Ask Slashdot: Linux and the Home Recording Studio? 264
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?
Ubuntu Studio (Score:5, Interesting)
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Most audio interfaces of any substance don't work under Linux. If you're looking for simple 2 channel interfaces or something like that, there's a plethora available that work nearly out of the box. If you're looking for serious multichannel, there's compromises left and right. It wasn't until a couple years ago that my Fireface 800 [rme-audio.de] was made to work with ffado [ffado.org] and, coincidentally, the FF800 has been discontinued since then.
The audio professional would either need to have a lot of hardware processing for
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If you're looking for simple 2 channel interfaces or something like that, there's a plethora available that work nearly out of the box.
That's the problem with just about any DAW... the hardware. There are plenty of purpose built hardware multi-track recorders that are 24 or 32 track and can record 8 or 12 inputs. Dump it to the PC and edit to your hearts content if you like.
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If you're looking for simple 2 channel interfaces or something like that, there's a plethora available that work nearly out of the box.
That's the problem with just about any DAW... the hardware. There are plenty of purpose built hardware multi-track recorders that are 24 or 32 track and can record 8 or 12 inputs. Dump it to the PC and edit to your hearts content if you like.
Not really, not anymore at least. There's really only 2 currently being made targeting the prosumer, the TASCAM and the Zoom and neither of them do more than 8 tracks at a time. Targeting the professional, there's the joeco Black boxes. Everything else is going to be computer oriented. This also is problematic if you want to ever do punches, overdubs, or anything of the like. You have to go back to your purpose built box. And it's entirely worth noting that the TASCAM and Zoom have mediocre sound to t
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iz RADAR.
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This isn't really true.
If companies adhere to the USB standards, then stuff just works. That's why you can plug a Behringer (Midas, really) X32 into a Linux system and it all just works. All of it.
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What you're really saying... (Score:4)
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.
Re:What you're really saying... (Score:4, Funny)
Alas, I spent my entire looking for a job.
I also spent my entire noun looking for a.
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I also spent my entire time looking for a noun.
FTFY
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Re:What you're really saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
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To feed the troll or not to feed the troll...?
I'm a troll for being sympathetic to your situation? Sheesh...
I paid taxes and everything.
The IRS hounded me for a year because I owed taxes on my unemployment benefits. Being unemployed for an extended period of time, filing for bankruptcy and unable to qualify for welfare didn't qualify for a hardship exemption in the eyes of the IRS.
Look, I am sorry your presumably tech resume didn't cut it during that time.
My resume was fine. The problem was with recruiters who saw that I had help desk experience for 3+ years in the last three positions, assumed that I wanted to continue doing help desk, and told me that
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Okay, so this has happened to me lots. Being told you are overqualified, even when true, is the pits. As far as how I so drastically switched gears, I had the benefit of hooking up with someone in the industry with previous IT experience. I also re-wrote my resume to be as applicable as possible. Further, I pretty much social engineered my way in. It worked out.
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Yeah, in 2009-ish I spent a couple of weeks camping outside "my future employer" doing stuff on my own laptop on the promise that I might get a paycheck, someday. Someday finally did come, and it was a good paying gig, off and on. Eventually too much off for my taste and I moved on to something with more "on time."
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Well obviously, if that's how things were, it's solely because you're just a lazy POS.
Now this is a troll.
Ubuntu Studio (Score:2)
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.
Why stick solely with Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
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CoreAudio ASIO JACK PulseAudio WDM (Score:5, Informative)
'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.
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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 th
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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
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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 mo
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This is so accurate. I recently bought a little M-Audio M-Track Plus 2 audio interface. Its manual (which is findable online [m-audio.com]) 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.
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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.
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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 f
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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.
SCaLE14x Had a Talk About This (Score:2, Interesting)
Aaron Wolf gave a talk about this at SCaLE14x this January.
Link: https://opensource.com/life/16/1/configuring-linux-for-music-recording-production
Hardware Multitrack (Score:2)
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.
DAW on Linux is great, last time I checked. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Ardour 60-70 tracks easy (Score:5, Informative)
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....
Ardour, Calf, and a Focusrite (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
I can attest to Focusrite's stuff. I use a Scarlett 2i2 with Audacity for live audio capture. Works great. For the cost, the mic preamps on the Scarlett are absurdly good.
Re:Ardour, Calf, and a Focusrite (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Bitwig for Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Checkout Bitwig. It's basically Ableton for Linux, damn near an exact clone. Multi-track recording, VST support, arrangement and performance type views.
Linux is unsuitable as a DAW platform. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 take it that Synergy didn't work out?
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Synergy has latency I'm unwilling to accept....because I'm a gamer, too. :) Besides, I still need some way to switch 2x24" monitors between computers, along with a pro audio interface (UAD Apollo).
You talk about Linux as a desktop platform (Score:2)
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
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In commercial DAW products, Harrison Consoles offers MixBus for Linux in both 64-bit and 32-bit editions. When I first tried it, the boot-able DVD demo edition was running AVLinux.
I've been wondering the same thing (Score:2)
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 [ardour.org], 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 an
Never got VSTi plugins working (Score:2)
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1) http://manual.ardour.org/worki... [ardour.org]
2) http://manual.ardour.org/worki... [ardour.org]
War on Violence and Other Songs for Anarchists (Score:2)
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Um. That's great. Nirvana's "Bleach" was recorded on 8 track, using dynamic mics and guitar amps. Of course you can record on anything, if reliability isn't too much of an issue. Particularly if you're recording through a mixer anyway, in which case your recording software is a bit irrelevant. You just mic up, set the levels and EQs and what-have-you, and push record.
If you're doing real multi-track recording through a proper multi-track audio interface, like the Steinberg UR824 that a friend of mine uses
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There are LOTS of multichannel USB audio interfaces that work perfectly on Linux. What matters is whether the devices correspond to the USB audio class specification, which is also equivalent to asking whether they come with their own drivers for OS X and Windows. No drivers? They will work on Linux.
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1) Quite a few manufacturers choose not to use the USB audio class specification
2) I can't write the software fast enough. Ardour has taken up 16 years of my life already, with a huge amount of help from other people.
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I don't wish for one moment to diminish the huge efforts of the open source community to try to create a software solution for Linux. But you're up against well-funded teams of software engineers who create software that the recording industry pays significant cash to acquire. The same problem exists for Photoshop vs. The GIMP, and Avid vs. whatever video editing software exists for Linux. And Blender vs. Renderman + Maya etc.
It's interesting that open source has succeeded with the OS (for its warts, Linux
Not Open Source (Score:2)
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 re
Fine for basements, not for anything else (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Try recording rap, then you can do both.
Uh... (Score:2)
You mean it has a state?
I didn't think it'd gotten that far yet...
like gimp, for audio (Score:2)
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
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I suppose it is just too hard these days to imagine recording music (the question was about a home RECORDING studio) as actually meaning RECORDING musicians performing on instruments.
I can assure you that there are plenty of people using Linux to do that, without the issues you're describing above. I'm also going to assume that you live in the USA, because if you lived in Europe (notably Germany) I think your perception of Linux would be quite different.
Seriously ... (Score:2)
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
Get A Mac. (Score:3)
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.
Bitwig + Renoise (Score:3)
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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.)
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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 r
Re:Reaper (Score:4, Informative)
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.
No.
The only thing that is partly stuck to the program is the workflow. If you just know in which order to press the buttons and don't know what they do or why they do it, then sure, you knowledge applies only to that program. But if you know what the tools are doing then you can jump to pretty much any DAW on the market and make it work. You'll be slightly less efficient because of changes in workflow while getting used to the new workflow. And the bigger the difference, the weirder it is for the first couple of hours. Jumping from ProTools to Ableton Live is quite weird, for example.
I've jumped between ProTools, Ableton Live, and Reason with no problems. I've also played around with Logic, Reaper, and Cubase.
Reaper is quite nice, and works well. Also very easy to grok the workflow as it is a simple one that is quite like ProTools in that it relies heavily on an old workflow that would fit an audio engineer from the 1980s or 90s.
Reaper rocks for that price!
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Back on Audacity, my son likes it, but I hate it. I find the interface just awful, not very intuitive, which is a shame, because the most important part, the backend processing, is nice. But they could put some more effort into that interface. For most wav editing type stuff, I'll use Adobe Audition. I've seen A
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Reaper is terrific. It's more robust than any of the other DAWs you mention and it's ability to handle VSTs is bulletproof. I've never had it balk at some odd VST or VSTi, even homebrewed ones.
I'm much faster working in Reaper than I am with ProTools, even though I've got a lot more years' experience using ProTools.
Re: The future looks good. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: The future looks good. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:The future looks good. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Apogee: yep. Apollo: yep. Some pro DAW embeds Linu (Score:3)
> 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?... [youtube.com]
Apollo? Sure thing:
https://thecrocoduckspond.word... [wordpress.com]
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
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This is not accurate. JACK uses ALSA. And tools like Ardour can now use ALSA directly, rather than via JACK, if the user prefers.
part of Alsa hw drivers yes, not the mixer etc (Score:2)
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 serio
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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.
The Scottish Apogee? (Score:3)
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 l
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No, that's not it. Apogee has terrific high-end interfaces. But on the low-end, their stuff is mainly toys for using with iPads. If you spend $59 for an interface, no matter what is on the nameplate, it's not going to be pro gear. If you spend $3000, and it says "Apogee", then you can produce professional audio. Now you don't ne
Re:The future looks good. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 u
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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.
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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.
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Reaper has the best VSTi support, but the VSTi has to run on your OS, and that's the problem with Linux.
Re:The future looks good. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [bandshed.net] 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...
Re:The future looks good. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The future looks good. (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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Re:The future looks good. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: The future looks good. (Score:2)
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Re: The future looks good. (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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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.
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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.
Re:Don't bother. (Score:4, Informative)
http://soundcloud.com/chuck-bl... [soundcloud.com]
It's not music that most people will like but it was recorded completely using a fedora studio spin. It can be done.
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If anybody found a direct solution, I'd like to know.
Use something else?
Sorry. But the point is that you're right, real-time effects is hard, although in the context of a modern PC the CPU requirements aren't that huge if you're only talking a handful of effects and tracks. Logic can do multiple convolution reverbs in real-time, for instance. It's hard to do, and this is why we end up having to pay for the software. It escapes me why people don't like this. They'll drop several hundred dollars on a good USB audio interface, and then moan about buying some dec
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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