy. I have to say that Linux is ready to be in the studio, yet as all things linux most of the software is in beta stage so bugs might appear. Just don't be afraid of the command line and you will be fine.
If you are both a programmer and a musician, you will probably like Lilypond a lot (most things that it doesn't do by itself can be tweaked by writing Scheme scripts), but it probably will not be popular with the average musician. The system is much like (or better, is built out of) TeX -- you prepare a plaintext file with the appropriate commands, then run lilypond on it and get a finished MIDI and/or PDF (and DVI, if you want it) file. If you're a programmer and don't know music theory, you'll likely be bogged down by the required terminology -- you indicate the key with commands like "\key a \major", so unless you know that 3 sharps is A, you're out of luck. There are some frontends, but I haven't used them extensively. I can generate a score very quickly and with high quality in Lilypond, so haven't really looked any further.