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

slashdotted

[Hatta]

No comments and it's already slashdotted. Ah well. What are your thoughts on these products?

RoseGarden
Ardour
CSound

Do you really need anything else?

Re:slashdotted

[billcopc]

You are either brave or foolish. I also rely extensively on virtual instruments and sampling, writing pure virtual music software is how I started out in the 90's. Still, you can't go anywhere without getting blasted by audio hippies claiming "that's not real music!". The fact is, recording is the easy part! Multitracks and sequencers are to music what Windows Explorer is to files. They just move them around, cut/paste and a few simple tricks. There's very little computing involved.

I get quite irritated when people spend a small fortune on an "audio workstation" then use it like a glorified mixing deck. They'd be better off spending the cash on real gear, because it works in real-time, doesn't crash or become obsoleted by software upgrades, and the interface is a zillion times more natural. Instead there's a perverse market of Virtual Studio which ignores computing paradigms in order to faithfully reproduce a picture of a real mixer on-screen, and then you have to go out and buy a USB Control Surface that's basically a mixer with a USB port, to control the on-screen mixer. Yeah the mouse sucks, maybe they could have considered that if they had designed an actual computer interface.

What's next ? A virtual wah pedal that's operated by a real-looking USB wah-pedal-controller ?

Great VST Host Support Is A Must

[justindnb]

One of the major problems (for me) with MAC/Windows audio software is it's high price, which is unusual considering that most musicians are poor and starving. For this reason, I've dropped Sony Soundforge and now use Audacity as my primary wave processing tool. However, Audacity only supports VSTS under Mac/Win and until there is stable VST host support in Linux and a sequencer comparable to Cubase/Logic/Sonar, it will not good enough to run a modern, competitive, software-based DAW.

5 Albums Down and More to Come

[kruhft]

I've been using linux for music production for over 5 years, have produced about 5 albums and EP's and am starting to get into scoring films. The Linux audio domain has shown a huge amount of improvement over that time. Ardour has evolved from a crash-happy hair-tearer to a stable recording and mixing package. The number of sound editors out there is astounding and each has their own strengths and weaknesses that you can exploit. But then there's the command line, which let's you do things like this:

for i in *.wav; do out=${i/.wav/_mono.wav}; sox $i -r 44100 -b -c 1 $out; normalize $i; done

which will convert all samples in the current directory to mono and normalize them in no time at all.

The amount of audio software for linux is astounding, from programmer synths/sequencers like ChucK, Common Lisp Music, and CSound, to modular synths like Alsa Modular, PD and the super powerful keykit (the Emacs of MIDI sequencers). There are command line sound mushers and generators, mixers and so many effects it's hard to know where to start. But there really are no limits, if you're willing to put in the time and learn the system and how to tie everything together...

As a side note, I volunteered to help setup a new Pro-Tools setup at the local Film Pool, and after a week of trying to get all the licences in order, I wondered why anybody would pay for it at all. That was my first time using Pro-Tools for real, and it was just astounding that *every* (extra) plugin had to be registered, you still had version compatibility hell (could only use this driver with this version of PT, etc) and even after a week the system still didn't work right. After using Pro-Tools I'd take Ardour any day, if only for the lack of registration hell (which an audio engineer friend of mine teaches a day long course in; not how to use Pro-Tools, just how to register it!) and the massive amounts of high quality, free LADSPA plugins that are available.

Right now, Gentoo is my distro of choice and it has a huge amount of audio apps in portage as well as a Pro Audio overlay that's available through layman. Needless to say, I would concur that Linux is ready for the audio desktop workstation market, and has been for some time.

The only thing that linux is lacking is "instant gratification" music apps (although the playfield is getting better with LMMS and such programs). The tools available take some time to learn, but that's also half the fun of it, since once you learn the basics a whole new world opens up as you learn more and more about what's available. Jumping in takes a while to learn how to swim, but the only limits on how far you go depends on the amount of time you put in...