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Ask Slashdot: An Open Source PC Music Studio?
enharmonix writes "I have a big decision to make. I am probably going to buy a laptop that I will primarily use for music. I would prefer an OEM distro so I don't need to install the OS myself (not that I mind), but I have no preference between open- and closed-source software as an end-user; I just care about the quality of the product. There are two applications that I absolutely must have: 1) a standard notation transcription program with quality auditioning (i.e., playback with quality sound fonts or something similar, better than your standard MIDI patches) that can also accept recorded audio in lieu of MIDI playback, and 2) a capable synthesizer (the more options, the better). If there's software out there that does both 1 and 2 in the same app, that's even better. I've played with some of Ubuntu's offerings for music a few years ago and some are very good, though not all of them are self-explanatory and the last time I checked, none of them really met my needs. I am not so worried about number 2 because I think I could pretty easily develop my own in .NET/Mono, which I think would be a fun project (which would be open source, of course). I am a Gnome fan so if I go with Linux, I will almost certainly go with standard Ubuntu over Kubuntu, but Gnome seems to rule out Rosegarden which was the best FOSS transcription software out there the last time I checked. The other solution I've thought of is to just shell out the $600 for Finale, which I'm more than willing to do, but I'm not so sure I want Windows 8 and I'm just not sure I can afford to go with a Mac on top of the $600 for Finale. I don't intend to put more than one OS on my laptop, either. Any slashdotters out there dabble in composing/recording, using MIDI, sound fonts, recorded audio, and/or synthesizers? What setup of hardware/OS/software works for you? Can FOSS music software compete with their pricier closed source competitors?"
The KXStudio apps installed over Debian or Ubuntu tend to be pretty nice (better session handling that gladish provides at least).
Someone's paired the wrong headline and summary.
Since music is a collaborative art, and you are going to want to share music, aren't you better off using what people in your "scene" are using, whether that's your school program or online forum or in the performance venues you frequent? I'd expect that would trump whatever software might look "best" if you were working alone.
If you're making a statement of your religious faith OR if you're just tinkering, going to the trouble of finding something to run an open source package makes sense. If you're actually interested in the right tool for the job, then buy a real music studio with a Mac or a Windows PC instead. There's a reason that real musicians generally use real tools that suit professional needs.
Our music studio only records live sound (no MIDI). We use CCRMA on Fedora20. It has a ton of stuff you might find useful. We use it for the RT prempt capabilities so musicians can auto-punch-in/out during recording without have to go back and time-shift tracks later. Our "sound card" is a pair of Echo Audiofire 12's for the 24 mics around the studio.
I have tried just about EVERY option I can find in FOSS and they do not quite hold up to the current commercial offerings. Frankly, both as an end user and as a pro audio salesperson, I've only ever had mediocre luck with Make Music/Finale. At the very least, with Avid's Sibelius, I've been able to get decent tech support. I haven't had as much luck with Ardour as I'd like, and Audacity doesn't cut it. Getting into a decent Sequencer without dropping a fortune, I'd get into Studio One personally.
If you want more details and/or want to know more about my opinions on the matter, please feel free to PM me.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
As a DJ, I've come across some tools and some complete distributions that will likely fit your needs, but I don't know quite enough to make specific recommendations. I do know that there are alot of Linux music production tools that are way above my head, pro quality stuff. The folks at Linuxmusician.com and Linuxaudio.org would know exactly what you're talking about and be able to make specific recommendations. I looked at a couple distributions that are complete audio workstations on boot. They included a lot of fancy tools that were way more than I needed.
As you may know, music production on Linux uses JACK to hook together any software components you want. That means any editor tool can work with any midi source, for example, because they are plugged together using jack.
Two popular software packages are Ardour and Traktion, but really the Linux music community at sites focused on music production under Linux will have much better answers for you.
I'm a gigging musician who's been doing digital audio for 20 years, and followed open source audio very closely for ages. Sadly, a purely FOSS solution will just hamper you. I tried for years, ( I played shows with 100% FOSS software) but honestly, I think a DAW is too feature rich for anything but a dedicated team to do properly. Now I use Reaper, which is as close to open source as you're going to get in a kick ass DAW. (Ardour will do for tracking and mixing, but not scoring or midi editing). It's got an unlimited un-crippled demo, cheap individual license ($40), cool company, and to be honest, it's so good I'd use it over Logic or Protools or Live even if it cost $500. It's incredibly well designed, and extendable in two scripting languages so there are loads of open source extensions and plugins for it. You can find tons of great FOSS environments to use *in addition* to your DAW ( PureData, SuperCollider, CSound, scads of open source plugins), but for your main DAW, the sweet spot IMHO is Reaper on a hackintosh.
If you *need* it to be 100% open source, Linux + Ardour + PureData or SuperCollider is a good option, but I wouldn't recommend it over doing the same thing with Os X and Reaper instead.
There is just not much in the free software world, particularly for Linux, that is good for music composition. Just the way it is. If you want to do it well, you need commercial tools, generally for Windows or Mac.
For what the original poster is looking for, I'd say have a look at Cakewalk Sonar X3. Sonar is real, real good at MIDI, knows how to deal with SoundFonts, has some built in synths that aren't too bad, and only runs $100 for the basic version. It's notation is not the best, but anything I can think of that is a reasonable step up is also quite a bit more money (like Cubase).
However depending on what the ultimate goal is, the DAW can end up being the cheap part of things. High quality samples cost a lot, and there are few freebies. Reason is to make good samples you need to hire good musicians, a good recording studio/hall, good engineers, and then spend a lot of time on it. Gotta make that money back somehow. So if you want realistic sounds, you can easily spend far more on samples than the DAW/sequencer. I own Sonar X3 Producer, which is $500, but I've spent more than that on a single sample set, and I have multiple sample sets.
Also if he thinks that programming a synthesizer is easy, he's got another thing coming. Making a competent synthesis engine that sounds good, is usable, etc, etc is not an easy task. Particularly since there are all sort of different kinds of synthesis one might wish to use, and each is implemented and controlled differently.
So, like the parent said: religious statement or actual work? If you just wanna play around in Linux with free solutions, then go to it. No need to ask on Slashdot, just try stuff out. Wikipedia has a list of OSS music software, to name just one place. If you are asking because you want something that doesn't suck and can do some real work, then you'll need to stick with Window or Mac and drop some money.
Like I said, I'd go for Sonar. There's a free trial, and the base version isn't that much and has good features and capabilities (it isn't crippled with regards to tracks and so on). You can always upgrade later.
Other reasonably priced options to look at are Reaper and FL Studio Fruity Edition.
2. figure out WHAT you want to do in music and select the software that fits your needs from there.
3. Buy the hardware that supports your software the best.
Frankly, in terms of just "getting shit done" Windows (7) is basically as good as Mac. Linux isn't so friendly, but if the software you need to get shit done is only on Linux, then, you're on Linux.
Now, there is a caveat with the software first thing, which is, your interface. If the audio in/out device you're using is Mac only, then you're using a Mac. Etc for the rest. So, for example for my home studio, I have a MOTU Ultralite MkIII hybrid running on windows 7 HP laptop. It's a bit quirky, but the sound quality is excellent and the preamps are smooth - for the price, it's hard to beat. There is better, but it costs more. Luckily, the MOTU is Mac/Win, and I happened to have this HP laptop not doing anything, so bingo: instant home music set up.
For software I run Ableton Live Suite - the fullblown monster. Why? Because what I do is more performance /composition based. If I was in a band and I was recording through some big multichannel interface, I would go with ProTools, because that's what I learnt in school, and it's pretty much the "MS Office" of the audio world (in more ways than one...) I also use Audacity, which is the swiss army knife of audio editing (i.e., small, crude, but effective)
For monitors at home I have a pair of EVENT PS8 monitors. They're a little bass heavy, but over all, very good sounding at a very reasonable price.
I don't use a mixing desk, I have an AKAI control surface and a Yamaha (XS6) synthesizer. Between them, I have plenty of ways of making things happen.
At work, things are very different - I have a ProTools C24 console and an SSL mixing desk with Bryston amps and Dynaudio 5.1 monitors and a Mac Tower running Protools, AVID, Audacity, Melodyne, Autotune, and a pile of other gear (compressors, processors, etc.) But that's almost half million bucks right there. So, "let's not go there" and let's focus on what you're trying to do.
So, get yourself an audio interface and some kick ass speakers, FIRST. Then figure out what software you need, and that will guide you to the hardware. When all is said and done, what computer you use is trivial, both in terms of effectiveness and expense. I bought my HP laptop (an old i5 running win 7) for $300 used. It works FINE. Ableton Live Suite literally costs THREE times as much. My laptop is one of the cheapest pieces of gear I own (my speakers were $650). So, don't sweat the hardware. Figure out the kind of music you want to make and proceed from there.
Here are some general suggestions
1. Rock Music: ProTools / Logic / Whatever - Focus on microphones and a good compressor.
2. Electronica: Ableton Live. Get a good control surface (I don't recommend Akai - mine sucks...) and a good keyboard
3. Dance Music: I would suggest a combo of FL Studio and Ableton Live
4. Composition: Finale and (whatever: Logic / Ableton / ProTools / Reaper / whatever) Your main point is to generate good composition - the software is just there to make it do something, so it will be more a question of what softsynths you use...)
5. Experimental: Cycling 74 Max/MSP or Processing. You'll need to get a Mac for that.
6. Jazz: See Rock.
That should get you started. DON'T TALK TO SALESMEN. They will try to sell you things. Things you probably don't need. Focus on what your interests and skills are, and then build your studio around that.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
But of course, since Ubuntu doesn't even use GNOME anymore as the default environment, I suppose it's possible you're simply asking a question from 2004, and I do remember back then apps looked kindof bad in the wrong DEs, and computers often didn't have enough disk space and RAM to want to bring in so many additional dependencies. Yeah, your question starts to make a bit more sense if we assume you're lost in time, although it still doesn't make a ton of sense. But anyways, considering it's 2014, who the fuck cares if you end up using an extra 100MB of RAM because you need to open the Qt libraries as well?
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
BUT, that being said, I'm a musician in real life that prostitutes myself as an engineer during the day to pay the bills, for several decades now...
I tried for years using various software packages on Windows and Linux, you name it, I've tried it... Bottom line is, I finally broke down and bought a MBP in 2011 ( cheap ass $1199 entry level one, maxed out the memory and shitcanned the HD and installed a 512 Gb SSD) I'll never look back and wish I'd done it a lot sooner.
Everyone can spew whatever fanboi shit they want to, but Apple owns the music market. Even software that works in multiple OS environments like ProTools work better on a Mac and you don't run into hardware/latency/drivers/other issues common on other HW/OS platforms. Just go ahead and buy an Apple iMac or MBP as suits your environment; if you don't you can spend a lot of time/money/aggravation over a period of years, trust me, been there, done that, have the T-shirt and barbed wire ankle tattoo...
I've been writing and recording since the early 80s. I own several computers and tonnes midi/audio recording software, (e.g. Protools, Cubase, Garage Band, Sonar, Sibelius...). I've also been using Linux on my desktop since Mandrake 7. Recently, I set up a computer with Ubuntu Studio, and I love it. I've barely touched any of the other systems since....mostly just to export tracks. There was a bit of a learning curve, but I'm finding that once I got the hang of using Jack, there was no turning back.
Primarily, I'm using Ardour (http://ardour.org/features.html) for multi-track audio recordings (LV2, VST and LADSPA plugins are all supported), MuseScore (http://musescore.org/) for scoring, Timidity/Qsyth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiMidity%2B%2B) for MIDI tone generation.
Also, I've never had any issues sharing tracks with users of other programs, nor have I had any issues exporting from other programs/platforms into those in Ubuntu Studio.
"Oh, what sad times these are when passing ruffians can say 'ni' to helpless old ladies."
I've been following this for more than a decade, even wrote a lot of audio software for Linux, and all my music is made under it, with my own apps. Yet I recognize the situation will never improve. Here's why:
1) While the Linux kernel is perfectly capable of low latency, even on the shittiest of hardware, it does not provide the concept of primary and secondary buffers. If you want to use pro audio, you want to be able to mix the low latency, high sampling rate stream together with the regular OS/Desktop audio. Windows and OSX do this by setting the hardware for the realtime client, then also mixing the secondary audio over it, which comes from userland (or already mixed in userland). As a result, when using realtime audio in Linux, desktop audio dies or is hacked to route pulseaudio to jack and other stuff that does not really work well.
2) It's impossible to write plugins similar to VST, because of the different way tookits connect to X11 (they won't share the connection). You can't mix and match toolkits so a host DAW will use different plugns. The only way is to use separate processes, but that makes programming complexity much higher and very few people bothered. Wayland seemed like it could fix this in the future, but other distros such as Ubuntu refuse to use it, so it doesn't seem good.
3) Good programmers are not necesarily good composers. This is something that is much more important than it seems. Commercial companies are forced to listen to their users, but OSS developers mostly care about doing something good enough for themselves. Given the chance that a good programmer is a good producer/composer is super slim for the practical world, most audio software kind of sucks and feels incomplete. Ardour took more than a decade to implement MIDI and it still is horrible, because the main developers care more about live session recording. If they really had to use it everyday to make professional music, it wouldn't be as bare bones as it is now. At the same time, stuff that looks like a good idea (jack daemon) are terrible in practice because making music with a bunch of applications open is akin or worse to a live set of devices with cables connected.
4) Finally, the biggest problem of Linux is that, unlike other software such as 3D or imaging, there is plenty of cheap and good Windows/OSX audio alternatives, so even if OSS software were to run properly on Windows/Mac, the incentive is still slow. It's not like Blender or Gimp, that it's commercial counterparts are in the thousands $.
If you aren't familiar with the capabilities of GarageBand, or any other music software, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU COMMENTING ON THIS PARTICULAR STORY?
Garageband is (at least up to 2010ish - not sure if recent? versions have robbed anything) a surprisingly powerful music program. Logic (& other daws) add a lot of editing specific features that really enable you to get extremely anal with your work, but all of the underlying 'record/punch/trim/level/etcetc' concepts are there and do what you expect them to do. Garageband does notation along with midi / wave substitution and add in the JamPacks (all included free with MainStage on app store iirc) to replace stock GM sounds and everything the topic poster wants is there.
A better analogy would be telling a Photoshop user to try GetPaint.net / Paint.NET. Not the same as Photoshop, but all of the essentials and editing concepts are nearly identical. You can easily accomplish whatever it is your trying to do.
$.02 As much as I love and try to solely OSS, there are no options for this specific case. Ardour and Rosegarden are nice enough, but in much the same way Gimp isn't Photoshop, neither are those suitable alternatives. (primarily, asio-ish low latency audio/hardware isn't reliable ime, and there are no real options for upgraded GM soundbanks short of creating them yourself (which will end up consuming easily 88x more time and energy than the music being written in the first place))
That's all well and good for writing it. But not so much for recording it.
Huh?! You serious? Logic/ProTools is like the default setup for recording, mixing, composing, and editing. We're not talking about avant-gardists, mind you, so no PD, Max, Audiosculpt (and other IRCAM stuff), etc.
Yes, there's Live, Reason, Sonar, DP, and a couple of other packages, but standard is Logic and/or ProTools. Period.
Linux, Windows, and OSX all have problems with low-latency audio. The sad irony is that 15 years ago, you actually COULD connect a MIDI keyboard to a SB Pro AWE/32's MIDI port, run your sequencer app, and have it do a halfway decent job of both capture and playback. Then, host-based audio happened, and everything went to shit... accelerated by architectural changes to all three platforms that made matters even worse.
Forget about trying to do realtime CPU-based audio on any computer that needs to still be usable as a normal computer. It's impossible. You CAN hand-tweak Linux, Windows, and OS X in various ways to get the latency down (as others have noted, Linux has had realtime kernel audio available as an option for a while), but the tweaks you have to make will render it dysfunctional as a general-purpose computer.
It doesn't matter how fast your i7 or Xeon is, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have, and it doesn't matter if you have a terabyte RAID 0 SSD array... nothing you do will ever make it fast enough to do low-latency host-based audio without ever glitching. You might reduce the glitches to something that happens every 5-10 minutes, instead of every 5-10 seconds, but you'll never eliminate them completely. It's just the nature of how Windows, Linux, and OS X now handle multitasking.
The solution? Re-discover dedicated synth modules. Or set up a second PC whose only reason for existence is to be a VST/soft synth host -- aggressively tweaked for low-latency audio in ways the main DAW PC can't be.
The problem isn't MIDI (that was solved YEARS ago by just using USB to give every physical MIDI port its own dedicated full-bandwidth MIDI cable), and the problem isn't raw data being shoveled around. The problem is that even with a multi-core CPU and abundant RAM, Windows/Linux/OS X will all starve the soft synth for CPU cycles for 3-7ms at a time (usually, more like 12-20ms) while the audio buffer drains. If it empties before the CPU calculates the next 5-10ms chunk of waveform data, you get a loud audio glitch. Audio-generation is a "realtime" activity, and Windows/Linux/OS X in their roles as desktop operating systems all fall flat on their faces when realtime becomes a necessity.
So... the moral of the story: forget about trying to use a single computer as both DAW and VST/softsynth host. If you can avoid live performances involving a softsynth (or pre-record the softsynth and fake the keyboard playing during the performance, you'll save a LOT of money. Audio glitches while jamming or capturing keyboard input suck, but at least they won't affect your real recordings. Use your DAW as a DAW, and give the soft synth host its own hardware that can be properly tweaked for realtime audio.
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