Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Linux and the Home Recording Studio?
wjcofkc writes: Somewhere between IT jobs I found myself spending 2 1/2 years employed pretty deeply in the local music industry. It was a fantastic experience. Left and right I saw people using very expensive proprietary software. I never saw anything that a similar Linux counterpart, or a suite of Open Source counterparts could not do. Needless to say, I preached the good word. Unfortunately, I never exploited any opportunities to provide a demo. One thing concerned me. If you have a full DAW setup, it's not just software; there is always some sort of hardware interface of varying complexity involved and playing through an amp into a microphone connected to a computer is not an acceptable way to record. I recently purchased a Lexicon Alpha 2-Channel Desktop Recording Studio interface based on vague mentions that it might work with Linux. After plugging it in for the first time, I fired up Audacity and Ardour. The device was available to select as an interface with zero configuration and it works perfectly. My question to the music geeks among us: what is your take on the state of Open Source pro audio software? And what successes and failures have you had with studio hardware?
Linux is utter shite for anything requiring creativity. Just get a Mac and be happy with your work instead of living with the endless frustration that is modern day open sores software.
Are we being trolled?
It's getting better, and it will get even better with time and higher adoption rates.
It's basically the same for games on Linux, the larger the audience, the more available the resources will be.
This is also a great thing for DAWs specifically as there is much lower OS overhead than a Windows environment.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Reaper is sort of decent. but personally I'd still rather use a standard platform to collaborate with other musicians, thus I use logic pro.
Choosing a DAW is much like choosing a programming language & IDE in one, all your knowledge becomes domain specific, and as such, as soon as you get serious it's difficult to consider open source options seriously. That said, reaper is really good for mucking about. I suspect it's not taken off as it's just the complete norm for musicians to pirate their production software. It's often so expensive and musicians are almost always not affluent.
I remember Ubuntu Studio being a thing years ago. I haven't been active in the Ubuntu community for a while know. I don't know what happened to the project. It had a real time kernel that seemed interesting.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I took a look at Linux music tools a few years ago, for Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/01/making-music-in-linux-and-beyond/
Haven't messed with any of it recently, but sort of assuming that things can only have gotten better in the last 5 years. Hope I'm not wrong.
Somewhere between IT jobs I found myself spending 2 1/2 years employed pretty deeply in the local music industry.
You were unemployed for 2.5 years following the Great Recession. I understand your situation. I was unemployed for two years (2009-2010), underemployed (working 20 hours per month) for six months, and filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy. Alas, I spent my entire looking for a job.
Have you looked into this package? https://ardour.org/ And please, no Apple Fan-boy talk. :P
Sadly, moving my productions to Linux isn't something I've thought about in a long, long time ... maybe I should. I'm currently on Avid Protools 12 with Apogee converters. I dumped the DigiDesign PCI-X hardware a few years back but I know for certain there was no Linux support there. In fact, Linux just listed it all as unknown devices. Kind of sad.
I had a couple of firewire 002's and 003's that again, Linux didn't recognize. The old Motu 8pre's were seen by the system for what they were but again, not supported even as a basic audio device and Audacity couldn't do anything with them. Same with the Presonus gear. The closest I ever got was with a Mackie Onyx and the USB interface and it was in fact recognized as a USB audio interface and Audacity would record from it but it was not good audio and, in the end it was a single channel recording - just no support.
I toyed with the idea of poking around in the device drivers however a friend at Avid (shortly after the DigiDesign acquisition) told me there would almost certainly be a DMCA takedown order if I went down that road so I never did.
That was back in the PT73 days playing with Fedora Core 3/5. And then along came the iLok. I don't recall ever plugging that into a Linux box.
Personally I would love to see some DAW's coming up on Linux! There are so many RTOS kernels out there and even with the high end hardware, software and converters and such - the lag time imposed by the OS (pick flavor) and all the little restrictive hiccups could possibly go away!
I love open source software. Unfortunately I cannot find a quality piece of audio software that is even remotely comparable to Pro Tools (the industry standard).
Pro Tools works on Windows and Mac - not Linux.
Damn!
I don't do anything very advanced, but I am using Audacity running on Ubuntu Studio with a simple USB interface. This allows me to record, edit, playback audio and probably has a lot of other capabilities that I don't use and am not aware of. Audacity is plenty powerful for anything I'm likely to do at home. Most music people I'm acquainted with are hooked on ProTools, which is prohibitively expensive as far as I'm concerned, but may have features and advantages that I wouldn't appreciate.
Reaper is the way to go, because driver support on Windows is unparalleled (good luck getting 3-5ms latency through ANY interface under Linux... it is quite possible in Reaper with relatively cheap off-the-shelf components without going to any big proprietary vendors)
Comes with a realtime kernel, jack, and Ardour all set up and ready to go. There's no other distro to use for a home studio. I used it in my home studio years ago with an 8x8 PCI audio card, and it was great. I haven't used it in a while but the project is still being maintained, so you might check it out.
For what you trying to accomplish, there are more open source programs available for Windows than any other platform. If your computer is stand alone, you need not worry about phone home telemetry, or just use Windows 7. Auto Tune alternatives are widely available for Windows than Linux, if that matters to you. Otherwise, Linux is great if it meets all your projected needs.
Actually I use a low latency build of the Linux kernel, otherwise you would be right. Jack would be... jacked. It is something I had to learn.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
'Recording Studio' -> Get a Mac. Seriously. CoreAudio is probably *the* best audio subsystem on the planet, currently, Proprietary or Open Source.
I tried Ardour with my FireWire mixer (32ch in & out). Even with a realtime kernel, JACK would instantly eat 100% of a CPU core when connecting to the mixer, and I'd get dropouts. You have to manually tweak buffer sizes & sample rates to target a specific latency. Not to mention the entire JACK core would crash mid-recording sometimes. Ardour itself is amazing for an open-source DAW, but it's hobbled by broken subsystems as dependencies.
PulseAudio is like WDM on Windows - you're going to get absolute crap for latency, next to no control over sample rates and buffers unless you start digging through the Pulse configs, restarting the service yourself... it's meant as a 'consumer' audio playback engine, at *most* you'll want to use its recording side for, say, voice chat, livestreaming with Open Broadcaster Suite, that sort of thing. It also has a bad habit of assuming 'multichannel' means 'surround'.
The only other system that you can get by with would be ASIO on Windows, but then you're dealing with the typical Windows issues, hoping your mixer/interface manufacturer has created Windows drivers for your system, those drivers actually work and don't crash, etc. Your interface is a few years old? Only has drivers for WinXP/Vista? Good luck!
This is *the* one big place (video editing being the other) where Macs are still King. CoreAudio is literally plug-and-play, and can handle sample rate conversions, clock sync master/slave settings, etc. (Audio MIDI Preferences.app for details) - you can even merge multiple disparate interfaces into one combined virtual interface (though you risk timing issues with wildly disparate hardware).
You can assume almost every Pro Audio hardware manufacturer designs and tests on Macs & OS X *first*, and then hacks together a Windows ASIO & (maybe) WDM driver as an afterthought. All your 'regular' Windows apps will be using WDM - games, Skype, what have you, and all your Pro apps will be using ASIO. Two different drivers for two different sets of applications. On a Mac? CoreAudio is the same for everyone. Games and 'regular' apps use the same backend as Pro Tools or Ableton or Logic.
tl;dr: I tried the whole 'Linux DAW' thing years ago, gave up, got a Mac, actually spent my time getting stuff done and not fighting broken systems/drivers.
Aaron Wolf gave a talk about this at SCaLE14x this January.
Link: https://opensource.com/life/16/1/configuring-linux-for-music-recording-production
I've used Audacity and Ardour but only to record practice and loose sessions when it comes to making something a little more professional you will want hardware based recording system so that you can actually record more tracks simultaneously. Sometimes is difficult to get drums recorded directly to the PC with out loosing quality due to track limitations. This doesn't mean you can't dump it to the workstation for editing and mixing later.
Depending on what you want, you're either gonna have the full set of tools, or hit a stonewall when you really need that extra something. I'd say if you wanna do the classical, sans-bullshite recording of analog instruments, and minor mixing, you're pretty much OK. But when you want to produce anything with, say, some fancy effects, some unheard VSTs, or even the most basic virtual synthesizer, you're pretty much at that point when you gotta switch the entire project to Win/Mac.
Of course this is all very vague, and I'm gonna get modded down for the next phrase, but your only really "free" solution for serious producing relies mostly on TPB et al.
I used Ubuntu with Ardour for about 4 years (2005-2009) doing a ton of recording. The machine I ran on was a 2.7Ghz dual-core, 2GB of RAM, and I used a sound card known to work well with Linux at the time (can't remember the brand, disinclined to open the machine up and find out for the purposes of this post). I have a friend who, during the same time frame, bought a Mac Pro and Pro Tools, paid someone from Pro Tools to come to his studio and train him, and bought a bunch of preamps, etc. He was writing songs and working some kind of deal with a publisher in Nashville.
Long story short, because my apparent knack for arranging (and programming realistic-sounding drum parts), he ended up sending all of the bed-track work to me. Typical project size was 40+ tracks. I built a Qt app to listen to incoming MIDI events from my drum machine, played hi-res drum samples, and recorded each drum output into Ardour. There was a TON of effects plug-ins that ranged in quality from "utter crap" to "very darn good". The overall recording quality was about what you'd expect a basement-studio guy to produce: That is to say, equal to what my ProTools friend was producing. As for performance and stability: I remember that when the machine was trying to play 40+ tracks with a lot of effects and play the drum parts too, it would run into some difficulty that resulted in it sounding like the drummer was a bit drunk. The solution was to record the drum tracks by themselves in a pass, then it was fine.
Overall, I was very happy with it. I ended up doing the bed tracks for an actual album for another guy later, and then sort of lost interest in recording in my basement and moved on to other things. I've been thinking lately of getting back into it, to see where things are technology-wise. It was fun.
First, AC, you don't know me by the slightest. Second, I am specifically referring to Open Source software on the software side, and obviously propriety hardware on the hardware side and how the do or do not work together. There isn't even a story to read you silly AC, at least read the summary before being an ass. Afterwards, you can still be an ass if you like.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
My only limitation with Ardour was the learning curve. I initially had it running on AV Linux, but since switched to UStudio. I agree with one of the above posters that things will only get better. Granted, my use of Ardour is limited, as I am a solo and really never need more than four or five tracks for any given song.
My biggest issue was not recording, but mixing, and I was limited not by Ardour but by my own inexperience; mixing is an art form.
I use Audacity only to quickly trim and convert music files from WAV to whatever is needed.
For the past couple weeks I've been recording using a Scarlett audio interface, and it's "just worked" in Linux. In Windows I had to install drivers but the device also works. As you mentioned, and as others have mentioned, hardware pre-amps seem to be a necessity for quality audio recording regardless of operating system or software. As far as FOSS goes, I've yet to discover something that the expensive editors can do that Audacity and LMMS can't. Ubuntu Studio provides a lot of tools for working with audio, so I'd recommend it to anyone looking for an out of the box platform.
Lots of experience with this.
1) Real Time Kernel (compile it if you have to)
2) Ardour (My best results are with Ardour 2 so far)
3) Jack Audio
4) Rosegarden (for midi)
5) Linuxsampler (convert midi to audio using professional samples)
It doesn't hurt to have 8 cores, 32 GB RAM and tons of HD.
With 2 40" 4K screens I can display just the ardour mixer with 30-50 tracks across one screen.... and have room for the other apps.
I've done many tracks.... easily up to 70 tracks... with plugins... low latency....
Although I use Cubase on a Mac with a Focusrite 18i8, I've heard very good things about Tracktion. It claims to work on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. http://www.tracktion.com
DAWs not supported in Linux (practically all of them).
Reaper
Pro Tools
Cakewalk Sonar
Steinberg/Cubase
Logic
Garageband
Audio interfaces also don't work out of the box. Drivers typically need to be downloaded off the manufacture's site as it doesn't get detected right out of the box even in Windows.
Without either DAW and audio interface driver support on Linux, you're pretty much left with nothing these days, when most work is done in the DAW.
I use Audacity and Adobe CS6 for simple home audio editing. The Adobe software works more intuitively in my experience but i did find a tutorial to make a protoss voice in audacity so it's got that going for it ;-)
"playing through an amp into a microphone connected to a computer is not an acceptable way to record"
What? That's how guitarists have gotten their best sounds for literally decades. Do you not understand how to properly mic an amp?
The sentiment generally seems to be that current Linux "Recording Studio software" isn't good enough for audio professionals ... at least, not yet.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/01/28/0213207/ask-slashdot-an-open-source-pc-music-studio
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/10/27/0534248/ask-slashdot-best-cross-platform-linux-only-audio-software
I use Ardour on Fedora, connected to a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, and heavily using the great and opensource Calf Studio Gear Audio plugin suite. Everything works really well, and the setup could be used to put together a really high quality album. We almost exclusively use it for recording church services, which doesn't exercise the full potential of the setup. One of these days I'll have time to put together a project that takes advantage of more of the capabilities we have.
Already have a Mac, although it does not get much action these days. When I was in the industry it was all I used, but I also did a fantastic amount of graphic design and print advertising. Fast forward to today, and I much prefer the Open Source offerings I can get with Linux for home studio recording. The trick is to use a low latency kernel.
Note: When it came to graphic design and print design, I actually got by using Gimp in X Windows on OS X and no one was the wiser. But wait.... print you say? But that is CMYK? How so with the Gimp? Google is your friend but if you want I can cover it.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I know there's merit in asking for people's insight in a forum like this but I wanted to share a resource that can help you discover software. Alternativeto.net is great for answering questions like this. Simply perform an online search: alternativeto . You mentioned Ardour, so here is the resulting page. You can filter by platform, free-ness, and whether it's open or closed source. Take the rankings with a grain of salt and just use it as a way to find software in the category you're interested in. They even add notes when software hasn't been updated in years. I find it a lot more useful than other too exhaustive or infrequently updated lists out there, such as most Wikipedia lists.
I know nothing about professional musicianship or production, but I like messing around with LMMS. It has a great interface, plenty of tutorials out there, and it's fun to make electronic music with. So it might not meet your needs at all, but it makes making music as a hobbyist very accessible.
Say what you really think, don't hold back!
Dude... chill.
Sounds to me like you got royally frustrated using a Linux DAW.
So tell me what kinds of files you need to generate to send off to "any other studio in the world to be mixed". I'm curious.
Checkout Bitwig. It's basically Ableton for Linux, damn near an exact clone. Multi-track recording, VST support, arrangement and performance type views.
Well, to be fair, he did say he spent 2.5 years deep in the *music industry*, not diddling around with cheap home solutions.
If more plugin makers would support Linux, things would be different, but currently there is no way to get the same level of ITB processing on Linux than on OS X or Windows. The same for DAWs, current Linux DAWs like Ardour are simply not good enough (yet).
If you have lots of money for hardware processors and mostly track real musicians (as opposed to Midi fiddling), then a Linux setup might work. But then the hardware is so ridiculously expensive that there is also no reason not to spend a few bucks on proprietary software.
Full disclosure: I'm a middleware guy, and I greatly prefer to run linux as a server operating system. I have 25+ years of experience as an IT administrator and am more than a power user on linux. Off the clock, I make music and have used PC and Apple based DAWs for 20+ years, starting with a Pentium 75 with a Turtle Beach soundcard back in 1994. Today, my wife is a pro voice actor (if you listen to Pandora, you've likely heard her) and we maintain a professional level recording studio in our home. Said studio runs Windows 10 and Cubase 8.5 for a DAW.
That said: There are better platforms upon which to do digital audio. If you're doing this with any intention of making money, spend money on your operating system. Linux struggles to be a decent desktop OS as it is; there's no need to introduce driver issues and under-supported DAW software into the mix, while at the same time dealing with a dicey desktop OS.
Windows and OSX are by no means perfect - but they're supported solutions that DAW software and interface drivers are specifically coded for. Open source is fantastic in the enterprise, but I would never, ever risk my wife's career on community supported software. As it stands, running Windows is dicey enough - and we'll be moving (back) to OSX once I work out a monitor/keyboard/mouse sharing solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Even with a realtime kernel, JACK would instantly eat 100% of a CPU core when connecting to the mixer, and I'd get dropouts.
I have the intuition (not so much an intuition) using a real time kernel would increase the CPU load rather than decrease it. Perhaps the "tick rate" or whatever it is of the real-time feature can be configured.
In another vein you remind me why I don't use a "3D accelerated" desktop in linux, I like to keep a top window running when needing to keep tabs on things and this just results in crazy CPU load spikes by the window manager, Xorg or both.
Pulseaudio does have a cool feature, you can add one silly line of configuration and get a "mono output" virtual device, which is useful if one of two speakers is broken or you're listening to a "left ear" youtube video. That's the one good thing I could say about it. I do audio consumption.
a few years ago i delved into this and gave up. i'm sure it's better now but i wasted enough time then that i don't care to repeat the experience. as you allude to in your post, it was less the recording software and more of the overall hardware environment that was the issue. it, of course, all has to work together but it did not. i work with both video and audio and used a mac pro at that time. i also had four monitors running with a matrox triplehead2go. that combination proved way too cumbersome for me to get set up reliably considering i was mainly supposed to be working on media, not system setup. i now run a hackintosh partitioned to have both osx and w7 (mostly running w7 nowadays) and have been tempted to check things out again but, frankly, i don't have the time to waste as everything works really well under my current setup and with little time spent troubleshooting that setup.
It's a totally normal thing to send files to other studios. Collaboration is the name of the game. And most people still use a professional mastering engineer even if they've done everything else themselves. If you have tracks in Pro Tools or Logic Pro, you'll be fine. Cubase also probably fine. Reaper... maybe. Anything else, you'll be laughed at.
Speaking as a old-time Software Engineer/Programmer, DAW user, and occasional Linux user, it's the audio support. The computer to external interface (interface). Pro Tools solved the problem the old fashoined way - customer's would by the DAW and hardware as a package. Not everyone is up to groking a computer and its OS (it's different for kids today tho ). Pro Tools by far has the professional market for turnkey setups, and studios can easily exchange dataq as they are all on the same software. For us mere penniless mortals, there's Windows, Mac, and linux for the brave. It's all about market share. Things are changing though, file formats are converging. I use Cakewalk and it is now capable of exporting a file format that can be ingested by Pro Tools. For the curious, take a look at Harrison Mixbus - there's a linux DAW that been ported to Windows.
In short - it's cross platform compatibility - we don't go to the mountain, the mountain comes to us....
By day I manage datacenters. By night I have a home recording studio.
For a home recording studio, use whatever the heck you want. A good mic and a good room impact the sound more than anything else (assuming you're a real recording studio and not just moving zeros and ones around on a disk).
For a pro studio, even a paid-hobby level studio recording local bands, and even if you have massive Linux kung-fu skills, use Pro Tools or Logic, they're the industry standard.
And the first time something doesn't go well during recording, and something will not go well for sure, your reputation will suffer if there's any indication, real or imaginary, that it's because you're using something non standard.
Reputation is your paycheck for a recording studio. An all linux recording studio, even with well tested sw/hw, would still fall into "bleeding edge", don't be bleeding edge with your paycheck.
I used (and still occasionally continue to use) Ardour on Linux using ffado linked up to a Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 from about 2010 on for mixing, mastering, and demo recording. It was great for many years. Unfortunately, I feel as if development on much open source audio software hit a wall right around then, which causes compatibility issues with newer hardware, thus less flexibility and production nightmares. At this point, it's not really feasible for use on large-scale projects anymore, at least not with newer hardware.
A few years ago I built a machine for my musically inclined friends with an M-Audio 10/10. I tossed Gentoo on it and loaded it down with every piece of software that looked remotely useful and showed him how jack works. He is still using it to this day and loves it. Granted they arent some large studio, they mostly record for thier various bands, but they do a lot of recording/editing/etc.
Id say other than the initial setup (Jack is kind of a pain in the ass, and you absolutely need a supported soundcard for it to be useful) the Linux solutions are pretty solid.
Works best is somewhat subjective at best. Most of the time it can be equated with "I'm used to it and it does the things I'm used to doing".
Years ago I ran hacked versions of Sonar on an XP system with a basic two channel usb input. For basic recording it worked fine, and Sonar wasn't bad.
Here we are several years later and I have been thinking about getting back into it, and I've researched DAW on Linux and found Ardour, which I haven't tried.
Like others have pointed out, getting drivers of interfaces to work has worried me on Linux, though they show certain M-Audio ones they recommend.
But alas, I've stayed on Windows 7 with Sonar and it is working fine.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Well, I know it's normal to send files back and forth; I do it too. I was just wondering what sorts of files you were referring to that can't be sent from a Linux DAW, as I've never had any problem.
Works best is somewhat subjective at best. Most of the time it can be equated with "I'm used to it and it does the things I'm used to doing".
Except that in this case what OP like being used to is low-latency audio interface throughput. I guess you could try to approach a high-latency music production system like we used to approach high-ping games of Quake/Unreal, to try to correct for it. But for serious music production it is not something I'd like to get used to.
Granted, it's not free and open source, but the tracker Renoise supports Windows, OS X, and Linux. I've used it on all three platforms and it works great everywhere. It is better for song composition than straight up DAW tracking, but it has excellent effects and sampling capabilities. They do have a pretty solid demo version available with few limitations, so it's worth checking out.
Any luck with VST/VSTi? I recall an inability to make progress with the latter as a major show stopper
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Sounds like you've worked with some true professionals...
If it is work, buy something that already works.
Even if the purchased system costs $5000, that is only 50-70 hrs work. You will easily waste that much time getting a Linux system going.
Also, those expensive systems support the file formats required for transferring your data required for real work.
Full disclosure: I'm a middleware guy, and I greatly prefer to run linux as a server operating system. [....] Linux struggles to be a decent desktop OS
I would not call Linux a dicey desktop OS, it works very well if you keep it up to date, and have hardware that support it. I can not speak for audio on the desktop but it seems to me that you are mixing the two issues, I have complete newbies that use Linux and there are NO issues except proprietary hardware support. From what I can see it seems that you haven't even tried using Linux for this, you could perhaps just list the softwares you have tried and why dismissed them.
Please add some useful facts to your opinionated post, to make it useful. I for example have seen whole radio stations run on Linux, I have not idea how they did it but it did work.
This album was recorded on a 10 year old HP Pavilion single processor laptop with 2G RAM on Arch Linux with Audacity using $50 condenser mics through a Mackie FX12 mixer. A video of one of the songs was created with OpenShot on the same equipment.
Also pretty sure anything audio related in Linux land is going to be stillborn thanks to PulseAudio. From what I have run across, base ALSA isn't going to help much either.
Content creation whether, audio, video, 2D, 3D, or other at the professional level generally requires the ability to jump among a variety of software packages, plugins, and occasional one-jobbers. You're not going to see that anytime soon in Linux. Audio and 2D have a foothold in OSX because of ProTools and Adobe, but everything else runs on Windows workflows. 3D used to be a big one for industrial *nixes, but that ended in the late 90's / early 2000s when Microsoft bought SoftImage to port their software to NT 4.0. I run across a few Linux zealots talking about Blender and on the more professional side, Houdini, but none of those people are gainfully employed on a regular basis. Content creation is about the workflow and being able to accomplish things end to end. There's little hope there for Linux as a desktop OS unless you can restrict your use case to a subset of the software available there.
It's slowly getting there. It's getting there, but slowly.
You no longer have to compile your own kernel just to get decent latency. Haven't had Ardour crash on me when running it in a loop in my last project, unlike in the past. I can record on a HD24 recorder and run HD24tools to Ardour through JACK. However, heavy mixed media audio+midi through rosegarden+ardour+hydrogen+zynaddsubfx+linuxsampler running all at the same time was asking for trouble last time I tried, granted that's a bit ago.
Sometimes when I report an issue, it gets investigated, a patch is accepted and makes it into mainstream repos (troubleshooting resulting in improved MinGW support for libsndfile, noise modules for rezound, M-Audio split master volume fix for Volti.
Sometimes issue reports are ignored - a buzz in JACK audio when switching user sessions, Ardour SysReq control surface support (incl. EQ) for those who'd like to use a cheap Behringer mixer as Ardour control surface, etc. (because Paul Davis is not just a great guy but also a busy man).
It took some time to get things set up and working well but with a low-latency kernel and Jackd as a core I now have a well-integrated audio system using Ardour as a multi-track recorder, Rosegarden with a USB midi interface for midi recording and editing, QSynth with the Fluidsynth GUI for a sample-based synth, Hydrogen for percussion, and sometimes other Jack-based applications as needed. Jack syncs everything up and makes it all work together in real time as an integrated system and Ardour records all the tracks and produces the final mix. I also use Audacity separately to record a track from an external mixer board or for processing a raw track or sometimes the final mix. I wish I could do as much with video on that system.
There is little to none professional open source audio software. Yes, there are some notable exceptions, but the visual arts have a lot more open source tools that a professional could fine useful compared to the audible arts. I could speculate all day about the reasons for that. Maybe because to paint you only need a mouse, that a computer has anyways, but for professional audio production you need a lot of expensive hardware making visual computer art a lot more accessible. There could be any number of reasons.
But that's it. Ask any honest open source and audio enthusiast. They will readily admit that there is little in the open source world for you, if you want to be serious about audio.
But if you reduce your requirement to Linux, it becomes another story. More and more companies release their software for Linux as well. But if you rely proprietary software anyways, why limit yourself to Linux? Even as Microsoft alienates their users at a record rate by pushing them onto Windows 10, Mac OSX is a strong alternative. Since professional audio equipment is prohibitively expensive anyways, spending some extra on a Mac doesn't make all the difference, does it?
As an avid open source enthusiast I would like to know what you guys think of LMMS and MuseScore. Is it worth it to invest into learning those?
I love Linux and open-source software. I used a Linux desktop for 15+ years as a software developer. For servers, it's a no-brainer. I'm rooting for Linux.
For audio work, I won't touch Linux with a 10-foot cattle prod. It's just not there yet, and it's not going to be anytime soon.
I spent several years attempting to keep Linux at the center of my studio, and I wish I hadn't. The user experience for a seasoned studio engineer is light-years behind Windows and Mac. I was forced to compile real-time kernels and custom versions of Ardour, got rid of my MOTU interfaces because the manufacturer hates Linux, spent countless evenings swearing at xruns, and developed a well-honed contempt for JACK's almost Windows NT-like stability. Working with MIDI and audio required lashing Ardour, Rosegarden, and Hydrogen together with duct tape and wishful thinking. Audio latency was never decent enough to use most effects while monitoring.
Every time I hit record with other musicians, I said a small prayer to the USB bus gods that nothing would explode mid-take. This is not a mindset conducive to creativity.
Did it actually work? Yes, after a fashion. There are some bright spots: Alsa Modular Synth sounds awesome, the Calf Audio plugins are as good as anything on the proprietary side of the fence, and Ardour is serviceable in a 2003 kind of way. I managed to record a few albums of material using that setup, but it was not an experience I would recommend to anyone. It felt like I was doing more tech support than creating.
Eventually I sucked in my open-source pride and bought a Mac with Logic Pro X on it. Pretty much everything that I've done on it worked right out of the box. It hurt my soul to hand $3K to an Apple Store genius, but now I spend my free evenings recording instead of swearing. I can only hope that Richard Stallman doesn't show up at my front door to lecture me, or worse yet, sing that god-awful GNU song at me.
Time is money, and free time is the most expensive of all. If you value your creative time in the slightest, don't bother with Linux. Get a Mac or PC, load it up with an industry-standard DAW, and make some noise. You may not please St. Ignucius, but you will at least be productive.
You can assume almost every Pro Audio hardware manufacturer designs and tests on Macs & OS X *first*, and then hacks together a Windows ASIO & (maybe) WDM driver as an afterthought. All your 'regular' Windows apps will be using WDM - games, Skype, what have you, and all your Pro apps will be using ASIO. Two different drivers for two different sets of applications. On a Mac? CoreAudio is the same for everyone. Games and 'regular' apps use the same backend as Pro Tools or Ableton or Logic.
tl;dr: I tried the whole 'Linux DAW' thing years ago, gave up, got a Mac, actually spent my time getting stuff done and not fighting broken systems/drivers.
It seems like Windows is a bit more prevalent in the audio/music DAW world than it used to be. Macs certainly used to reign supreme, but that was quite a few years ago - it's a lot more even footing, at least from what I've seen. Granted, my view may be biased since the audio pros I know are mostly game developers. As such, they'd naturally tend to gravitate towards Windows, that being the primary development platform our industry uses.
For my part, I've been using Cakewalk software since DOS days, and moved with it to Windows. The notion of switching to some other platform and program would mean abandoning a lifetime of composition work as well. It's simply not happening. Not to mention, I've got many tens of thousands of dollars invested in sample libraries with their associated audio plugins, some of them with hardware-based DRM dongles (yuck), and again, only Mac and Windows support. That's the reality of things - there's no equivalent to many of those high-end products on Linux.
I've never actually seen a Linux based DAW before, or heard about an audio pro that used one. Most professionals have enough on their plate simply trying to get and keep things working reliably on a supported platform. DAWs tend to be high-end, complicated beasts because of their real-time requirements, often with high-end audio cards or other hardware that requires very explicit driver support. I'm pretty sure it's not impossible to create a Linux-based DAW - just not with the software I'd be comfortable using. I think you'd need to be pretty dedicated to using Linux (or avoiding proprietary OSes) to make it happen.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You mean it has a state?
I didn't think it'd gotten that far yet...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
He's right. I worked in the entertainment industry for years, and NOBODY wants to put up with weird techies with their Sacred Cow setups and BS religious arguments: time is money and the less time wasted with non-standard tools (or tool outputs) the better because the more money we make.
There was NO FUCKING ARGUMENT among the lighting and sound professionals when all this shit got computerized: they pros all went Mac because it worked. I've talked with the techies at every show I've gone to since I got out of the biz. Never saw a Windows box unless is was running something non-mission-critical (or was being used to shadow the Mac SW to see how the Windows SW was coming along.) "The Show Must Go On" means exactly that, and if you and your delightful little SW fiefdom doesn't do that, you're not going to get hired (and certainly not hired again).
Don't screw around with amateur tools if you want to work with music (or other entertainment) professionals. They simply will not return your phone calls if you are seen to be wasting their time.
Interesting that both systemd and pulseaudio come from the same toilet.
My contention is there is no open-source, PRO audio software. Period.
This is so accurate. I recently bought a little M-Audio M-Track Plus 2 audio interface. Its manual (which is findable online) has a section called "Audio Setup" with instructions for configuring your audio, downloading drivers, etc. The Windows section is a page full of checklists. The Mac section is "plug it in, go to Sound preferences, set the unit as your default input and output devices, and close the window".
Mac audio Just Works really, really well.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And Snap's "World Power" album was composed/produced on a Commodre Amiga using TFMX Pro. You don't need a high end system to compose/produce audio. Use whatever works and sounds good.
This is *the* one big place (video editing being the other) where Macs are still King.
Considering the state of the art GPU acceleration on PC and the availability of substantially superior CPUs with high clock speeds (which is generally what you want vs many cores), Windows is still the place to be for video editing.
Keep repeating compiling the kernel :)
Then you didn't understand what they were doing. To suggest you can do the same on Linux is like suggesting you can use Gimp instead of Photoshop. It makes it sound like you don't do anything but resize photos, or the audio equivalent.
All of the DAWs and all of the sound libraries and all of the virtual instruments and all of the effects processing and all of the mastering software is on the Mac and on Windows. So is all the beatmaking software and the drivers for all the professional hardware interfaces. Any projects clients or friends bring you will be for a Windows or Mac suite of tools.
You can make music with Linux. People have made hit records with a lot less. But Linux is so far behind that using it for music is just a self-limiting, philosophical pat on the back.
I use Ardour4 and/or Mixbus3 with KXStudio distribution to record my musical ideas (Delta 66 or Scarlet 2i4, PC tower with 6 cores or old Dell Inspiron portable). I can control Mixbus with remotes (nanoKontrol2 or Guitar Wing). I even recorded some musican friends. I use Hydrogen because drummers are... you know ;-) If this qualify for Home Recording, then yes, Linux can do it, low cost and good quality. Whatever tools you use, you need to transcend it... It's the music that counts. (My brother-in-law is using Mixbus on OSX and likes it... especially when he has a problem and he calls me :-)
Luc
As an experienced user of Mac and Linux, I have to say that, unless you are more interested in technical aspects of music, rather than smooth and accomplished production - actually getting stuff out the door - Garageband is a FAR FAR better choice.
Linux audio is fraught with peril and surprises. The available software is adequate, but not very polished, and usually lacking in endless features you'd find invaluable in production. Nothing ruins the flow of creativity and artistry more than endless limitations and technical problems. The big companies have invested heavily in software for the major platforms, and you'll never get close to the endless options they offer, whether its MIDI or audio or mixing or effects, or sample libraries.
I like the idea of open source a lot, but its 'products' lack focus and versatility in many areas. Music is the best example I know of.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I don't even know where to begin with this.
First off, Windows has continued to be non-standards compliant, inconsistent in its directions, and has haphazardly dealt with security updates. I shouldn't have to wait for months to have a security vulnerability patched. Have they gotten better? Yes. But this licensing garbage that's tied to the firmware for 8 and up, and Office licensing that's tied to email is a horrendous endeavor to maintain.
If you want to consider Linux a failure of a desktop on the account of Gnome, Pulse Audio, Unity, and SystemD, you fail to realize that each one of those are simply software packages running on top of the operating system. Most of the issues you describe are either anecdotal, or simply a regurgitation of what you've heard. I've never had problems with Pulse Audio, nor has anyone that I know personally. Gnome I've had issues with when attempting to integrate with an existing installation, but that was during 3 Beta, Unity sucks, and is is sluggish, but it isn't buggy. SystemD, a lot of people complain about it, and I understand why, it's a complete overhaul, overbearing/far reaching, but since it's adoption out of Beta, I've yet to have ANY workstation or server have any reliability/stability problems. There have been minor configuration issues occasionally, but nothing that's atypical from normal software upgrades.
PulseAudio is nothing like WDM on Windows, in any sense at all.
Your "one system for everyone (CoreAudio on OS X)" is also true on Linux too. The issue is the presence of "middleware", such as PulseAudio or JACK. But JACK provides functionality that is not possible with just CoreAudio (interapplication audio, shared transport control and more), so the comparison is a bit more complex.
And by the way, if low latency is the primary metric for measuring the quality of an audio system, then ALSA still wins.
And finally, almost all new audio interfaces use USB, and almost all of them are class compliant, which means that the manufacturer doesn't write a driver at all. One driver, all applications, all Windows, OS X and Linux.
> Let me know when I can use an Apogee or Apollo or Avid interface with a Linux box.
Some Apogee products are USB audio compliant, so they are plug-and-play and always have been. Other Apogee products started getting Linux support five years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Apollo? Sure thing:
https://thecrocoduckspond.word...
Some professional "hardware" runs on embedded real-time Linux - all that DAW functionality isn't done by tubes anymore, there's an OS inside that workstation. And that OS is not Windows.
You will want to download a real time kernel and use Jack, not Alsa, for professional audio work.
Oh, and Ardour no longer requires JACK either (on any of the 3 platforms on which it runs), but can use it if the user wishes to do so.
The only other system that you can get by with would be ASIO on Windows, but then you're dealing with the typical Windows issues, hoping your mixer/interface manufacturer has created Windows drivers for your system, those drivers actually work and don't crash, etc. Your interface is a few years old? Only has drivers for WinXP/Vista? Good luck!
https://www.asio4all.com works wonders, and has for years and years now.
This is not accurate. JACK uses ALSA. And tools like Ardour can now use ALSA directly, rather than via JACK, if the user prefers.
I think you'd need to be pretty dedicated to using Linux (or avoiding proprietary OSes) to make it happen.
Dedicated is an understatement; dude is a masochist. He did 'design work' and willingly used GIMP rather than (presumably) the standard Adobe suite.
I like FOSS as much as the next guy, but a serious craftsman picks the right tool for the job.
Only Apogee's lowest end consumer toys will work in Linux. And the Apollo that you linked to is not the same Apollo that makes pro audio interfaces.
Professionals don't use Linux as their main production DAW.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not to worry. I'm guessing they're Windows fanbois who never even used linux and are just trolling to get people's dander up. Note that such commentary usually comes from ACs.
Don't step on the baby.
Ardour 4 is heads and shoulders past the earlier iterations, you don't even have to use Jack-Audio. The plugins such as Calf and Eq10q are also quite good, among others. Some fine musicians and audio/video production people use Libre/Opensource software to do excellent work. If you need very specific plugins or narrow, highly specialized tasks, then I can see going the proprietary route. However, if you have general tasks and music production or audio for video, Ardour 4 and attendant plugins are sufficient. Moreover, more libre plugins are being developed all the time. However, there is also Harrison Mixbus, which is based on Ardour 4 and also has some very good (albeit proprietary) plugins that can be installed on your favorite GNU/Linux distro. I use proprietary software as I was trained in school to use them, but also see my way to eventually abandon them. If you are learning to work with a DAW, then Ardour 4 is as good program to start with as any as a lot of the principles are the same. Except that you can share the program and the documentation. Using Libre software is also a conviction, to believe in the ethos and the idea that in the long run, free software will not only catch up, but surpass.
I have a friend who uses Blender on a Linux system for editing. She likes it and says it does a good job.
I should have been more specific. Yes, Jack can use a portion of ALSA, and it replaces other portions.
Specifically, the ALSA hardware drivers provide three interfaces to each card. Jack uses the low-level interface of the hardware drivers provided by alsa. It replaces the default alsa mixer, etc.
Let's put it this way - for best results mixing audio on Linux, plan on either doing some setup work or running a media-specific distro. Default ALSA and PortAudio has latency and generally isn't designed for serious mixing. The real-time system is significantly better, for serious use.
A minute ago it was "you can't use Apogee on Linux, and professional use only use Apogee etc". Now it's "that Apogee gear is crap, now that I know Linux supports it just fine". I guess only the Scottish Apogee model is any good, eh?
Everybody is mistaken sometimes. Knowledgeable people get that way by by -learning- when they are presented with new information. Ignorant people refuse to learn anything, instead moving the goalposts and playing no true Scotsman when new information is presented.
Take a close look at the owner's manual for your DAW. You just might be surprised and find a FOSS disclosure in there.
The biggest issue I had was a combination of drivers for various audio I/o. In the early days I had an aardvark that I couldn't get to work in Linux. Later my alesis I/o also did not easily connect. Then there are the types of daw editions environments... Audacity is great for tracking a podcast or a live show but tedious as a project handler from start to finish.
If someone had really nice outboard fx and just patched everything out to analog mixing this could be acceptable. A digital tape reel for an analog studio could work.
I must state my desire for open source media production has been longstanding and supportive. I spent hours trying to program a driver for my aardvark.
Currently I use cubase on a pc ðY
Not the best but it works well and is dependable and cheaper than some alternatives.
Bro, having used Windows+ASIO and MAC for years I can tell you quite honestly I get better latency on my Windows DAW running an RME 800 over firewire. I'm talking sub 1ms latency (around 0.3ms). Go take the apple fan boy shit somewhere else.
I know that "Get a Mac" seems like a trite statement to a lot of people, but in the case of professional audio and video production, there really isn't any reason to do otherwise. Your choices for professional studio compatibility are ProTools or Logic, and everything else (Abelton, etc.) is pretty much only used by hobbyists, not professional studios.
FWIW, my current home studio setup is still a Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 GHz machine with 1 GB of RAM and a 160GB SATA-1 drive. I use a second 160GB SATA-1 drive for my recording deck. My interface is an M-Audio Delta 1010 (24-bit/96 KHz), the PCI-X version (this is the last Mac that actually works with the PCI-X card). I'm running Logic 7.2 still, because it works for what I need, which is for recording a small rock band. I have an M-Audio Octane 8-channel mic preamp fronting it, and the outtput goes through a Presonus Central Station before hitting my Sennheiser HD280 cans and M-Audio Studiophile BX8 nearfield monitors. My microphones are a pair of M-Audio Solaris large diaphragms with Shure Beta 57A and 52A dynamics. I use a LaCie Electron Blue 19 CRT monitor. All in all, a very respectable home studio setup, circa 2005, which is when I bought it.
I can easily record 16 tracks with a shit ton of software plugins including multiple convolution reverbs before running into CPU or disk speed problems. This workstation is not used for anything other than recording, and ten years later, it's perfectly functional, if limited to Mac OS X 10.6 (I keep it off the Internet, mostly). If I needed a bit more speed, I could run a RAID-0/1, add RAM, or add a tc electronic PCI DSP card to handle the reverbs and some of the other effects, rather than having the Mac calculate everything. But, the fact is, I rarely run into insurmountable problems with the amount of bandwidth in this machine. There have been times when I've needed to "freeze" certain tracks in Logic in order to avoid CPU snags, but I'm recording a four-piece rock band: drums, bass, guitars, vocals.
This whole system was literally plug and play. You are simply not going to find anything that works this simply or this well in Linux, not even now, in 2016. Eventually, this system will be replaced with something new and a Firewire or Lightning A/D/A box, and I'll upgrade to whatever version off Logic is current, but there's no need to fix what isn't broken. Logic is, to my knowledge, the only system other than ProTools that is capable of using Avid/Digidesign ProTools HD interfaces.
Pretty simple.. don't use Linux for DAW. There is no real upside to using Linux for such an application and you will waste at least dozens of hours of your life and worst off if your DAW will probably still be cumbersome and the choice in Linux thus harm your workflow.
Long story short, Linux is the wrong choice for that application, just like it's currently the wrong choice for a gaming system.
This idea that all software should be opensource is just stupid. Use the best solution, in the case of a DAW there is very little real benefit to be seen from going opensource.
For a low cost flexible DAW I'd go with windows. It's virtuall free these days as just about ANY Windows 7 or later key will upgrade to the respective version of the OS. So.. all those stickers in the trash could be free copies of Windows 10. For now cost is not much of an issue for Windows and the selection of software is easily the best.
Mac has no real DAW advantages these days, mostly disadvantages, but lots of pros are used to them so they keep on keepin on. DAW is so generally untested on Linux under enough hardware that your basically an alpha tester if you want anything even close to the Windows/Mac experience
DAWs are all about plugs and effects usually, especially home recording ones. If your needs are simple enough then Audacity is ok, but I didn't like much of what Linux had to offer audio recording wise last I tried a couple years ago and I don't think any huge gains have been made. I would no try it again as it was just a bunch of work to have a way inferior and far less flexible setup.
If your just recording all clean guitar or keyboard or vocals without effects then i dont see why the Linux daw don't work, but plug-ins are already buggy enough on most platforms, so I wouldn't want to press my luck and getting the latest greatest software can add a lot of fun features. The selection on Windows really just blows away the other platforms. If your looking to add various drumming programs for instance, Windows wins there. Windows wins on plugins too, but Mac has more than enough.
Nope.. gaming and audio.. for me that's still the real of Windows and every attempt to change that has just wasted untold hours of my life to come up with way inferior alternatives. You can get lucky for awhile and they maybe something breaks or you want a new piece of hardware and now what.. your doing to design your DAW around Linux.. that just makes no sense.
Do you need an opensource guitar too? Where does it end?
For a home studio sure, what ever works for you. For the people that have to make living in music you are only hurting yourself. I have no idea what the latency is on a RT version of Linux, it took so long for it to be possible I lost interest last decade. If you are working in milliseconds sorry the latency is excessive. In the production world latency is measured in samples.
As someone that does scoring and arrangements for a living, I don't think Linux is ready.
Like in every domain, for many commercial tools, yes there is an OSS equivalent but it is always lacking something or it's always clunky.
It would be good if people stopped that religious obsession about open source software.
It's not because something is open source that it is good and it's not because one is used to a more limited software than it becomes better than a more full featured one, in the absolute.
I have seem the same analogy many times:
- "X is a good car!"
- "no, it's crap, Y is a much better car"
- "oh, yes, but it's more expensive and I can only afford X"
It's not because you want something free that the only free solution is good, nor that something is good because it is open source.
A tool can be free, open source, and absolute garbage too, while some evil commercial close source tool can be fantastic.
in short: free and open source are NOT factors in the quality of the tool.
The same way that gimp is close to photoshop, it is not photoshop, blender is not maya and ardour is not logic pro nor pro tools.
Having worked on soundtracks for feature films and animated films, I never saw artists using gimp, nor blender nor ardour in any of the projects.
Sure, you can make things work, assemble all the tools you need, tweak the kernel to lower the latency, try various configurations, etc to get something that kind of works on linux, But you can also buy a mac, buy almost any audio interface, and run excellent music software and it just works.
If you want to do music, just get a mac; if you want to waste time just to prove you can rig something together that will never perform as well, yes.. stay on linux.
Content creation whether, audio, video, 2D, 3D, or other at the professional level generally requires the ability to jump among a variety of software packages, plugins, and occasional one-jobbers.
If there's a limitation with Linux, that's it. Good quality software and hardware are available, but there's far less choice than there is for Windows, which is obviously supported by every manufacturer.
Also pretty sure anything audio related in Linux land is going to be stillborn thanks to PulseAudio. From what I have run across, base ALSA isn't going to help much either.
Content creation whether, audio, video, 2D, 3D, or other at the professional level generally requires the ability to jump among a variety of software packages, plugins, and occasional one-jobbers. You're not going to see that anytime soon in Linux. Audio and 2D have a foothold in OSX because of ProTools and Adobe, but everything else runs on Windows workflows. 3D used to be a big one for industrial *nixes, but that ended in the late 90's / early 2000s when Microsoft bought SoftImage to port their software to NT 4.0. I run across a few Linux zealots talking about Blender and on the more professional side, Houdini, but none of those people are gainfully employed on a regular basis. Content creation is about the workflow and being able to accomplish things end to end. There's little hope there for Linux as a desktop OS unless you can restrict your use case to a subset of the software available there.
You are not quite accurate about 3D graphics. Apple's graphics cards have been hopelessly behind PCs for about a decade. About 3 or 4 years ago, Apple made a concerted effort to catch up but is still very much behind. In many pro studios, the artists/designers use Maya or more likely C4D (or one of several other popular suites) and render on their workstations. In the very high end, the same apps are still used for the content creation but the rendering is done on clustered Linux boxes using...wait for it...Blender. But since workstation class cards are coming down in price and the game market is driving consumer class cards to be much faster, the need for the very high end render farms is less and less.
Seriously? How is one supposed to manage Midi devices? Shell scripting, hexdump, amidi? Seriously?
You don't know jack. The above is almost surely documented in the jack wiki, if you'd like to find it out it works, rather than arguing .
Alas, I find that the best commercial virtual instruments are DRMed up the wazoo. You can use them for anything you like, but you can't share them around without the author knowing who did it. They also may be in formats that need wrappers, such as Kontakt. The wrappers and/or the instruments themselves are generally made only for Windows and OSX, because that covers the bulk of the market. Even if it is possible to make the DRM work with Linux (which it probably is), the publishers don't see it as worth their time or money, so I'm stuck in an OS they feel is worth targeting.
If I can't get my expensive instruments running on a Linux system even though everything else does, then I can't get the results I want and that's a non-starter.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I have seen dudes doing magical things with only a midi keyboard, LMMS and some Audacity post-process. (Learn Hydrogen and Milkytracker to broaden you view.) Seriously if you're talented then produce some songs put them on Itunes and watch the money roll in. Worked for Gaga and Taylor Swift.
Buy a proper website and make a Youtube channel for added exposure.
Srsly these are the best times for small time authors (software, writers, gfx and zax artists). You can hit very big. Of course Play store, Itunes, Amazon or Steam (in case of games) will take it's share but whateva you're doing what you love.
I use Bitwig Studio and Renoise as my DAW's of choice. Hard to beat really I use a Scarlett 2i4 and have a bunch of hardware . Arturia Beatstep , Korg minikeys , Waldorf Blofeld. Never had any issues getting it to work I use Ubuntu for the desktop. Neither DAW are open source but both have a thriving community .I'm happy to support vendors that support Linux. You can hear some of my stuff here.
http://www.soundcloud.com/poly...
No Mac or windows machines were used on any of my tracks.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
is non DAW at http://non.tuxfamily.org
I use FOSS software like Ardour to do my recordings, and recording through an amplifier into a mic into an audio interface into a computer is the way I record my guitar tracks. I don't understand how it's unacceptable, many of us guitarists track their guitar in precisely this way.
I agree about pulseaudio. I used to run Suse, then, around '10, I switched to CentOS (same as RHEL). What audio issues I had have 80%, at least, been due to network issues. Mostly, it pretty much just works... and I've been listening to streaming media, every day, since I figured out streaming media 10 or so years ago.
Of course, I'm not a True Audiophile (for example, I didn't rush out to buy the "cryogenically-treated audio cables for $1k...), I just want to listen to music - and that ranges from folk to classical.
mark, tired of Macaholics who don't, in fact, really want to learn their tools, just
wave their hands and make magical incantations
Those of you who've actually done, or tried to do serious recording: are all the programs mentioned in this thread equal for ->all types of music-, or would you use one, say, for working on classical music themes, but that one wouldn't work well at all for rap, and would that, or either, work with rock or folk?
mark
Whether these statements are factually correct is subject to debate. But there are a number of people in the community who agree with the negative opinions of all the software packages that are named here, and the debate has had a negative impact on the acceptance of Linux. So I don't think this post is a troll.
Ubuntu Studio keeps getting better. Especially now that more and more devices work with it.
http://ubuntustudio.org/
Kriston
As a musician, I've dipped my feet into the digital word. Outside of playing pretty much any instrument I pick up, I am fluent on piano, harmonica, guitar, hand drums, acoustic bass, and I can sing. I can also play nearly any instrument once I play with it for a few minutes. The issue isn't that Linux can or cannot do what I need... The issue is user-friendly opinion pared with "this feature crashes my software." I've tried pretty much every music-creation gender of a program on the Linux platform and the amount of bugs and issues make "cheap" music.
For example: I wanted to add electronic undertones to harmonica and then go over it with guitar. Sounds easy enough but with the amount of problems I had to debug, dependencies I had to hunt down, and code so had to modify plus time to recompile from source... I'd rather buy real equipment at a professional standard.
As for which platform is best for multimedia production... Apple wins. Windows trumps Linux... And Linux comes in last.
Don't forget that serious musicians will pay top money for their instruments. I have a $120 harmonica and YES is sounds very different from a $5 harmonica. See what I did there?
Ive used Linux for 16 years, I assure everyone that I am not a fan of other platforms. I have a Tux tattoo. I also hate Apple as a company but I prefer the iPhone as I have had far less problems than Android based phones. I also refuse to use Windows as all costs. I'm about stability.
For what it's worth, I use an iPad for the majority of my musical needs outside of preferring to stay acoustic. If Linux had more funded software parallel with an open source beta, and goals were set to provide high-end software at cost for studio work... I see Linux paving a nice smooth road into the recording business.
Last thing I'd want to do is debug some bullshit feature that crashed my act during a live performance.
Ubuntu makes a distro tuned for multimedia creation..
https://ubuntustudio.org/tour/...
Unfortunately even on Macs you should probably stick with the OS version from a year or 2 years ago if you want decent support for hardware. Drivers for current OSes come out months after an OS is released and what you require is consistent performance and reliability. Linux support & drivers are pretty nonexistent if you look at major hardware manufacturers, it still is a OSX vs Windows. Generic USB drivers are pretty useless in many cases when you want to fully exploit hardware, for example, the Roland TR-8 has 14 different audio outputs, the System-1 can be changed using plugin with Plug-out, these are all features you can only access with the proper drivers and software combination. Even on a purely hardware level, finding the proper USB hub is a pain, you need very specific hub that will not slow down all connected devices to USB 1.1 speed. The quality and reliability in USB 3.0 hubs is pretty nonexistent too, again no point in having the greatest and latest if all your synths still run USB 2.0 and 1.1
The modern studio is a tightly coupled hardware, software, drivers, plugins, control surfaces all talking to each others. Always select reliability above anything else, you don't want dropped audio, you want low latency and high bitrate. If you go 100% software then everything i have said can be ignored, but if you want to hook up MIDI, hardware synths or modules, audio interface, USB interfaces then you have been warned.
....Pro Tools IS the industry standard. Didn't say it was the best, but the sheer amount of installations in working studios makes it the standard. And I actually use something else, but recognize this fact.
No free beer, no free cost: Reaper But it really whips the llama's ass!
Seriously! It is available for OS X and Windows, is shareware and comes with a two way license model. Both licenses are the same, full-featured application, but one is for amateurs (US$ 60), the other one is for professionals (US$ 225). It's constantly supported, updates just fly in, community is great, both in size as in character.
It is being developed by Justin Frankel, who also created WinAmp, SHOUTcast, Gnutella and the Nullsoft Installer (NSIS) and his company Cockos.
I understand, that the question was about a Linux solution, but as far as I know, for professional audio-work, you have only two chances: Steinberg, Logic, etc. or Reaper.
Since 2005 I have ONLY purchased my personal hardware from ZaReason a small family owned business out of Berkley, CA.
They do Linux right.
No Device driver issues, no USB issues, no Audio issues, no UEFI BS on the hardware and in spite of that, the hardware would run Windows, but why would you want too except for specific non steam games that are Windows ONLY.
I have used Windows, Mac and Linux at work, but for home use it's pretty much Linux, though in full disclosure I do have a Windows 7 box.
At work the licensing and way apps are purchased for Windows 8, 8.1 and now 10 are becoming an issue for us. I wonder what some of those in the music industry will do, when the only way to get Windows application software is to rent it monthly.... it's coming, like it or not....
Should that day come and you not pay your monthly rent on your software and hardware, you will have nothing but an expensive paperweight.
As a developer, I do have to use C# and .NET at work, unfortunately. Life was much eaiser with PHP on Linux (LAMP) or on WAMP for my Windows 7 PC at home. One of our concerns is changing of the development tool chain with Microsoft.
They purchased FoxPro and gutted it for all the great Visual stuff, upgrading Visual Studio and .dotNET, after which they end-of-lifed Visual FoxPro. Have heard rumors of them end-of-lifing Visual Basic, which is why we moved to C Sharp (C#) with .dotNET.
MS purchased Skype and focused primarily on Windows. In the office, when we installed Skype for Business, on some laptops, we experienced Licensing issues as we are still running Office 2010 (Pro & Stad) on Windows 7 Enterprise and Outlook 2012 and 2013. Skype pushed a 2015 License that created problems for any desktop where we had attempted to provide the License Key to Office, but the darn thing was not accepted, so now we have to force that license to accept BEFORE we install Skype for Business. Which really sucks for a large corporation that has multiple thousands of licenses.... If only Microsoft would fully document where all the hidden BS is, we could go out, edit it and fix/prevent the problem. But we literally have to stumble on the solution from someone else who has taken time to add junk to the bindry to experiment...that really sucks.
We use allot of touch screens in our production processes and have experienced issues with Asus, HP ProOne 400 AiOs and have started looking pretty hard at Dell's. At least the Dells, get us away from the Lightbar on the HP ProOne 400 AiOs which can be tough to keep clean in a prodution / plant type of environment. As with most production processes, we put those in a separate branch of Active Driectory so that windows won't stupidly push updates and cause a 30 minute interruption or longer in production. This is becoming increasingly a problem for us with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Hopefully they will fix it before it becomes a show stopper. The other day I went to force a shutdown and reboot of a problem, intended to log on as an administrator and force the update during the team's 45 minute lunch...imagine my surprise when the system, which was in the proper AD branch to prevent this, actually started updated Windows, I burned through the 45 minute lunch and 20 minutes into the production process. Just love notifying the plant manager 10 minutes into the outage that its because of a Windows update that should not have happened anyway. If that happens again, we have two touchscreens ready to go and I am just going to pull any machine that updates without permission out of the production process...a big hassle when the touch screen is bolted down.
Fortuantely I have a pretty progressive upper management structure that will actually consider Unity on Linux for touchscreens, so it's an option at this site. Does away with the automatic update happening without permission and allows us to reduce are per unit cost in har