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

A good start, but still some holes to fill.

[Lockejaw]

RoseGarden fills one big gap (score editing, like Finale and Sibelius), but what I'd really like to see is an alternative to SmartMusic (practice music with the computer playing the accompaniment). Bonus points if it will playback scores prepared in RoseGarden.

Re:A good start, but still some holes to fill.

[drinkypoo]

I second that, actually what I want is an application that provides a singing tutor. I have a pretty good voice, but I flub quite a bit of notes and my sense of pitch could be better. I've seen them for sale for Windows, but who wants to pay for software? :)

The problems comes

[falcon5768]

With tracking down things that work. Hell even on the Mac I hit this issue recently because there was a shift going on a few years back to the PC that only recently has shifted back to the Mac. While if you where geeky enough you could fiddle around and get it working, most musicians I know want it to JUST WORK out of the box no questions asked, and get annoyed if it doesn't since for a lot of people musical inspiration is a hit or miss opportunity (I know friends who keep digital recorders on them at all times because of how often they hummed something out and forgot it 2 hours later)

I would love for free and cheap solutions to present themselves, i think musical programs as well as most programs are overly expensive for what they are, but given the choice between a 600 dollar mac mini with garageband, or fiddling around in linux to get something to work, a lot of the type of people I know musicians to be are going to go with the former.

Re:The problems comes

[pisco_sour]

Legitimate question:

Isn't the point, or rather than the point, the by-product of free software like Linux to turn software deployment into a service? I understand how for a musician, it's preferable to just get a Mac because it just works rather than to fiddle around with Linux for a week. But shouldn't that create a market for cheaper-than-macs, semi-pro systems custom-made by Linux geeks? I can see a service where a programmer or developer could specialize in audio hardware and software for Linux, and make a living out of setting up these sorts of systems por musicians or studios not willing to invest the money it would cost to set up a Mac-based studio (especially in regards to licenses). For the musician, it just works and it's transparent; the developer handles the inner-workings.

Am I wrong here? Is it not economically feasible? My first and foremost concern would be if the possible revenues justify such a project. Still, sounds like a fun way to make a living for a Linux geek/audiophile/musician.

Free as in beer

[CokeJunky]

One notable flub in the article: There is a terminology section following the article. It takes the time to discuss free (as-in-speech) vs. free (as-in-beer) -- this is a good thing. However it suggests that pirated commercial software is free-as-in-beer, albeit illegal... That's like saying knocking off a beer store with pantyhose over your head nets you free beer. The article misses out on software that is free-as-in-beer, but not free-as-in-speech (i.e. some hardware drivers, etc.)

Still not ready.

[qweqwe321]

There's two reasons for this. First, getting a software synthesizer to work was a royal PITA. MIDI isn't supported out-of the-box, and the directions online are both contradictory and useless. I know there's probably a way to get it to work, but for now it's a hell of a lot easier just to boot into Win2K and use Sibelius. The second reason is that the notation software itself isn't exactly the best-- I'm more into writing choral music, and Linux has yet to produce any software notation that matches Sibelius. Those that do come close often have stupid limitations, like NoteEdit-- which doesn't let you copy and paste, for instance.

To hell with MOTU & Sonar

[mtaht]

I used to own a motu 24i and run Sonar - and tascam gigastudio on a different machine. Sonar 1 and 2 was unreliable as hell, I could never record at low latency, and sonar over the course of 3 versions kept crashing - permanently - so it would not restart without a complete reinstall, and I was always misplacing the license key.

I had this happen in the middle of a critical, paid gig, and I lost not only a lot of money, but a lot of respect from the customer. I was incredibly angry, as you might imagine, and resolved to never again be dependent on code I couldn't fix.

100 bucks a year for sonar upgrades wasn't worth it as my bugs weren't getting fixed.

So... After begging the motu guys *for years* for specs for their board so I could write a driver for linux, and/or begging them for a driver, and getting the same "hell, no" response over and over again...

1) I researched companies that had a good history of linux support, and chose the RME-audio multiface.

2) Publically denounced motu's squareheadedness as loudly and bitterly as possible. I sold my motu 24i's to a dedicated mac-head.

3) Threw out my windows PC and Sonar and upgraded to a dual opteron 64 bit linux box...

... And, today, admittedly after some rough spots - I couldn't be happier. Ardour2 ROCKS! It works great 64 bit Linuxsampler does a great job with gigastudio files And I just added a digimax FS (via ADAT) to the rme-audio multiface, giving me 12 tracks of 96khz audio or 16 tracks of 44.1 - and it sounds great.

I sold the used Motu 24is for something like 400 dollars each. I haven't upgraded my sonar in a few years - so I've saved at least 300-400 bucks in upgrade fees, just on sonar. Gigastudio has come out with a few new versions (but is worth buying just for the sample libraries). There's a new windows version out - doesn't work terribly well for 64 bit, and costs some serious money.

So, all in all, throwing windows out of the studio entirely has resulted in:

1) Vastly improved reliability, with an os (linux-rt)truly targeted at multimedia
2) A huge cost savings in software, letting me buy much better hardware
3) I can run all my applications on a single dual-core machine with very low latency
4) A sense of satisfaction of "sticking it to the man"
5) The ability to participate in the process at any level you might choose. In my case, I've been speeding up plugins lately...
A windows based platform costs a lot more than linux platform. Windows + Sonar + Gigastudio is nearly a thousand dollar investment just in software. Linux + ardour + rosegarden + linuxsampler are subscriber supported.

Re:slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't Slashdotted -- it was Dugg yesterday: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Music_Production_on_Lin ux_easy_and_fun

By the way, thanks for the links. I went to the Ardor page, and I love this comment regarding Ardor running on a Beryl desktop (under the post "3D desktop and Ardour"): "Honest, OS X, we still have feelings for you, but your pretty cousin is in town ..."

Ugh. Not again.

[SocialEngineer]

I've been an independant recording musician/songwriter for a number of years now, and have worked under Linux and Windows.

Linux is certainly a usable platform, but it can't do everything. Ardour is great (from the screenshots and reviews I've seen, at least - never been able to actually INSTALL the sucker, because of the dep. hell), but as far as synthesizing goes, the choices are less than ideal (in my opinion).

I use Windows for my needs, primarily, and it has served me well. There are a variety of great resources available - sure, for a cost - but the quality is superb. I use Reason 3.0 to sequence simple orchestral work for my new albums, and can do strings, piano, synthesizers, anything, with a rich, controllable sound quality. Not to mention the fact that there are a number of EXCELLENT refills/samples available for it. I also use Reason to sequence my percussion - ranging from funk jazz to industrial.

I use Cooledit Pro 1.2 - an old multitrack recording program - to record and mix. It's cheap, and it works very well without being resource intensive.

I'm not a fan of Csound, nor do I really like much of the other alternatives in the Linux market. I did use Audacity to record and master some monologues for a play a while back, and Rosegarden to do some sequencing/songwriting. Rosegarden is actually a superb piece of software - for sequencing. IIRC, that's all it can do. If you've got your external instruments hooked up properly, I'm sure it'd be perfect. I can't afford to buy all the outboard gear I'd need to match what I have with Windows based softsynths.

Good, expensive, audio hardware for Linux

[mtaht]

This is my ardour setup:

RME-Audio Multiface - up to 14 channels of sweet sounding 96khz/24 bit converters - 8 line inputs + ADAT + SPDIF
Prosonus Digimax FS - 8 nice pre's with an ADAT out.
Dual processor opteron (3 years old) - with 3GB of ram. Given the huge samples I use (bardstown bosendorfer being one), I have linuxsampler compiled for 128 voices, and configured to use up 1.6GB of ram all by itself.
4 drives in a striped terabyte.
System works way better than my motu ever did under the evil os - works like a champ at latency levels down to 1.5ms. I generally run at 5.2ms however, as I tend to run linuxsampler+rosegarden+ardour+hydrogen a lot. One day soon I hope to get a dual core with 8GB of ram.
The RME-audio design might be 5+ years old, but it's still superior to "normal" firewire, IMHO. The fact that I have both PCI and PCMCIA cards for it means I can take the gear on the road easily...
Rest of the machine: a bunch of edirol midi converters (they just work), a roland XV88, and PodXT (fully supported by rosegarden) - the M-audio keyboard.... Dual heads provided by a 19 dollar matrox M450 card. I tried the latest nvidia card in this machine, could never get it to work...
Last important note:
[m@mingus ~]$ uptime 09:23:22 up 12 days, 6 min, 11 users, load average: 1.39, 1.31, 1.33

musician vs recording

[mrcdeckard]

just some of my experiences as a musician and engineer:

i bought a 12" powerbook with the motu traveler, and it was a rock solid set up. i recorded and mixed a few albums on it last summer, and it stood up, and this is with 20+ tracks and effects (including altiverb) -- although there were a few times i thought the laptop was gonna melt. these ppc chips run hot.

this is why i won't be going open source for a while -- when you're with clients, it's a problem if you say, "oh hold on, i have to recompile the kernel". macs, for production, are solid -- which is not surprise since it's one of their major demographics.

but as a musician, i get the sense that linux is there. it would be nice if there was something like reason for linux, but that is asking quite a lot. otherwise, the freedom and programming-friendly environment of linux is very conducive to music-making (assuming electronic-based music, of course).

on windows, soundforge is the greatest 2 track editor evar. (problem is, you can't let anyone touch the machine, just looking at a windows box will get you a few viruses) i havce yet to use a 2 track editor as responsive as souindforge. i use audacity now, and it sucks for editing. also, it wants to save project files, which is ridiculous for 2 track files. it would be nice to know of a stripped down 2 track editor that let you zoom in to a sample level and out immediately, allowed for fades, crossfades, and basic stuff like normalization -- support for audio units, and that's it. i spent so much time just editing mixes -- it's nice to have a program that just let's you do that quickly.

i will say this, i had a PII 266 about 8 years ago, runnin linux 2.2 kernel with a low-latency patch. i could get audio in and out of that box in 8ms -- it still amazes me (i was using csound). i think this is where linux could shine, as real-time effects boxes -- you can strip all the other stuff away.

anyway, more and more i'm thinking of putting together a linux workstation, especially after reading about blender yesterday. i wonder how video is on linux?

mr c

Re:musician vs recording

[mrcdeckard]

i knew someone was going to (rightfully) call me out on that. after some reflection, linux is probably more solid that os x *once* you get everything setup. i guess os x (and windows for that matter) is probably more flexible in that i can download some app and use it right away (which i have done during a session) -- my experience with linux is that you can quickly get into dependency hell with that sort of thing.

to put it another way, my experience with linux is that when i've tried to do something different, i quickly run into brickwalls. i can't think of the last time i hit a brick wall with os x.

to be fair, this is a preconceived notion based on indirect experience. that is, i haven't put together a linux DAW and run a session on it to know just how it would be. i am serious about putting one together in the near future. it seems like linux has come a long way since i last gave it serious consideration.

oh, and thanks for the 2 track suggestion. i'll try it.

mr c

pymidichaos...

[advocate_one]

I'd like to see the guy who was interviewed put his python program up on sourceforge... it's neat and small and could do with more exposure... currently, there are precisely 4 links on Google for it, and one's in the article and I haven't a clue what licence he's got for it as there's nothing mentioned in the actual code or anywhere... I really want to know what licence he plans to let us use it under before I start messing with it myself...

Re:What would JACK do?

[plasticsquirrel]

Somehow it seems that - if I'm going to run music software such as Rosegarden or Ardour - that I shouldn't have to setup a server to do it.

You actually don't need JACK running to use Rosegarden at all (at least in the Ubuntu build it's never required). But from the way your post reads, it seems as though you don't quite understand the benefits of running JACK. The JACK server provides low-latency audio routing between different JACK-enabled applications and sound hardware. This means that every JACK-enabled application plays well with and is able to share audio with every other JACK-enabled application. This is a huge bonus for audio processing on Linux, and its importance shouldn't be underestimated.

Re:What would JACK do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Best audio distros IMHO
Jacklab - Suse based, jack all set up and running, best jack-based distro
dynebolic - Great live video tools and dj mixing tools
64studio - Debian based, fairly current

Ubuntustudio - vaporware

Older or less popular distros
deMuDi
Studio to Go!
Musix
Mediainlinux64


For those that mention VST try jacklab. Excerpts from homepage...
...The VST wrapper FST now coming with support for the proAudio total recall system LASH.
and
...VST on openSUSE JAD with DSSI-VST | XFST | Ardour2 | LMMS | energyXT2 | Recommended plugins/links

Cheap hardware ... http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Sound_Cards/

Re:slashdotted

[X0563511]

Wake me up when we have something like Reason or FLStudio...

I don't have, nor want, real instruments...

Where is Linux's equivalent of Reason 3 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In typical Linux fashion, the *tech* side works fine, but the UI side is lacking.

Almost all the musician's apps apart from Ardour look like something out of the 80's, really awful. Yes, we *can* still use them, but come on, it's 2007, our expectations for UIs are a bit higher than when Gtk or Qt just came out.

And while Jack provides very good audio linkage, everything else seems totally ad hoc, with minimal interoperability, and even MIDI integration is poor.

The really big thing that's missing though is a central framework to bind them all, something like Reason3 + ReWire in the proprietary world. However, it should not reinvent everything like Propellerhead did, but just bind all our existing tools together through ALSA, MIDI, and Jack, and provide a MODERN and powerful graphic interface and a full-featured programmers' API. (QJackCtl is about 5% of the way there, but it looks dreadful and doesn't have an API.)

Ardour could have been that central framework, but despite huge numbers of requests, the main devs don't really want to tread far into MIDI waters. Well fine, but in that case some other app needs to take on the mantle of coordination, and Ardour will have to become slave to it.

We really need that badly. Once we have it, Linux music will conquer the world.

Re:Where is Linux's equivalent of Reason 3 ?

[paulbd]

its too bad that /. is still full of posters who manage to sound authoritative yet actually don't know anywhere near enough about the subject of their posts.

re: Ardour & MIDI: first, Ardour has support MTC and MMC along with MIDI CC for parameter control, for years, and these are the standards associated with "binding it all together. second, see http://ardour.org/node/855

second, re ALSA, MIDI & JACK: if you were following JACK development, you'd know that JACK supports inter-app distribution of MIDI now, and more and more apps are starting to support its use.

as for "a MODERN and powerful graphic interface", i think you've crossed over into the realm of the subjective. there are some very cool VST plugins, for example, whose GUI looks like a crayola version of an early 1990's X10 interface. what you consider "MODERN and powerful" is considered by some other people to be instrusive and ugly.

Musician's OS my ass

[suv4x4]

Musicians rely heavily on their tools (Pro Tools, pun not intended) and software intstruments (VST/VSTi, which are normally released for OSX and Windows only) to do what they do.

Now, music is an art, you can do music with a garbage can and chicken bone if you want. Thus Linux could be used for that, but no serious musician would inconvenience himself and forget about the plathora of processing plugins, instruments, effects, sequencers, remixers, audio editors on Windows/OSX to go for Linux.

For the most part, musicians use computers to make music, not follow misguided attempts to prove Linux best in everything.