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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."
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.
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I see why you posted as AC. The point of the article is he is a fairly well established musician breaking away from a well established platform for the music industry. I actually find it interesting, considering that a few years ago you often had to go through hell just to get anything to come out of the sound card using linux.
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.
Anyone who believes this has never tried to record and mix multitrack audio on Linux
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 actually find it interesting, considering that a few years ago you often had to go through hell just to get anything to come out of the sound card using linux.
On the other hand, many still do have trouble getting anything to get out of their sound card on Linux. I agree that the story is "interesting," but those of us serious Linux users will have to admit that the audio situation here is far from ideal, to put it positively. Alsa.... pulse.... awful. Compound this with the noticeable lack of good software and drivers for audio production equipment, and I will have to admit that the vast majority of professional audio people are much better of staying with Apple at the moment.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
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.
I have had nothing but a NIGHTMARE with sound in Ubuntu forcing me to go through hell to find the problem at each upgrade. And each upgrade from 8.04 (to 8.10 and now 9.04) have caused me to have to figure out why I get NO SOUND each time. Unfortunately each of the 3 versions caused a different problem so it wasn't as simple as just replicating what I did previously to resolve the issue.
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.
That depends on how you define "works." I agree that most people who install something like Ubuntu will get sound working without fuss. My main beefs with audio on Linux are with some terrible design decisions along the entire sound stack. For example, ALSA (ditching OSS completely) was a bad idea. PulseAudio is a good idea for some (very few) specific situations, but it doesn't belong as the fixture it has been made by several of the common distributions. It solves problems nobody knew they had only to introduce other important problems (i.e. latency).
I'm not discouraged at all by the audio situation on Linux. Like you said, it mostly works (setting aside audio production concerns). There are a lot of problems, though, and the best solutions may require some hurt egos. That's always a tough thing.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
...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.
I blogged about it and submitted the patches to the ALSA tree. It should hit mainline eventually (I'm not sure how often they sync up with ALSA).
I'm the editor of CDM and also run our servers. (apparently not terribly well, though I am in the middle of a migration to a new server config -- should've, uh, waited on this story!)
I'd like to get more data on hardware, too, and I'm curious what's been giving you trouble. I regularly see various problems on all three platforms, though I agree Linux is probably the least familiar and needs information dissemination most urgently (at least for music production).
While I'm waiting and restarting Apache (cough), some of the things folks are claiming here seem to be misinformed. That's not necessarily their fault; it illustrates that better documentation is needed, and simply pointing people to audio-centric distros I think is not enough.
For driver support -- RME fills the pro audio gap nicely if you're looking at the high end; they're the ones that are really doing it right. You'll also have good luck with any class-compliant USB audio interface. I'm getting good results out of a Cakewalk SPS-25 (basically equivalent to an Edirol UA-25). FireWire support is greatly improved, and you can check there at ffado.org. Most internal chipsets are also well-supported by ALSA - not a high-end option, true, but it means you can mix something on the road listening to the headphone jack without having to muck about with something like ASIO4ALL on PC.
Software: it's true there isn't much in the way of Linux-*only* software, but not that you don't have choices. Renoise and energyXT now both run natively, Renoise being a huge deal to fans of trackers. And many Windows apps can run better under WINE, with ALSA, WINEASIO, and JACK, than they do on Windows. That's the reason Native Instruments software can run on the MUSE Receptor, specialized hardware that runs Linux and WINE under the hood. It's solid enough that it winds up being preferable for people to buy that hardware over a laptop - yes, even over a Mac laptop. You probably won't get that kind of reliability out of a Linux setup out of the box, really, regardless of distro. But if you can set it up in a way that will be rock-solid, that could be worth the time for people.
I think that's the bottom line: a lot of people would be happy to invest a little extra time and effort to get an open system running. The problem is, they don't know how. The responses here demonstrate that people aren't aware of what some of their choices are, or have had (understandable) frustration because the distros ship out-of-box in a way that doesn't quite work, and there's not much clear documentation to tell you how to fix it.
ALSA isn't perfect, but neither is Core Audio, let alone ASIO. ALSA combined with JACK can be an exceptionally-terrific audio system for these applications.
So, I can make you a deal - I will put more of that information online, *and* fix our servers, too, so you can actually read it. ;)
Reaper actually *officialy* supports WINE. From http://www.reaper.fm/download.php : "Windows (32-bit): Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/7 or WINE (limited support for W98/ME)."
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