Guy on the run
Lucie / minutedo you make music on Linux, and what's your favorite software to work with? and what do you miss the most from Linux music/audio software that exists on other platforms?
cinap_lenrekyes, having lots of fun with lmms 1.2.2
@cinap_lenrek fun fact, i first included BSD and plan9 in my post but then edited it out again to focus :D
dont worry. the tools dont really matter. 9front has a very active music scene š
@cinap_lenrek hehe yeah the tools matter a little bit to me :D if i constantly have to fight the thing, i'm not making music
@mntmn I feel like tagging @aeva here (in case you don't follow each other?) since I know she works on both OSes... and writes her own stuff, too.
I haven't done anything more serious than just having 'play sessions', rather than "let's make a song!" sessions so my insight probably isn't as valuable as others, but I like Ardour as much as I think I can get comfortable with any DAW and I enjoy using Helm and https://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/ for various software synth stuff (they have a plugin you can).
I enjoyed playing around with the Bitwig Studio demo but I don't know how good it is for stuff. But the synth options were pretty awesome and easy to use for someone who isn't overly familiar with a lot of the standard types of levers to manipulate, so to speak
I haven't done anything more serious than just having 'play sessions', rather than "let's make a song!" sessions so my insight probably isn't as valuable as others, but I like Ardour as much as I think I can get comfortable with any DAW and I enjoy using Helm and https://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/ for various software synth stuff (they have a plugin you can).
I enjoyed playing around with the Bitwig Studio demo but I don't know how good it is for stuff. But the synth options were pretty awesome and easy to use for someone who isn't overly familiar with a lot of the standard types of levers to manipulate, so to speak
Thommy
aeva@aud @mntmn my favorite Linux music software is #mollytime, but I'm biased because I wrote it.
Rosegarden handles realtime playback completely wrong, but it is ok as a MIDI editor. I've been using Tenacity for simple edits of recordings and to converting WAVs to other formats.
I don't really use Windows for music (beyond keeping the windows version of mollytime more or less at parity), and I've never used Macos for music.
@aud @mntmn the RPI-400 i have on hand only has 4 GB, which makes the device very infuriating to use for normal tasks like "opening websites in firefox", so I haven't tried to use it for much of anything else. I tried to use it to tide me over when my laptop broke a while back, and it was so bad I ended up buying a steamdeck instead. In theory 4 GB should be significantly more than enough to actually run mollytime. I don't remember what the clock speed is on the device.
@mntmn @aud This is where the source currently lives https://github.com/Aeva/mollytime "excelsior" is the main branch. README.md walks through the basic installation instructions, BUILD.md documents everything necessary to build it and what all the mollybuild.py wraps (as well as what dependencies you may need to install yourself), and BUILD-linux.md contains some additional notes. iirc most of the dependencies are automatically cloned from upstream repositories by mollybuild.py
@mntmn @aud if you try it out let me know!
also if you get it to run, there's a hoard of patches in the (poorly curated) examples folder. "drums4.beep" is my current goto for confirming if basic functionality is working. "breath_of_the_world.beep", "tape_loop.beep", "central_dynamo.beep" are probably the main highlights for hearing something pleasant, and in general it is a good idea to keep your volume down low when opening an unfamiliar patch.
@mntmn @aud the patches in examples/midi are all midi instruments. I usually use aplaymidi to feed midi streams into them or use a midi controller. molytime has 32 lanes of polyphony for midi patches by default which makes them a lot more expensive. starting mollytime with `-p 16` will set it to use 16 lanes instead, etc. Generally you want to see the LOAD indicator run below 50% for midi patches, below 20% is better.
@mntmn @aud also as a stopgap for not having proper documentation, this video walks through the basics of how to write and manipulate patches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gWxtttdr0s
mollytime basic operation
YourName@mntmn
The needed tool is very dependent of what you want to do.
Mix ? Mixxx
Record ? Ardour
Write ? Musescore
Jam ? Carla
On proprietary, all devs say "yeah my soft can do anything" but it's obviously wrong.
On floss, we know that one good soft is build for on usage.
If you want, i've do a collection of tools (french) at https://l2m2p.lebib.org/?LesOutils
eighty
cĆ©line didone@[email protected] Bookmarking this because Iām very interested in the responses!
Iāve tried and failed so far, but i want to keep trying. (So far tried reaper and ardour). What Iām missing:
ā Audio device predictability: something about my setup means opening these daws will sometimes kill my wireplumber session in a way I donāt know how to recover without a reboot, and not repeatable enough that I know āwhat not to doā
The rest is around specific plugins, which I hope the responses provide some good recommendations.
Iāve tried and failed so far, but i want to keep trying. (So far tried reaper and ardour). What Iām missing:
ā Audio device predictability: something about my setup means opening these daws will sometimes kill my wireplumber session in a way I donāt know how to recover without a reboot, and not repeatable enough that I know āwhat not to doā
The rest is around specific plugins, which I hope the responses provide some good recommendations.
ą²ą²æą²°ą²¾ą²ą³ š¹āš¾āš±šµšø (he/him)@[email protected] @[email protected] I havenāt been able to get any sound out of ALSA in my current setup
@[email protected] @ruben Oh weird. Are you using an external mixer/sound card?
@[email protected] Sometimes. But Iāll figure it out at some point. Rather than going down the debugging route, the reason I mentioned it is that when Iām in a āmake musicā mood iām not in a ādebug Linux audioā mood, and it just makes me not go to my Linux machine for making music.
I can only imagine this is worse for non technical users.
I can only imagine this is worse for non technical users.
Gƶrllewin@mntmn loving PureData at the moment.
pasta 
@mntmn i would say that ardour (if it doesn't crash, but that improved a lot over the years?), x42-plugins and surge xt are pretty nice.
i honestly only miss minor things such as having a "real" piano roll or having the scale highlighted in the piano roll (or... whatever that thing in ardour is called). adding new tracks takes ages in ardour, that's a bit annoying. especially in huge projects.
i use melodyne and that works pretty well with yabridge.
so all in all its pretty okay tbh? don't really miss a lot
nash
pretty fungi@mntmn there's a lot under the domain of "making music" ā & different tools for different things. off the top of my head i use musescore for writing out scores, audacity/tenacity for making rough edits to audio & transcribing things, reaper (ardour in the past as well) for more serious recording work, renoise for midi-controlled synth sounds & programming.
biggest problem you can run into i think is plugins. there are a lot of linux native plugins, some of them very good, but most commercial VSTs are mac or windows only. you can sometimes get windows VSTs working through wine (yabridge) but it's a pain and may not work.
i don't use a computer much in my professional music work so it's all good enough for me.
@mntmn oh ā a useful resource i found is this website ā https://linuxdaw.org/ ā all kinds of things (mainly plugins) listed there.
Undercat@mntmn I tried with Reaper but found I missed FL Studio too much. I wish ImageLine would make a Linux version.
YHANCI~1.TXT
Fabio Neves šØš¦š§š·@mntmn I used Bitwig on Linux a few times. Itās not open-source and a lot of people take issue with that, but itās a fine piece of software
@fabio yeah, i had a license once, a long time ago, but unfortunately they didn't make an arm64 linux version
decibyte
Lykso
gahlord@mntmn I do not yet make music on Linux but the things I worry about are: SoX, a useful DAW (currently use Logic, small list of plugins I like but could live with stock plugins), I/O ā I have a merging tech Hapi interface and also an RME babyface & Cranbourne: getting multiple streams of audio in, out, and round trip (through hardware processors) is a critical thing for me and something I always assume is a nightmare on Linux given third party AD/DA converters are part of that.
Beyond that functional MIDI I/O to drive controllers and hardware synths.
@mntmn I could also imagine completely blowing up my audio process and focusing on SoX, SuperCollider (I am in the monome/norns hardware world), and something node-based and treating everything like a 50s electronic music studio environment.
Regdar and the Fighters@gahlord @mntmn I do a lot with SoX and supercollider on a cli daw.
There is a ton of learning curve and some tools are just fundamentally user-unfriendly (even if providing numeric arguments to a function does make sense to you, compand is still harder to dial in than any other compressor or gate ive seen)
But it is fun and let's you get some very interesting results
There is a ton of learning curve and some tools are just fundamentally user-unfriendly (even if providing numeric arguments to a function does make sense to you, compand is still harder to dial in than any other compressor or gate ive seen)
But it is fun and let's you get some very interesting results
@vomithatsteve @mntmn that is useful to hear. Definitely if I end up going that route I would be intentionally seeking to set aside my mostly ātapeā metaphor of recording and replace it with something completely foreign or available only in digital lands like node-based or code-process etc. It would be a wholesale changing out of learned practice for something new. Like the difference between playing bass guitar and making patches on the modular.
That said I am very curious about a CLI DAW!
@vomithatsteve @mntmn Sweet, I have tried Reaper and I could definitely get by with it as a DAW. Didnāt realise it has CLI too, I think that could be fun to learn.
Lynx@mntmn I have been trying to make music on Linux for around 20 years now. I've worked with Ardour, LMMS, Reaper, Non, and various trackers. So far my favorite (and most productive, despite me having only released 3 songs so far) is SunVox, which is free but closed source. I really wish Neil would compile on modern systems; I may hack at it at some point.
Sigrid Solveig HaflĆnudĆ³ttir@mntmn Renoise. Was a bit of ft2-clone before.
ZĢoĆ©
cathos
Landry
Fugue State Audio@mntmn I've been a happy Reaper user for many years, so very cool that I can still use it on Linux. Surge XT has become my go-to "super synth," and I'm using Cardinal for a lot of what I used to use Biome for (modular fx processing).
The main things I miss are Sound Forge and Reaktor.
Kobold
Bad Diode@mntmn Iām partial to Bitwig. For native plugins I miss having Valhalla reverbs and some useful LUFS monitoring tools that I use via Yabridge, though maybe there is something native and havenāt look hard enough
Alison Wilder
Jmvars