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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?
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".
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 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.
The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at. I've used Audacity as my primary audio editor for years. Admittedly, my requirements are pretty lightweight, but it does what I need.
Checkout Bitwig. It's basically Ableton for Linux, damn near an exact clone. Multi-track recording, VST support, arrangement and performance type views.
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.
The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at. I've used Audacity as my primary audio editor for years. Admittedly, my requirements are pretty lightweight, but it does what I need.
I've done some audio editing in the past where I take raw inputs, clean them up, add effects & other work as needed, then produce a final track. While I can do that with Audacity, I find it harder to do than with SoundForge (an MS-Windows only program). I'm sure some of my preference is what I'm used to, but it's always felt to me that Audacity just makes things a little harder than they need to be, or is missing something I'm looking for (it might even have what I want but is called something else that I don't recognize so I think it can't do what I need). I appreciate what the team has done in giving us Audacity, and it's fine for when I need to take a recording and trim the ends or something else dead simple, but for real editing I'd *much* rather have SoundForge.
... me, I just want to get the job done so I can move on to the next job).
To use an analogy that is somewhat apropos, I actually prefer MS-Word over LibreOffice-Writer. Sure, I can use Writer to get the job done, but I always seem to have to hunt a little harder to find the task I need, or Writer randomly renders the document incorrectly occasionally (displaying into the margins is the most annoying one but it screws up in other ways too). I use Writer for simple tasks like viewing only, but for heavy editing I prefer Word.
In both cases, I'm discussing ease of use to get the job done and not about which is "freer" (which maybe be more important to some poeople
For audio production you usually need JACK which lets makes audio and MIDI connections between audio programs and I/O. And Ardour is getting to be a polished and very capable product now. Neither has any application on a normal desktop system, but for audio work they are ideal.
Linux would be good for this, but most of the mainstream desktop UIs (KDE, Gnome, etc.) tend to be very slow and porky, so it really would take a separate desktop environment that is lightweight in order to allow Linux to be useful for an audio or audio/video platform.
It also needs a few system tweaks and, for best latency, a low-latency or even realtime kernel.
AV Linux is a Debian system so tweaked, making it very easy to use. It also comes with XFCE, which is more than enough desktop functionality to do audio and video work and llightweight enough not to get in the way.
It is better, whichever OS you use, to have a dedicated system for realtime work like multitrack audio recording and mixing. Real recording studios don't do their accounts and email on the studio computer. Not while it's being used in a recording session, anyway...
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.
I'm an actual recording engineer who's worked for Justin Bieber, Kanye West, VictoriousRush and her that rubs her minge on a wrecking ball and let me tell you that yes, they totally do.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Reaper is now my go-to for audio recording, editing, and mixing. Works on Linux, Mac, and Windows, and costs less than a new video game. It supports an enormous number of VST and Dx plugins (the latter sadly only on Windows), and works instantly with nearly every DAW or audio interface I've thrown at it (provided there are drivers for your OS). I've recorded, edited, and mixed two commercial albums on it (small-scale, but still selling 1000+ copies each). I'm not a mastering engineer, so I can't speak to its capabilities there, but for everything else... it took me an age to give up on my old PARIS rig, but Reaper even supports my old PARIS audio files...
OK, sorry. You want advice? If you want to do professional quality work in your home studio, you have to start with a Windows PC or Mac. Run Cockos Reaper. Use your Linux box to offload streaming and processing work via Reapers ReaMote technology, for rendering and for sample streaming. You'll get the best of both worlds.
Then, once a year or so, install a real-time kernel distro and the latest Audacity and see how far it's come. Keep hope alive that there will eventually be an all-OSS solution for DAWs.
You had said you were a 2 1/2 year veteran of the music industry, and I made assumptions from that. In regards to that Lexicon Alpha: invest in a decent mic preamp if you plan to use any live mics and run the output of that into the Alpha. It'll make a world of difference. ART makes some very decent cheap preamps that sound pretty damn good for the price (probably about $30).
Seriously friend, good luck. I shouldn't have assumed anything about your level of experience. I used some really shitty setups when I was first starting out. I learned a ton from trial and error and asking smart-asses like me for help.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have almost completed producing a full album using only Ardour. We tried Logic and looked at Pro-Tools however, as a band, we made an artistic decision to see where Ardour and Jack would take us because we did not want to invest our time and money learning proprietary tools. Additionally the workflow was something we wanted to alter and being locked into proprietary software meant we had no control over that even though we had the technical expertise to overcome issues.
We are a live band with instruments (drums, guitars, bass, vocals and a lot of sweat) recorded, using Ardour on hardware tuned for I/O (ssd, jfs), Linux mint, low latency kernel, rt patches and 16 channels captured from a 24 Channel desk. I threw my friends into the deep end and told them that we were going to record an album. We converted a 3 bedroom house into a studio and recorded over a period of 5 weekends to polish the material we recorded each time. We finalized it with a single recording session in one day after we picked out the songs we wanted to record for the album. They were a bit dubious at first but soon got into it when they could see results.
We used a bunch of different microphones and a number of techniques to capture the sounds we want, I personally feel that the choice of what microphones (which Ardour has allowed me to accumulate and test into an interesting collection), where and how you capture sounds is more important than the software. Ardour just made it possible by just working. We captured all day, no issues and the system was stable. More than that, it really gave my friends the confidence to be a little out there with what they did. It was so much fun but also very hard work.
On the production side I found the Ardour code base to be stable, I use a Xeon 2650, X79, 16Gb ram. I did have one crash, however I had to abuse it pretty hard to get there. It's not perfect, I'm not using the latest version, however it's pretty good. We don't use VSTs and the sonic results so far are amazing with the calf plugins and other open source plugins. I think it is absolutely worth the investment in time to learn Ardour if you are a live band recording music and just want to get on with recording music.
I think Paul Davis is a genius and Jack is a revolution in the way audio production works on a system once you understand how to utilize its power. I don't think we could have achieved the workflow efficiencies we have without Jack or with traditional processes. It's not easy, it's a very heavy workload and I'm hoping I can make some contributions back to the Ardour project with what I have learned by doing this.
The best advise I can give is to cyclically prepare and test all hardware before recording. Agile seems to work pretty good for musicians too.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.