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.'"

Comments

My Linux Audio Setup

[phatmonkey]

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.

Linux Music at the brink of "plausible promise"

[mtaht]

One of the marvelous things about most Linux based music apps is that they run on any architecture. This might seem like a no brainer to some, but as someone that has struggled with 64 bit issues on another (to be unnammed) platform, Linux+Music on x86_64 is pretty impressive. What's even more impressive, to me, is how Ingo's RT patch is working on x86_64 these days. I've had a week of solid uptime since the 2.6.21-rt1 patch.

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.

Re:Notation SW option

[MPolo]

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.