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Goodbye Apple, Hello Music Production On Ubuntu
Adam Wrzeski notes a piece up at Create Digital Music by musician Kim Cascone (artist's bio) on switching from Apple to Linux for audio production: "The [Apple] computer functioned as both sound design studio and stage instrument. I worked this way for ten years, faithfully following the upgrade path set forth by Apple and the various developers of the software I used. Continually upgrading required a substantial financial commitment on my part. ... I loaded up my Dell with a selection of Linux audio applications and brought it with me on tour as an emergency backup to my tottering PowerBook. The Mini 9 could play back four tracks of 24-bit/96 kHz audio with effects — not bad for a netbook. The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer — a far cry from the $3000 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple. After a couple of months of solid use, I have had no problems with my laptop or Ubuntu. Both have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable."
He totally switched from Apple to Linux, and he does things with this computer just like everyone else! You should totally post his story on /.
Well, Apple DO encourage it...
nice to see a person that has the right tool for the job. BTW you wern't locked into Apple, you were locked into the software developers choice of OS and hardware.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I love using linux for as much as I possibly can, but I have noticed a distinct difference in the audio quality between my old power book Ti and a 'business' grade dell. The audio out my mac mini is MUCH better than what I get out of Dell desktops I've used, too. My eeePC 901 does seem to sound pretty good, though.
I'm all for open-source, but trying to do any music production on linux has been a headache to say the least. I'm more than willing to give it another shot, but I've had very little if any problems on my mac. Actually, all the problems came from it being a "hackintosh" Mac OS X was designed for audio unlike other OS's. Between it's ultra-low latency audio subsytem and the industry standard Audio Units plugin archetecture, it'll take a hell of alot for Linux to beat that. Plus Logic owns any program I've ever tried and I can only run it on a mac. As much as I love open-source anything, I spent too much time just trying to figure out Linux technical issues and not enough time actually recording. If there were less competing standards on the platform and less buggy software I'd probably be running a Linux DAW right now. Until then I'm more than happy with my "Mac".
So what? I'm not trying to troll here (well, maybe a little) but honestly, who cares?
This whole mentality of "Us against the world" is kinda amusing to me. I guess it's because I'm not a developer, or something, I dunno.
But this is one artist saying "Software X is/was expensive, so I'm using a different and free solution." Ok, great, good for her. So now what?
Sent from your iPad.
yay
Hardware has kept me from Ubuntu in this regard. I have an old Steinberg VSL ADAT card that has no drivers on linux or even OS X.
Honestly, I don't know the state of pro audio on linux past this, but it is keeping me for now.
Did the author manage to get anything other than a DAW and sound editor running under Ubuntu ? Max/MSP for instance ? Reason ? Ableton Live ?
I've given up trying to do anything musical with Ubuntu. Windows and OSX are still miles ahead in terms of compatible hardware and software that 'just works'.
Squirrel!
Anyone who believes this has never tried to record and mix multitrack audio on Linux
Audio support is fine. Music making support OTOH is abysmal. The article correctly points out that sound recording, editing and mixing is fine on Linux. The heavyweight music creation tools just don't exist and many of the top-end hardware interfaces simply don't have Linux drivers.
Squirrel!
I agree with the premise of this article: Linux is a perfectly good platform for digital audio creation and editing. It might even be better than a Mac, depending on how you weigh different pros and cons. But I unfortunately don't really feel I learned much from this article about why Linux is a good choice. All the apps he mentioned (Audacity, Ardour, etc.) are available for both platforms. And his reasons for switching, like the lack of a tree view in the OS X finder, strike me as weirdly trivial and not music related.
As someone who's done some published research on audio latency/jitter issues in a former life, I'm also somewhat annoyed by how much these sorts of articles focus on tech like JACK and low-latency kernel patches. This used to be a huge issue, but I suspect it shouldn't be nearly as high up anyone's priority list as it used to be--- back in the 2.4.x. series kernels, when the default kernel's clock tick used 10ms granularity and scheduling was flaky, it made a much bigger difference. Today, I suspect this sort of behind-the-scenes performance is only infrequently the bottleneck in anyone's audio performance; when I see actual glitches in performances, they can often be fixed by much more boring scheduling tweaks like "nice -19" on the processes that are bottlenecks in the audio path, or finding bugs in how you're setting up your callbacks.
In any case, these days I see JACK as useful mainly for being a reasonably well supported audio-app-interconnection bus; as he says, the Core Audio of the Linux world. But that doesn't make it hugely unique either.
So I guess I'm in the weird position where I agree with the article's conclusions, and some of its specific points, but overall if I didn't already agree with it, this article wouldn't have sold me on why Linux is great for audio editing. Sorry. :/
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've been using this for quite some time now. anyone else?
Warning, the above comment may contain sarcasm. Don't say I didn't warn you.
I stopped caring at this point.
I used to produce with Cubase VST/32 on OS9, which was an environment I enjoyed working in. When OS9 was abandoned and my mac died I continued with VST/32 on Windows2000, but it wasn't the same. Neither were the new versions of Cubase on OSX.
My biggest problem with this situation was my old projects were stuck in this archaic format with nowhere to go. Since then I've moved to Ardour on Ubuntu, I find the environment is even better than before and tools like Hydrogen are great. Best of all is Jack, there's nothing like it.
Linux audio is good and it's only going to get better, the price of the software isn't relevant in this assessment, only quality.
POKE 36879,8
...is that all his music creating can be summed up in him cutting and playing back audio samples with various effects on it - there is no actual sequencing or other advanced music creation involved.
Had there been, I'd say, with many years experience as a composer, that this article would not be.
I could certainly do it for under $500 with a good used MacBook. Does that make the $600 for the refurbished old-school Dell system "more expensive"?
For the new/seeking, see these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMMS
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/
http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=opera&rls=en&q=lmms&sourceid=opera&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=FL14SrTCLYW0sgPfqe3xBA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4#
http://keepthemfree.net/application/lmms-044
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
http://linux-sound.org/notation.html
And a slew of others are starts if not replacements, depending on what any given person is after. If someone can top Rosegarden, Lilypond and LMMS, or combine the best of all these and some others, you'll probably see/hear Apple whip out the patent/copyright infringement... But, i DO have to say, Garageband is FANTASTIC. I watched a demon in the Apple Store, and it's hard (it appears) to beat GarageBand (for now?).
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
If you're looking for a great alternative to expensive, bloated audio applications, check out Reaper. It's made from the guy who originally wrote Winamp. The licensing is very friendly and only costs $60 (discounted license). They're very responsive to user feedback and add features constantly (updates usually arrive every 2 weeks). I've used other tools in the past like Reason and Cubase, but ended up ditching them in favor of Reaper. Its built-in effects are quite good and it supports DX and VST plugin formats. Unfortunately it is only supported on Windows (32 and 64bit) and Mac OSX at the moment however
Seems like some enterprising individual could start putting together cheaper-than-dirt Ubuntu-based music machines by buying Dell Studio laptops (with Microsoft license rebate, naturally) and preloading everything necessary.
The complaint from non-geeks about Linux is you have to do it yourself. If you didn't have to do it yourself, and it really was that cheap, it becomes a lot more interesting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This dude is not exactly producing musical scores using his Ubuntu rig. I mean, seriously... go check out some of the stuff on his store and you'll see why (examples):
Reaching Dark Stations
Recorded in Regina, Saskatchewan in 2007 at the Neutral Ground Gallery:::industrial factory sounds filtered through a turbine jet engine::Play loud, play often:::Statistically Improbable Phrases
30 minutes of sputtering modems and hacked sparking mainframes; the sound of technology gone awry mixed with submariner dark station dronescapes; briny chains scraping against the hulls of rusted ships. Recorded live in Paris at Instant Chavires
In short, he doesn't need the type of precision and accuracy provided by higher-end hardware and/or custom interfaces and plugins that one would need for 'serious' music (yes, I went there), so he can get away with using Ubuntu. After all, it's just 'bleepy shit' anyway.
Kim mentions the use of free audio production software, such as Audacity, as substitutes for commercial offerings. While an Audacity user is more than welcome to dive into the code base and make needed improvements, not every user has the time and/or ability to do such. In my estimation, neither Audacity 1.3.7 nor Audacity 1.2.6 are stable enough to be considered "professional-quality" software. I am not trying to insult the developers and their abilities -- they have a complex project on their hands. But Audacity's graphical interface has serious and repeatable bugs; Audacity's sound export facilities reliably adds spurious noise to sound. I admire Kim's decision to use Ubuntu as an audio workstation, but I don't think Kim has been forthcoming about sacrifices in software quality that a user must make to do so. Kim can easily translate most audio programming done in Max/MSP (the commercial environment he has worked with extensively) to the public domain environment "pd" -- but as an experienced user of both systems there are more functionality loses than gains moving from the commercial Max/MSP/Jitter environment to pd (Pure Data).
If the cost of an Apple system and the higher cost of outfitting it with professional quality audio production and performance software are bankrupting a musician, then I can see the logic of using an Ubuntu system at this time. Otherwise, I still believe the adage "you get what you pay for" applies. However, I believe with effort from open source audio developers an Ubuntu audio workstation with both cost and quality advantages is more than possible. The bugs I am seeing in Audacity today remind me of the bugs I saw in the comparable commercial application "Peak" ten years ago.
If a $600 laptop has enough horsepower to do what he needs, why was he looking at MacBook Pros? The $1,000 MacBook should have suited him fine. It's still more expensive, but as he says in TFA "invest money or time, never both" so that time savings would probably have been worth it.
And you can install Jack or Soundflower under Mac OS X's Core Audio as well.
until it has something like this. Something cheap and extremely usable.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Wow! Kim Cascone! THE Kim Cascone! Why, we were just talking about him...
Oh wait, actually I have absolutely no idea who this guy is. Why do I care? I take it we're going to be finding random "I switched from OS xxx to OS yyy" stories on Slashdot now?
#DeleteChrome
The heavyweight music creation tools don't exist because a) there's not much of a market for them on Linux because; b) Audio support is most definitely not fine.
I wonder how the vendors are going to support another OS when they can't even get their stuff working properly with different hardware configurations on TWO operating systems (Windows/OS X). I can't tell you how many problems I've had with FireWire audio interfaces.
Once this hurdle has been reached, I am all for whatever open source audio stuff comes my way. I use currently Audacity for editing samples and quick n' dirty recording. Audacity WORKS but it's interface is mediocre at best and if you want ASIO support you have to download an unsupported patch to get it.
Does it matter how funky the system is? Not that Ubuntu is un-funky, it's the imagination that funkifies it. Funkification, n: To make something like James Brown's music
Pulse is dead. You can just use alsa, which is as low level as you can get.
Sorry. I'm a professional video game composer (and will remain anonymous), and I can tell you this will never fly, not until instruments/engines like Kontakt, Reason, PLAY, and Vienna Instruments all work on Linux. And that's not even counting all the plugins for reverb and such, like Altiverb. No freaking way could I produce compelling, high production quality material on a machine that didn't support these tools of the trade.
Heck. And that's just the plugin side of it! We haven't even talked about the sequencer, which has to beat heavy hitters like Cubase, Logic, and the few others that people tend to have in their arsenal. Linux has a very long way to go before it can be considered a professional music platform.
There is no doubt that Ubuntu notebook would be somewhat cheaper than Apple hardware of comparable specs. Although, your own comparison is terribly flawed by choosing refurbished and low end Dell laptop compared to high-end Macbook Pro. Regular MacBooks can be had in the ballpark of $1K and refurbished one might well be available for $600.
But a bigger problem is comparison between Linux open source and commercial audio apps for OSX. Apparently you are both a geek and a music guy and can manage fine. For one, I prefer Gimp to Photoshop as the interface of the former is much more logical from programmer's perspective. However, majority of non-geeks still prefer Word, Photoshop, Garage Band or Logic studio and value their time more than a couple grand to get the hardware platform.
they don't want to shepherd some high-maintenance bird around that has to be hacked ...
Shepherding birds?
Flocking hell. Forget beowulf clusters, imagine a bevy of quails! ;-)
Many people have problems with sound in Linux. The situation is certainly less than ideal. However, on most computers, sound in Linux works flawlessly. If you have problem with sound in Linux, you are part of the exception, rather than the rule.
Well if you were working on music production it would have to be http://jackaudio.org/ .
Also webcams often contain microphones, I expect your computer is treating the webcam as its primary audio device.
Please see the relevant documentation for your audio system on changing this.
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
The only problem I have is that on Linux, when I hear about this fantastic package that supposedly runs on the distro du jour, I usually find that I have to download 5 or more different pieces of kit like libraries or audio driver special patches and low latency kernel patches then re-compile all of these with this switch set and hold my nose a certain way while tweaking this driver then recompile the kernel on Tuesday with my hair on fire then do it again Wednesday standing in a freezer. And when I finally get all that done I find that no one mentioned the package that already existed with half of it done for me but the other half is written in perl and then I have to update perl modules from some depository to the latest and greatest. Then the PHP modules required by the web interface aren't loaded by default and the PHP version is too advanced i have to install the old one but if I switch to this other distro all this other stuff is done then when I finally get all these ducks in a row my sound card isn't fully supported by any distro in existence so I switch to a USB sound card that is supposed to be universally supported except that the drivers are proprietary so they weren't actually included in my distro cause that gave somebody heartburn.
By the time I get it running I have to update the kernel again and that broke the drivers all over again.
So Sorry I'm saving up and buying the tools that have already been proven to work.
Why bother
Yeah, what the hell does Kim Cascone know about producing music?
Look up Kim Cascone.. oh, quite a lot actually. Hmm a seasoned veteran with serious chops? That's actually worth looking into, to bad the article is shit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio
No need for a fancy Dell either, it works just fine with any soundcard, and I bet it sounds a lot like whatever this dude's doing (maybe even better).
Try it sometime!
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
But I unfortunately don't really feel I learned much from this article about why Linux is a good choice. All the apps he mentioned (Audacity, Ardour, etc.) are available for both platforms. And his reasons for switching, like the lack of a tree view in the OS X finder, strike me as weirdly trivial and not music related.
Yes, that's all he mentions. Never once does he mention price. Nope. Well, perhaps vaguely here:
A quick back-of-a-napkin estimate came to approximately $3,000, not including the time it would take tweaking and testing to make it work for the tour. If the netbook revolution hadn't come along and spawn a price-wars on laptops, I might have proceeded to increase my credit card debt.
But he certainly doesn't mention it here:
The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer -- a far cry from the $3000.00 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple.
Or here:
Not only was the expense of owning and maintaining Apple hardware a key factor in my switch, but the operating system had become a frustration to me.
Like most people, all of my Linux experiences are seen through the filter of whatever distro I'm using. When I wanted to try out music production on Linux, I installed Ubuntu Studio 9.04.
My experience was bitter-sweet:
So sadly, I didn't even get as far as seriously critiquing the apps. It's a pity, because there seems to be so much potential there.
Yeah, that's fair. I suppose what I really wanted to read was an argument about why Linux is particularly well-suited to audio, which I think it is. But an argument that it's "good enough, and cheap" is, as you point out, also legit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Agreed. Driver support amongst studio quality interfaces is severely lacking and limits your options significantly.
The webcam problem occurs on Windows too. Very annoying.
Oh, I dunno...I think there are several professional musicians using linux...they just don't know it!
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/11/09/inside-the-korg-oasys.html
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12200#12200
It fixed all my problems with sound, anyway.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
About time this came up on /.
I am a recording engineer and a musician. Unfortunately I have a MOTU 24io which only works with OSx or Windoze. I've tried out Audacity and other stuff, and it works fine, but the drivers for audio cards work if I use only the correct stuff. Drivers Drivers Drivers! I mean getting VST's to work is great, but if I can only have 2 channels to record, I mean that's not gonna work.
I use at least 16 channels at once for recording. We need audio cards that handle 16 channels and drivers that work for me to rig up my studio for linux. God I would love to switch if I could get decent audio with Linux
You could buy a used (aka EBAY, craigs list, apple.com) macbook (which would blow the doors off of the mini) to replace your 5-7 year old powerbook for about $700. It would (or at least should) include the latest iLife bits. You'd be way ahead. Linux is a helluvalot better than OSX for stuff like databases and web servers, but there is no way that video or audio applications (or most any desktop app) are anywhere close. I used linux exclusively on my notebooks from 98-06 and I can tell you about 1000s of hours wasted (although I enjoyed it) getting everything to run. With OSX everything just runs. Plus, using the media apps is a breeze.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
JACK is great for getting audio applications to talk to each other, but in my experience it is in no way ready for "professional" production. When you actually connect a couple of apps together, you can get drop outs all the time. I ran Pure Data in OSS mode because it didn't give me any gaps.
Granted, I don't know how to set up a low-latency kernel. But, I'm willing to pay to be able to ignore all that crap now.
As for software being cross-platform- just because it can run on both systems does not necessarily mean it runs equally well. I recently experienced this first hand with Inkscape, which is unusable on my 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM.
There are also some awesome applications that are Mac only, take SuperCollider 3. I tried playing around with it on Linux with Emacs and it's terrible. And I'm a programmer (VIM guy though) ! However, on the Mac it runs flawlessly with a nice launch GUI, simple to use editor, easy to navigate help system, and SC GUI extensions.
One fantastic piece of software which works equally well is Mixxx...I'm glad it has perfect ports! Although on the Mac I can segway from iTunes into Mixxx seamlessly....Best of luck to Linux though....I love it but it's too young.
Me, I'd feel a lot better about that, because paying money for proprietary software.. it seems like it's just going into some black hole. For code that will be Free some day? That strikes me as more palatable. Like it's an investment in something bigger than just 1's and 0's on my own machine. Makes it seem more worth it, to me.
Maybe it's time to stop using KDE3? aRTS was always terrible.
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
...you must be kiddin'!
First of all, Linux is not the guilty one for not providing software for musicians. It is the developers of the software, like Apple, Steinberg, Propellerheads and Native Instruments, to name a few big ones.
Second, without all that Software. And I mean specifically that software, it is literally impossible to create the wanted sound on a Linux platform.
My setup is nearly 100% software (with a set of MIDI devices and a powerful sound card), and includes Cubase, Reason, Reaktor, Absynth, DR-008, and pretty much every Software from Native Instruments. And that is only the base. You also have to add a ton of specific plug-ins. E.g. for reverbs using impulse responses, or very specific filters to create the sound of a vintage synth.
You can not ever possibly recreate this under Linux, without it becoming a main platform for music production, so that those companies port their software. Which of course is a vicious circle.
But if Steinberg alone would port their VST platform Cubase onto Linux (Don't tell me about using it in Wine. I tried it. For real songs with dozens of tracks. It's a total joke. And I don't even mean the latency.), the circle could be broken.
So please stop with your dreamy dreams from wannabe professional musicians telling me how they were able to create a simple four-track audio song with some amateur FX plugged in. Because it has nothing to do with even my semi-professional work.
P.S.: I may sound angrier than I am. In fact I really *really* wish I could help with some big thing, like persuade Steinberg.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Try leaving the states. This attitude is not prevalent in Australia. Web Designers tend to use Windows PC's exclusively, most of the WD's I know dual boot with Ubuntu and XP/Vista and the only thing keeping them on XP/Vista is Creative Suite and IE testing. Same with many print designers, fonts and legacy work are pretty much the only things that keep them on Mac's seeing as most print shops switched to windows in the early 2000's (Windows XP/2003 era) so to send files to most print shops they have to display correctly on Windows.
Apple do not offer the same discounts in Australia. Especially to TAFE students where a lot of designers are coming from these days. So they end up getting a cheap Wintel PC and a Academic addition of CS to run on it.
Using Ubuntu for anything highly specific is the wrong idea. Ubuntu is designed as a general purpose OS, a jack of all trades so as the saying goes it is the master of none. Ubuntu is designed to meet 90% of the needs of 90% of people and Ubuntu achieves this fantastically. For any really specific job you will need to customise Linux. Yes I know this is beyond the capabilities of most simpletons but if it is done (by someone else perhaps) it will result in far superior performance and results. The ability to customise Linux into either a general purpose or highly specialised OS is the strength of Linux.
With a lot of video going to flash it no longer matters about quality that much. These people will hang on to Mac's and slowly price themselves out of the market as they try to compete with more streamlined operations (why Graphic Design has been spared from the "great offshoring" that has affected IT, Sales and so many other careers I do not know, it seems the perfect candidate from a managerial perspective). With more and more things heading to the internet, quality is less important then download time.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What gave macs the edge a decade ago was the powerpc architecture cpus. Schools and media production was better optimized for those systems.
Before there was PowerPC, there was the 68K -- and folks were doing audio and media processing on those machines, too!
Now they have no advantage hardware wise and you still pay the MacTax.
In conclusion; you're a crazy person if you use a mac
Again with the "Mac Tax." Comparably-configured Macs and Dells cost nearly the same. It's just that Apple refuses to play in the money-losing sub-$500 field.
Got it?
What are these pro audio programs called? I produce music in Windows and I am pretty sure my hardware DAW interface requires windows and won't work on linux (lame), but I am a big ubuntu fan and it would be nice to know about these options....
Apple has decided that they would write the JVM for OS X, citing better integration into OS X and making OS premium Java development platform at one point. Of course they back tracked on it and now Java on OS X is lagging behind 2-3 years behind major releases and versions on other OSes for which Sun and others are writing JVMs.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Out of curiosity, did you write up any documentation and put it online? I'm sure there are other people who might like to know about all the crazy tweaks you have to do...
I've periodically looked at Linux's audio production and always been left rather disappointed. It was just a bitch to get anything to work at all, much less to get a functional setup with multiple components working together. On Windows, well it has basically just been point and click. As such even if Linux could be the equal in technical terms, I don't know that I'd be interested in that I don't want to spend a lot of time fighting with it. I am willing to spend some money for stuff that just works.
Also as a practical matter, you may get screwed over in terms of creating synthesized music and most programs that do that are Windows and/or Mac only. The sample sets and the pure synthesis programs just only seem to run on those platforms. As such, even if you get a perfectly working Linux setup, you would likely lack access to the instruments you wanted. It might work for recording/mixing live music, but not likely for creating synthesized music.
Not anymore it doesn't. I used to get that problem in XP, never in Vista or Windows 7.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The software isn't there, either. I mean, for DAWs, you kind of need VST support. This shit is basic; the only "serious" DAW on Windows that doesn't support VST is Reason because it's more often used as a ReWire slave for a DAW like Cubase or Ableton Live. I know you can make VSTs work under Linux, but it's a silly fucking pain in the ass to do and not really worth it.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Kim Cascone is largely a sample junkie. There's very little instrumentation or sequencing involved--the sort of stuff that Linux DAWs still aren't very good at.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
About video editting on PCs... the most annoying part is that Final Cut Pro actually IS so good. I started doing video on Premiere Pro, and then worked on Vegas a bit. After going nuts at Premiere one too many times, I gave Final Cut a try. And yeah, it is better. Everything just works.. better!
That being said, Premiere Pro works fine. It has its quirks (ok, sometimes really annoying quirks), but it'll get the job done. Unfortunately, the whole world seems to be running on the "FCP Experienced Required!". Stupidly annoying.
Why would it be the developers' fault that they don't support an OS with a microscopic user base?
All the users are on OS X and Windows. If you want them to come to Linux, you must be better than OS X and Windows and market the hell out of it.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
You clearly have never recorded, mixed and mastered a 100+ piece symphony orchestra.
16 channels of 24/96 is not going to cut it for professionals.
Solid State Logic makes a PCIe card that does 128-channels at 24/96 and you can use up to 6 of them together which yields 768 channels. Other units offer 192KHz resolution.
If this is my life's work, I am going to settle for nothing less than the best. Until some serious changes happen, Linux and BSD are just not options for professionals who care about the quality of their work.
This is extremely unfortunate because I would like to have all of my work available to me in open formats so that I can use any part of it at any point in the future. All the sessions I did in grad school in Logic aren't available to me unless I start using proprietary software. And while I was in school, I either had to use proprietary software or not get the work done and not graduate which really wasn't much of an option.
Dell doesn't lose money on their sub-$500 PCs.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Really? What sort of audio were you working with? In a recording-studio environment, it's still a critical problem; one of the biggest advantages Pro Tools has over native DAWs is that your headphone mixes will Just Work. I set up a 32-channel RME/Nuendo system on a dual-core XP box a few years ago, and it was always a tradeoff - do I want the built-in, zero-latency, zero-effect monitor mix, or do I ratchet down the buffer sizes and repatch everything so I can give the vocalist some reverb and still get it back to their ears in time, and hope something doesn't go awry to ruin the take?
View > As List
Yup, it's a List, Details, and Tree view, all in one.
If he didn't notice that feature staring him in the face, it makes me question how thoroughly he evaluated the two platforms.
Maybe you were just pointing to the 'bundled for average guitar joe' thing.
But if you're talking Line6 products, I was surprised to find kernel drivers available for my UX1 (which I was about to sell on ebay after switching to a pure Linux environment).
Of course, the company won't notice that the Linux driver effort effectively won them a sale (because my second-hand unit wasn't on ebay to be bought by the Windows user that would have bought it in the place of the new unit...)
Kernel driver writers for odd hardware are pretty heroic IMHO.
Ubuntu Studio Edition comes with the real time kernel and most editing and sound applications installed. Add the MP3 driver and you are ready to go to work. I use it.
http://ubuntustudio.org/ Get it here.
The truth shall set you free!
I just finished recording and producing a jazz album using Project CCRMA hosted on Fedora. The recording through to the final mastering were all done using linux. Having read his article I was surprised to find he hadn't mastered his production using Jamin which, when used in combination with Ardour and Jack, gives the type of control over the production process I've not seen duplicated using a Mac (Windows is not capable at all in this regard). I suppose though that is the workflow he is used to.
The innovation is what it means to the production process. There is no mixdown to a 24bit 44.1Khz stereo track prior to mastering and you can render your tracks through the mastering software into the final tracks and tweak automation artifacts instead of compromising by using equalisation. Sure you still equalise but you end up doing less as you can refer back to the master if there is a problem and fix it there. Plus you have better control over (audio gain) compression to reduce transients and maintain dynamic range in the final product.
The bands that listen to my recording are amazed at the results (well my recording techniques *ahem* do play some part :-) and some asked me if it was done on analogue equipment - which is quite a compliment. The thing is sure, it's not perfect and sometimes frustrating because the your hardware is often pushed to it's limit, you find bugs you have to adjust your work flow around but simply put I don't think the capability *exists* anywhere else.
I've been using it since 2003 and have seen the foundation laid down by Alsa and Jack projects continually refined. Often the criticism is made that 'linux copies this or that' but after comparing it to existing processes it seems to me that audio production under Linux is on the leading edge of technology as the framework for innovation in music production.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And C) the people who make these apps tend to charge for them. Selling software to the Linux crowd is about as difficult as keeping MJ away from little boys.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You probably realized this already, but it hit me awhile back...
In grade school/high school back in the 80's, most schools had Macs. IBM PCs were totally inadequate at the time for educational purposes, they were meant for spreadsheets and business applications. Fast forward to 1998-2000...art departments started getting digital in large numbers, and who were the guys making the real decisions? Art directors and musicians and the like who probably never took a computer course in college and had never touched a PC, and if they had, their mind instantly conjured up images of a DOS command prompt vs. the Mac SE they took that keyboarding class on in high school. It's pretty obvious which direction they were going to go.
I really think those investments in getting Macs in public schools back in the 80's probably kept the whole company afloat. Apple might very well be dead right now if it weren't for that. PCs running Windows or Linux have been fully capable of doing everything that most of them need to do for a very long time now...and much cheaper to boot. But when you talk to these people, it's like they were never really aware of that fact until usually someone comes along and shows them.
>I used linux exclusively on my notebooks from 98-06
>and I can tell you about 1000s of hours wasted
Ive been working on Linux for 10 years and its been on my laptop since then.
I only decided to move my family and relatives to Linux in 2007 because I didnt think Linux on the desktop was ready before then (it was PCLinuxOS2007 and Mandriva that I chose for them),
Now that the desktop is finally raedy, you went a blew a bundle.
THats ass backwards.
I use Ubuntu Studio on the road and we do over 100 gigs a year. With the live recordiings Ive made weve even made some live bootleg cd's which are of equal quality that the sound guy does on his Mac.
Would I have done sound on Linux 2-3 years ago?
No.
Now? Of course.
Backwards.
Sounds like you didn't read the article. The author has a problem with "vendor lock-in," so he migrated away from Macs. That's his higher vision - he walks a different path than you do, with a different priorities. For all we know, maybe your higher vision is being the best consumer you can be. This guy was uncomfortable, made a switch, and is getting the word out to benefit others like him.
The problem I have is that Linux score writing applications are primitive. They exist. And they "sort of" work. But only "sort of". I supposedly can import Finale export files into Linux, but that's not using Linux as a music score editor.
And also I'd really like an application that combined an svg editor with a pixel graphics editor. Inkscape is good for one, and The Gimp is good for the other. But a good replacement for my favorite graphics editor would be a combined editor.
P.S.: Can The Gimp2 do animation yet? I'd try it, but the version I currently have installed works, and apparently I can't have both installed at once. The last time I had any firm information the answer was "not yet". (It depends on an add-on toolkit in The Gimp v 1.x.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Comparably-configured Macs and Dells cost nearly the same.
Rubbish.
Maybe in magic lala mac land they do but in the real world, particularly Australia in my case I just bought a new DELL Latitude , E6400/Core 2 2.66/4 gig RAM 320HDD LED screen metal case(Bloody awesome!)for $2000. To get the same spec in a new mac here would cost well over $3,000.
Note this is not a sub $500 machine.
I have cosistently found that the same laptop hardware spec costs 50% more for the mac label in Australia.
Got it?
I know you can make VSTs work under Linux, but it's a silly fucking pain in the ass to do and not really worth it.
I like and use Linux Multi Media Studio which has VeSTige, allowing me to play most (not all) of my vast collection of VSTs. It's not at all a pain and is worth a try IMO.
Steve
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
Ah yeah, I wasn't working with performance that involves non-electronic musicians with singers, so more focused on the output-only style of electronic music on laptops.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've used it. It is the closest thing to non-VSTfail, but I had trouble installing it and had to go dick around for a while until it decided to cooperate. The other problem is ReWire. I'm reasonably sure LMMS can't ReWire.
And to be honest, after using Ableton and Reason, something like LMMS is just lacking. The interface is kind of crap, and while it'd be usable if I didn't already own far more intuitive tools, I do.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
At the very least $3000 isn't an accurate figure. Any plain jane white Macbook will perform just fine for audio ($1000). Discounting the fact that the FOSS audio apps he's using are also available on mac, Logic Pro 9 is only $500 brand new. Cute article but I'll skip the angst, thank you.
So did he just remove pulseauio then? Was he lucky enough that his card has decent ALSA drivers? They're about 50/50 last I checked.
I couldn't see myself doing serious audio work without dropping in OSS or something... ..or is this guy only using the system to output audio? If you can't even play games with Pulseaudio I can't imagine it would be very good for pro audio...
Damn, did you just open one hell of a can of worms...Because there is a hell of a big world beyond Cubase and ProTools.
Cubase hasn't been considered a joke for a while, which is good. It's not a bad program.
A large number of the current DAW systems are very, very good, and have a place amongst serious musicians, mixers and composers.
Digital Performer still ranks supreme for a lot of music producers and film/TV composers (Zimmer, Elfman)...And it can utilize the PT audio system, cards and interfaces. It still has superior MIDI capabilities in some areas and does some nifty things with monophonic pitch detection.
Logic also has a place amongst the serious, though a smaller place.
And speaking of Steinberg, Nuendo is Cubase+everything needed for film, complex surround, specialized file formats etc. Cubase is the low-midgrade Steinberg product: Nuendo is, and always has been the flagship, dating back to its very, very brief days on the Irix platform (no, really).
Now, if we look at the very high end, we have some tools like Merging's Pyramix, Fairlight's impressive stuff, and for hardware, Euphonix, Harrison, Studer (yes, they make digital consoles), and even Otari for broadcast. But I digress.
Of course, the biggie DAW on Linux is Ardour. It supports CoreAudio (OS X) or ALSA/FFADO...No support for Windows users though. But why bother trying to program around Microsoft's inefficiencies? Ardour is very much a serious player. They had a partnership with Solid State Logic for a while, and put out a good package.
Cubase occupies a place in the market that I would describe as prosumer to pro...I wouldn't describe it as one of two 'serious' options. I would describe Cubase as the Honda of the audio production world: It does everything it needs to, but it's no Cadillac, no Rolls, and definitely no Oshkosh truck.
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seriously ubuntu, wtf? Everything worked last month, now nothing works?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Personally I did it the other way around.
I used to use Ardour, Rosegarden, Jack and Jazz and screwed about with Alsa until I got things working. It was pretty good considering the cost.
However, much as I dislike OSX (and I do with a passion), what you can achieve with something like Logic on a Mac is so far ahead of the Linux solution it is hard to believe.
This is a perfect fitting niche case - apparently the guy does a lot of recording and audio track editing. Linux/FOSS has many apps in that field that easyly rival and outperform close-source competitors. If you only do that kind of stuff Ubuntu actually *is* the cheaper alternative to anything else.
Here's a counter-example: I'm a very long term Linux user and plan on getting back to some video editing after an 8 year break. Video NLE still hasn't moved very much on Linux since then, so I guess I'll be working on my Mac with Premiere for doing that. Cinelerra and Blender Sequencer just aren't quite there yet.
There are special cases where you need Windows or OS X to get the job done (yes even Windows has those - some engineering stuff that only runs on MS for instance) but if your task is well specified it may be that you get the best option for free. On a FOSS operating system.
Bottom line: Allways check the alternatives. Or ask a non-zealot expert if FOSS has any boundaries for your field compared to the usual suspects.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
".[..] have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable"
Well that's great but is it actually any good?
A brick can be flawless, stable and reliable but it wouldn't be much use for making music on.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Configuring audio on Linux can be tricky, but that mostly affects casual users. If you're a professional audio user, you need to fiddle around a lot to set things up on any platform, and Linux is no harder than other platforms.
I think the point is that this kind of work has gone from "hard" to "feasible" on Linux. And in some areas, Linux actually has significant advantages of OS X, so that Linux now is a platform worth considering.
(Personally, I wouldn't dream of doing any kind of audio work on OS X anymore.)
And some Linux musicians told me Reaper is currently the only viable music production software for Linux. Rosegarden and Ardour being the two open source contenders not quite there yet.
Actually your post is 100% troll!
ALSA != PulseAudio. PulseAudio resides on top of ALSA, or whatever other audio services your desire.
-a guy on a Linux computer whose sound is disabled because his webcam is plugged in (wtf)
Unless you can prove otherwise, its more likely you're having problems because either you distro fails to properly account for your device in its configuration or you're making this up. Yes, Linux still has audio issues but for the vast majority, things just work.
I was recently kicking off a recording project with my sister, who lives in the US and uses Vista. I use OSX and live in Sweden. I did a complete market survey, trying to find a cross-platform solution for OSX and Windows (also taking Linux into account, since I'm a geek that way) and there was simply nothing that measured up to Cubase in terms of compatibility and interoperability and capability.
I really wanted to NOT come to that conclusion, but I couldn't. I didn't want to support Big Software, but I couldn't get around it for professional use. I've tried Ardour with Jack and all that, but except for the simplest projects, it just doesn't make it. And I just couldn't possibly support someone else in trying to get all that installed and working on another OS on another continent.
Sometimes you just have to bite the sour apple, as they say in Sweden.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Life is better inside the walled garden (topped with razor wire).
Here's my market survey (of serious contenders) -- it doesn't mention Reaper, though we checked that too.
-snip-
OK, so we seem to be slightly cutting edge with our hy-tek plans for fame and glory. As I kept searching, I could hardly believe that there was such a gap in the software market between Macs and PCs. It all seems so very 1993 or something. I mean they all run on Intel processors now, so WTF, mate?
By my market survey, here's the options...
Tracktion -- Mac & PC, slightly dodgy, but it's 100 bucks (or free if you want to try the keygen).
Cubase -- Mac & PC, not at all dodgy, but it's 500 bucks.
Audacity -- Mac, PC, Linux, but please...way too limiting even for us.
Traverso DAW -- Mac, Linux, Windows, kinda better than Audacity, but not really. Need I say more?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Logic 8 -- Mac Only
Protools -- Must have Digidesign soundcard
Cakewalk -- PC only
Ardour -- Mac, Linux
So, 400 bucks difference is a lot of beer money or like a plane ticket to Berlin or something.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
I too am bugged that when Apple or Microsoft upgrade their OS, it breaks applications and some are lost forever. I used Vision and still would be using it if it were available. But when Apple moved to a different chipset and Opcode sold out to Gibson, all hope was lost. I've poured thousands of dollars over the past 20 years into hardware (serial MIDI interface anyone? how about a nubus digital audio interface?) and software that will never work in the future (Rebirth? tons of others I haven't seen for nearly 10 years)
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
"reverbs using impulse responses"
The technical term you were looking for was "convolution reverb" and of course if you'd known that you could easily have found that one of the most popular plugin suites for LADSPA (the Linux plugin API) includes such a reverb and user-customisable impulse recordings.
I wonder how much, if anything, that you actually do is hard, let alone "impossible" with a Linux audio setup...
I love Ubuntu, and use it for almost all my non-audio related computing, but this really doesn't say much of anything about real audio production -- he is simply mixing and matching a few samples together and playing them back. He can come back and talk to me when he manages to record 16 simultaneous tracks of input, and then mix down 96 tracks with heavy editing and processing. I can do this with ease on my Windows* recording rig, but the tech really isn't there to do it in Linux. Hardware support is abysmal (and don't even try running a 32 I/O Firewire interface on third party drivers), and Ardour really is your only choice as far as recording software goes. I have used Ardour, and it is okay, but it is simply not even close to being a match for Cubase or ProTools. With how CPU intensive and finicky these programs can be (especially with the cost of a crash, nothing is more frustrating than losing the perfect take) you would be insane to even try running them in Wine. It is nice to see that Linux is starting to come into its own, but you can take it from me, this guy is doing little more than tinkering. Real audio production is still firmly in the realm of Windows* and Mac.
*Yes, Windows is every bit as good as Mac for audio production. Please stop with the lunacy that Mac is the go to platform for sound, I have used both extensively and honestly don't even notice the platform once I start mixing. I have had just as many crashes with Mac. The only reason you really need to go Apple is if you want to use Logic. I know Mac handles audio routing slightly better by default, but that is irrelevant in any professional environment as you will be using the DAE if you go the ProTools route, or ASIO if you use Steinberg software. There really is no advantage.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The guy only seems to record. That's the easy part. He says that he makes master mixes without compression or EQ. True, mastering engineers like to have that. However, the main reason he does that is because those tools simply don't exist on Linux. If you want to do your own mastering, where are the Waves plugins? The IKmultimedia Fairchild and Pultec emulations? Can you even hook up a UAD card to Linux? Same story for software synthesizers. With Logic you get more synths (and effects) than you'll use in a lifetime. Where is the physical modeling synth on Linux? An analog emulation of the quality of ES2? Or of Pro53, which is Mac/PC? Where are the innovative synths such as from Camel Audio? Doing my music on Linux, I'd feel like having only a recorder to score a symphony. V.
For any really specific job you will need to customise Linux. Yes I know this is beyond the capabilities of most simpletons but if it is done (by someone else perhaps) it will result in far superior performance and results. The ability to customise Linux into either a general purpose or highly specialised OS is the strength of Linux.
And here Ubuntu Studio comes in handy. On a plain vanilla Ubuntu, one can simply apt-get ubuntustudio packages and get every customization done for them. It installs the main applications (audio-wise it's great) and even configures a real-time kernel.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
To me, this is a shameful topic for Linux... There may be others, but this is the only one that bothers me. It's truly the only reason I haven't made at least a 90% switch to linux as a desktop...with windows basically acting as a game console on another partition.
I have used a vast array of music production software, too many to list here, on Linux, Windows and Mac. While the open source software out there for Linux is respectable, and definitely usable, it's nowhere near the commercial products that exist for Windows and Mac. If music were my career, there's no fscking way I would use Linux. As a hobbyist, it suits me fine. Taking a Linux laptop on stage would be terrifying for me. I would sooner use a Windows solution than Linux. But then, if it's your career, you should really be putting more than $600 into it.
My day job has me as a Linux/Unix/Win32 admin/architecht. I fiddle around with the stuff all day long.
On my lunch hour, some evenings and weekends, I work on music.
My primary PC/DAW has a Fedora 10 install on it. I have Ardour, Jack, Rosegarden, and LMMS installed, configured, tweaked to hell, and working... Yet I NEVER use it. The sheer effort it took to get all of that stuff talking to one another PLUS getting a handfull of my VST's working under LMMS was Herculean. Then I realized... I can't make much music with this stuff. I tried LMMS... I REALLY wanted to get my head around it 'cause it's multi platform, so whatever I make while under Linux, I can pull over to the WinXP side and work on it some more. Sadly, it never panned out that way. Ardour, for all it's good, still suffers from a lack of a sequencer, making it the rough equivalent of ProTools 3 or 4 (we're at 8 now). I'm not productive at all with this stuff. When I'm in "musician" mode, I don't want to tweak ANYTHING. I just want to sit down and create. I don't want to screw with jack to get stuff flowing from LMMS to Ardour. In fact, I don't want to have to run them both at the same time at all. While in WinXP, I pull up FL Studio, create, and I'm done. When it's time to master it, I open up SoundForge, drop in T-Racks or my SSL plugins and make it happen from there. If the mood calls for it, I pull up Sonar 7 and compose from there. I have dozens of plugins from freebie VST's to good Waves and NI plugins I paid for. I don't have this under Linux.
I think it's good that someone is trying to bring this stuff to Linux, but until I see the ability to use my apps and plugins, I'll pass.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Then I have wade through a mess of acronymns I don't completley understand. OSS? ALSA? JACK? PulseAudio?
Can somebody point me to a newbie's guide to Linux audio? Anything I've ever read (including tfa) is over my head, but I'd like to understand it.
I'm convinced 99.9% of issues people have with sound hardware are due to the bios. Linux has always supported my.... Let me start over. I have always purchased Linux compatible hardware for the device I'm making. I've had laptops with compatible hardware that did not have sound. Everytime that happened it turned out to be a bios issue.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Yes, that's true, but in a world of shrinking deadlines, increased competition and a dying music industry, you still have to be competitive. These tools do enhance workflow and they enable you to be more productive. As the parent would very well know, when you work in professional audio, even a couple of hours of computer downtime (be it configuration issues or restarting things or whatever) is disastrous.
Oh, and the cost of hardware/software is only a small factor when you're actually doing this for a living.
what do you consider "top end hardware interfaces"?
RME HDSP and MADI interfaces, the choice of most highly-multichannel configurations worldwide, work perfectly on Linux and have done for a long time. Perhaps you are one of those who believe that firewire devices are "high end"?
Same procedure with Ubuntu Media Centre.
This is what I love about Ubuntu, it can easily be used as a blank canvas. It's a simple procedure for another organisation or individual to create a custom environment and allow other users to download it and use it as Ubuntu provides a great and consistent common framework to build on. I know other Linux distro's can do the same but Ubuntu already does it well.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I know Linux has its appeal, but this is frankly ridiculous. At best it is a stunt. At worst it is a complete waste of time.
It's like recommending Windows for a Web server. Yes, you can get a Web server up and running on Windows. But why? You can get a free modern Linux or BSD for the same hardware and it is not only 98% set up for you already, but when you deploy it to the Web it will do the job much better. Thousands or perhaps millions of people were there in Linux or BSD land before you, optimizing those systems in innumerable ways to be a better Web server. When you set up a Web server on Linux, you stand on the shoulders of giants from the first moment. It's that way also when you set up a music and audio workstation using a Mac. It's not just that the hardware and software is optimized for the task over years and decades, it's that the relevant community is there now and has been there for many years. There are a million benefits to that. Enough music and audio -related technical problems have been solved already on the Mac that you can work on your musical problems and audio problems without having to stop to do technical or I-T work.
If you buy any stock Mac and add no 3rd party hardware and software, you already have a better music and audio system than anything you can build with Linux. You will get all these for free with the Mac, already setup and working: GarageBand (music and audio workstation based on Logic), CoreAudio (multichannel pro audio subsystem that supports simultaneous use of multiple 32-bit/192kHz audio hardware as well as multiple pro audio software apps), CoreMIDI (ultra low-latency MIDI subsystem with compatibility with all MIDI devices), QuickTime (backbone of digital media production for 20 years now and the basis of the MPEG-4 standard that replaced the CD and DVD), and iTunes (which is scriptable on the Mac, so you can, for example, create a script that stamps arbitrary tracks with all of your own artist info). The software you get with the Mac is worth the price of the Mac; the hardware is free. If you try and replicate this functionality on another system, you will spend the price of the Mac just attempting to do it. Further, every Mac except MacBook Air has built-in 24-bit optical digital audio in and out, as well as analog audio in and out. So you don't even have to buy audio hardware to make a decent 24-bit recording. A Mac mini is $599 and it has all of this already setup and working to very high specifications and can share the Linux system's display if you already have a Linux system. It's small enough to travel. It has a FireWire 800 port to hook onto an audio interface or fast hard disk. It backs up all your work automatically, including versioning, if you just give it access to a second disk. It can play 24-bit audio in any context, even within 3rd party apps such as MS Word that are not audio-related.
If you do want to add hardware or software to the Mac, there are about 10 digital audio workstations for the Mac, some of which go back to the 1980's (e.g. Logic Pro used to be called Notator back then) and you can run 2 or more simultaneously and share hardware also. You can not only plug in pretty much any pro audio interface, you can plug in 10 of them at once if you want and they will all work simultaneously. You can plug in any MIDI instrument. There are dozens of highly creative Mac-only music and audio apps like MetaSynth which simply don't exist on other platforms. And if you are doing any soundtrack work, the fact that the Mac is the best video editing platform will benefit you in many small and large ways.
Even the iPod can do better than this Linux system when it comes to music. You can buy an iPod touch for $229, and an app called "FourTrack" for $9.99 more and you have a 4-track recorder and player with multitouch transport controls, pan pots, and faders. A key thing is that with multitouch, you are essentially working with a little hardware mixer. You can drag 2 sliders down at once, for example, so you can do an awful lot on stage with
... LMMS, it's a great music production software, sequencer, supports MIDI, and had many bells and whistles. My son produced much of his music using that software.
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That's the most vigorous beating of a dead horse I've seen in a while.
While I'm a huge fan of the CLI, I'm not trying to fool anyone that it's easier than a visually oriented interface. In a GUI, things *can be* self evident. In a CLI, it's all >. ;-)
-Matt