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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?
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".
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 wouldn't hold my breath. From what I've seen, very little has improved in FOSS-land in the last 5 years, and a lot of things seem to have gotten worse (Gnome 3 is a prime example here). FOSS was exciting back in the late 90s and through the mid-2000s, after that it's been all downhill. (Of course, proprietary software has been a horror-show in the last 5 years too, just look at Windows Metro, Windows 10 spyware, etc.)
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.
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.
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.
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....
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 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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
Connecting an input device, say a mic or bass guitar, directly into a hardware interface device which then connects to a computer running the software you need provides quality leaps and bounds beyond doing it that way. Incidentally, you will always find a mic jack on an interface device so the singer/player can hear themselves just as though they are amped. Do you even realize such subtitles as say changing the tone on a guitar effects what gets recorded through the interface? You must watch a lot of TV, It always appears that they are just plain playing amped through a mic, but note the headphones. This is why we have studio monitor speakers. If you want to invest the time and energy into setting up an environment with super-substantial acoustic dynamics to facilitate your decades old approach, go for it. I can even draw up some plans for you. Otherwise welcome to the 21st century. Or a good chunk of the 20th century for that matter. So yes, I do understand how to properly mic an amp.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
This. Rarely does a DAW need to just lay down tracks like we did in the old days. Most of your effects are all digital and depending on the setup, some or all instruments as well. Compatibility with plug-ins is a must and Audacity, while it love it, doesn't cut it when up against ProTools, Cubase or Sonar. If you have an old school outboard rig, and you can find a compatible interface for Linux, you can recreate an old school 8-track system pretty easily. I don't think we're there yet for complex digital works with 3rd party plug-ins.
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
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.
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
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
Agree. I have several Linux machines, one of which is dedicated to music production. I use (at the very least) Rosegarden, Renoise, Ardour, SooperLooper, Hydrogen, Rakkarack, a few soft synths, kmidimon, a real-time kernel and JACK. I have an M-Audio 24/96 card, and a Tascam US-122 for real world interfacing. I use an M-Audio short keyboard as a controller, a DX7s for a real keyboard feel, external reverb/echo, Kawai K4r, Roland D-110, Soundcraft mixer and a Sennheiser mike. I have a Yamaha FX-770 for a guitar interface and my whole workflow is controlled from Linux, sequenced by Linux and recorded in Linux. The only thing I would add is the use of an external MIDI clock with stop/start/resume and tempo; that, and I am currently experimenting with BLM controllers; I re-brained a Novation Launchpad and I now want MORE.
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.
I whole heartedly agree, terrible waste of time.
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.
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 is not yet usable for professional-quality home recording.
The article, written by a guy who claims to have "spent 2 1/2 years in the local recording industry" tells us that he recently bought a "Lexicon Alpha 2-channel" interface. Just so you know, the Lexicon Alpha 2-channel interface is a $49 POS USB interface that you wouldn't use for anything more critical than a low bit-rate podcast. Let me know when I can use an Apogee or Apollo or Avid interface with a Linux box.
Linux is a fine platform for use in a recording studio. I use it all the time, but never as a main production platform. It can be used to stream samples, for storage, and even to off-load audio processing and rendering chores. The implementation of VSTs and VSTi's in Linux is still so wonky as to be unusable. And nobody ever used Audacity in their home recording studio to produce anything professional.
I hope Linux eventually does become a viable platform for music production. I've been waiting a long time for that to happen.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I mucked around with ardour 5 years ago.
No real time kernel by default in distros readily available at the time that were easy enough to use.
Driver for the Tascam US-144 created a background buzz very faintly.
Was unworkable for pro recordings.
Ended up using a mac with ardour i believe.
Havent looked again as i now have a focusrite ipad setup. Not pro, but good enough
You might want to check back in 2013 OSX is bit perfect again.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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...
That's nice to hear that ardour is coming along still. I tried it...15 years ago? And it was super unstable on my setup no matter what I tried. Regardless, I'm still surprised Reaper Audio isn't more popular. Costs $60, and does as much as Pro Tools, Cubase, etc in my experience. It ain't free, but it might as well be compared to the price of proprietary competitors.
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.
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."
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.
If you last tried Ardour 15 years ago, you owe it to yourself to try it again now. It took a major boost in features in the Ardour 3 release, and increased its polish for version 4. All in all, it's an excellent tool to make use of for music or other forms of audio production.
The Penguin Producer
I intend to use Lubuntu with LXDE and an Awesome (window manager, not superlative) desktop. No PulseAudio, very minimal system usage, and full access to KXStudio, which provides an immense collection of programs that can cover just about every possible function, especially when you take Jack, Ardour, Claudia, and the immense collection of plugins available.
The Penguin Producer
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?
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...
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 :)
Reaper is very nice for the price...in fact, they will even let you continue using the free shareware version (full features, non-crippled) after the demo period, because the devs are nice folks. The only feature I really miss from Logic is music notation...admittedly, a pretty big feature that I *really* wish it had.
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.
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 used to work for a defence contractor on software that, I discovered later, was being written for the NSA to use in the spying programme. No joke, this actually happened. I am posting this AC via Tor just in case.
I want you to keep than in mind when I say...
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.
I feel bad responding to a first post troll but wrong is just wrong. I'm an amateur musician in the Olympic sense (I've never been paid for it in a meaningful way). It turns out you can do incredible things with a Linux desktop and just as much (if not more) with a Linux recording setup. Now, would I suggest using a Linux set up when trying to collaborate with other musicians? No. Sounds like a terrible plan. Can you record decent sounding multitrack stuff on your own with the right equipment? Absolutely.
http://soundcloud.com/chuck-bl...
It's not music that most people will like but it was recorded completely using a fedora studio spin. It can be done.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
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.
This is not accurate. JACK uses ALSA. And tools like Ardour can now use ALSA directly, rather than via JACK, if the user prefers.
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.
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.
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.
The machine I'm sitting at right now has an RME interface attached to it, and you're right, it will work on Linux. I've never managed to get it to work "just fine" though. The latency is awful and a lot of the nicest features like the fancy in-box routing just never seemed to work for me. However, I admit that it's very possible that I just don't have the time to try to sort it all out. And that's why you use professional tools even in a home studio: because your time is worth something and nothing kills creativity like spending half a day trying to make something work in Linux when it's never going to work as well as one of the other OSs that are used for DAWs.
If you're a hobbyist, I salute you for using Linux as a DAW, because you'll be part of the reason Linux someday becomes viable for professional home audio recording. And I really hope that happens.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
In terms of interfaces, there are a lot of small digital mixers around now that work great. I do all my live recording with a QSC Touchmix
great pres, and 32 bit wav tracking direct to USB drive, then import to DAW.
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.
Reaper has the best VSTi support, but the VSTi has to run on your OS, and that's the problem with Linux.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, I've heard the QSC stuff is good. I suspicious of the touch-screen interface though, especially for something I would use in live performance or recording. But being able to track direct to a USB drive is a nice touch.
Though the QSC isn't cheap (it's like $800 for the 8 channel, right?), you get a lot for that money. Especially if you like an all in one solution between you and the box.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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 .
Another vote for Reaper. I've been making music for a long time on computers including quite a number of commercial ventures. I started off with C-Lab creator on the Atari, moved onto Logic Audio on the PC (and latterly on a cheap Mac G5 I got for £ 50 off fleabay) but am now mainly on Reaper.
Over the years I've worked with Cubase, Logic (PC & MAC versions), Fruity Loops, Acid, Pro Tools, Ableton Live etc. etc. In fact I've got some experience with most DAW/Sequencing software including most of the Linux based offerings (Rosegarden, Muse, LMMS, Ardour etc.)
All I can say is that Reaper is my number one choice by a long stretch. It's inexpensive, fully featured, flexible, the file formats are simple to parse, it copes with almost any audio file format you care to throw at it, it comes with a great set of plugins "out of the box" and it simply just works. Coming from other DAWs (i.e. mainly Logic) I have to say it was a complete pain to learn how it works as it's a totally different workflow to most other DAWs but I'm constantly amazed by how flexible the audio/MIDI routing is and how quickly I can get things done.
And I'm sorry to say it but Linux DAW software is simply leagues behind. I had great hopes when Ubuntu studio came out but it simply didn't "cut the mustard". The main problem being a lack of support for VSTs a, if you don't offer support for VST technology, I'm afraid you're basically out of the game. There are a ridiculous number of wonderful free VST instruments out there (not to mention the commercial powerhouses such as Kontakt etc.) and not being able to make use of them is like playing a guitar with only one arm and one string. yes you can get a tune out of it but you're very, very limited.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
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 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
I've got the 16. It's actually quite a good interface,with very good help, the manual is basically built in.
It's been totally stable so far, no crashes at all, and works well with multiple iPads.
10 aux all with extensive EQ, gates/comps every channel.
Best of all it replaces 70kg of desk and FX with 3kg. And no multicore!
It's not as user friendly as a nice big analog desk, however, setting up stuff ahead of time and saving it as a scene is a breeze.
I've given to experienced sound guys with no training and theyve all been able to work it out on the night of the gig.
Boy howdy, let me tell you, anyone able to lay down such a reasoned, thoughtful response has certainly gotten ME to rethink my position!
It's fine on a hobby level if you're exceptionally careful to vet the hardware you want tot use, but I'd never recommend it for professional recording work. Too many hardware limitations and you end up locked out of the vast landscape of cross-platform plugins and third party programs that are largely seamlessly interoperable across both hardware and software platforms.
Yeah, you're making yourself look exceptionally silly with this. I don't love ProTools, and I go out of my way to avoid it, but as a recording engineer of 35 years, I can absolutely assure you that it most certainly is the standard.
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
Why would they? 99 percent of their actual paying customers aren't using Linux in the studio.
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
Ubuntu Studio keeps getting better. Especially now that more and more devices work with it.
http://ubuntustudio.org/
Kriston
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.
"Lexicon Alpha 2-channel interface is a $49 POS USB"
Yes, it is a super cheapy and I am fully aware of it's limitations.
I use 2 delta 1010lts, clock synced with sp/diff. I pay attention to the impedence and quality of the cable used for timing signals. No cheap cables. I've had these for a while. I gang them together using alsa into a single 16 channel input. In your case, HW on a budget, make sure to have good clean power supplies. Consider using a small motor cycle battery to power your device so you can imnprove the input quality of your signal source. Use good cables, make sure you dedicate a USB interface to it. Pay attention to where mains voltage is.
Standard kernel and misc. other was no good. Adopted a low latency kernel (has it's own dangers) and made other system mods and no more bullshit.
Use the real time patches as well, pay attention to configuring io schedulers and picking good underlying filesystem (I like Jfs on ssd right now). It pays money to know about filesystem performance. Linux, hands down, kicks the shit out of MAC and widows for filesystem and CPU performance on the same hardware, short of MAC guys actually knowing how to utilize the underlying power of the BSD OS that makes Macintoshes what they are. The only thing faster than a Linux kernel is a Solaris kernel. If I used a MAC, I would do exactly what I would do in linux and compile Ardour and Jack on a MAC to see what it can do. This is the foundation for what you produce music on - that is why it is important to understand it.
You have to have the mindset to actually do innovative stuff because it's actually, mentally hard work. Those in a hurry to get into their creative space and unable to delay gratification to understand the underlying structural concepts that makes their equipment actually be a recording system deny themselves the opportunity to do something outstandingly different. I have Logic, I use Ardour because once you understand the flexibility you get to mangle the workflow you don't want to use pro-tools to produce the same sounds everyone else makes. So DAWs in the Linux space force you to choose between mainstream or innovation. Unforgiving, but extremely rewarding.
After finding it actually worked, I came here hoping for advice and what to buy and not to buy if I decided to spring for more.
Fuckin A, it's totally worth it. My upgrades to my studio will be PCie RME cards maybe 32 channels, a Mackie control surface.
In terms of Mics I have Rode: 2 beautiful pencil, 1 valve NTK, 1 NT1. AKG: some fat diaphram kick mic (that I use for bass amp), a AKG vocal. Shure SM57/58 (a few of them), Senheiser E600, 80 - shit I got a lot more now I think about it, I scored this old, very rare Zephr 18 x A Grid. Buy good desks, pay attention to how many busses you can squeeze out of a desk. Have a look around for some old tape four tracks, which actually make for pretty good 8 channel pre-amps for your computer, that way you also get off board eqs and pre-amps. Also look for a good quality desk, quality power supplies. I bought a Yamaha emx 600 over a decade ago and it was worth every cent, most good desks will have those features.
This is my first venture into home recording using Linux and all documentation out there on the subject is sketchy at best... home as in outside the needs of a full blown studio.
Don't look back, jump in. Don't listen to the naysayers. There are challenges, but they are worth it for the skills you acquire, which is also hard work. I used to use CCRMA, fedora, cut down kernels however now, I use ubuntu studio or linux mint with the low latency and rt kernel - available from the repos and apt. Pretty straight forward. You don't have to go as far as I went, however I am a little embarrasingly obsessed with sound and performance computing.
What these Mac guys *can't* do is yeild a stripped down thoughrobred OS that supports
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Wow! Most useful and on topic post under this submission. I will be converting this into and adding it to my personal documentation. Thanks a bunch!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Late response but I seldom check back on my posts. All on Linux. We used Hydrogen for drum patterns and Audacity for recording and mixing. The last track we posted was a goof on an earlier track we posted so it was kind of an inside joke. Glad you liked it. Thanks!
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Wow! Most useful and on topic post under this submission. I will be converting this into and adding it to my personal documentation. Thanks a bunch!
No problem, it was a good opportunity to articulate what I have been doing to people who could actually understand it, so I'm glad you asked.
My friends (bandmates?) just left. One of the cool things I've found I can do is get them more involved in the production process as well, which is what we did tonight.
Basically they come around (usually with beer and weed) and I take them through a bunch of effects or some elements that I prepared earlier for the songs. Then we go through using Ardour together and I ask them what they hear, anything, and act as a conduit to the application. When you get your own ego out of their way, their creative juices start flowing and suddenly there are three brains coming up with ideas with one brain (yours) in the logical space applying them.
This involves everyone in the sound (so they own it) and reduces my workload so I can apply my creativity into meshing the ideas together later on. Another cool thing is, we have a great time and everyone goes home laughing so it becomes an incredibly unique social activity.
Even though it's hard work, there is no reason you can't have a great time with it if you are careful with preparation and get the logical and structural elements out of the way first so that your friends, the musicians, can come up with good ideas. I hope you have a great time with it too.
All the best.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There are several, actually. One could even roll their own with Pure Data.