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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?
'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.
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....