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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".
'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.
Alas, I spent my entire looking for a job.
I also spent my entire noun looking for a.
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.
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....
To feed the troll or not to feed the troll...? Okay, here's some kibbles and bits. In fact I was most certainly employed in the music industry, however local. No less, I paid taxes and everything. Yes, I even got paid!!! It was decent too. I would rattle off everything I handed which was substantial, but that is not the point of my submission. Look, I am sorry your presumably tech resume didn't cut it during that time. Many of ours did not. I am also sorry you did not look outside the box like I did resulting in one of the most enriching and exciting employment stretches I will probably ever have. I have missed it so much, I am ditching tech outside of economic reasons to get back in.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
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.
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."
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...
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.