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Linux as A Musician's OS?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the but-there's-no-protools dept.

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.'"

2 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. A good start, but still some holes to fill. by Lockejaw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    (IANAL)
  2. Good, expensive, audio hardware for Linux by mtaht · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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