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Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

288 points by prmoustache

by gnarlouse

6 subcomments

I’d like to see some company come out with a wrapper for Logic, Ableton, ProTools, etc with the following:
- portable, reproducible environments: I suppose you could achieve this with a docker setup. If I jump to a different workstation, I want to be able to load my current project without playing setup wrangler.
- license management like a dotfile database: all my licenses are fettered to the wind across two or three email addresses, and every time my PC crashes (twice in the past 5y) or something breaks I have to go recollect them. It’s a quest. Quests suck.
- remote or cloud processing: connect to your workstation if you’re on the road, or a cloud cluster running DAWs. Sure, this introduces some lag which can force you into drag to piano roll contexts, but other times you’re just messing with mixes. But gaming giants like Sony figured it out for PS4/5 titles.
- shareable projects with some innovative business solution to the license barrier. I want to be able to access somebody else’s project and load it in its entirety—whether I have Neural DSP’s latest Archetype or not. Whether I have Serum2 or not. Apple managed to get bands onto iTunes. We seriously can’t get Waves or Neural DSP to go the same route? Some royalty-based approach?
I know these are outlandish requirements in some scenarios but I feel like this would fix the misery of music making in the era of Windows and macOS being goblinware operating systems.

by vlowther

3 subcomments

It took quite a bit of scrolling until I found my old faves of dexed and zynaddsubfx, and I didn't see Helm (https://tytel.org/helm/) at all.

by IndySun

0 subcomment

Thanks for making the list but I hate endless scroll. Who doesn't? It makes no sense to me, GUI torture. why make it impossible to reach the footer?!

by cpuguy83

17 subcomments

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these:
Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

by hardwarepirate

0 subcomment

i can recommend renoise, not sequencer, but a tracker, used for creating demo tracks (the music in cracks) or genres like breakcore, jungle, edm. venetian snares uses it after he used cubase in the 90s/00s.
it's rather customisable, reasonably priced and just works great as a daw for electronic music.
https://renoise.com/download it even comes with a demo and it's own vst for other daw'.

by belter

0 subcomment

Great demo of the JUNE - Classic Analog Polysynth JUNO-60 Plugin - AudioThing
https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46

by sramsay

0 subcomment

This. Is. Awesome.
Really. It amazes me that I still find out about new Linux plugins after years of producing music on the platform. It could not have been easy to compile this; the information is all over the place online.
The ability to filter (!) for compression, saturation, etc. is so great.

by jupake

1 subcomments

This is fantastic! There are plenty of us out there that dont mind paying for software if its high quality. This is an excellent resource for people who are less militant about open source and just want to make music.

by marttt

0 subcomment

Side note: looking at the screenshot gallery on the linked site, it is interesting to see how often audio software GUIs mimic real, physical devices in remarkable detail. Carefully crafted graphics for volume dials, sliders etc.

by notepad0x90

4 subcomments

For some reason "Linux musicians" made me think of someone making art out of 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp', and made me wonder what Windows musicians are like (lots of anger and frustration to express I'd imagine)

by chaosprint

1 subcomments

If you don’t wanna use a daw on linux you are welcomed to try https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

by cadr

3 subcomments

Is there a way I can see which would run on a raspberry pi?

by kosolam

2 subcomments

The things I need are free and opensource

by ufocia

1 subcomments

What about Ardour?

by gkhartman

2 subcomments

This is great. Makes these tools much more discoverable. I can help but notice the drop in plugin ui quality one you click the foss filter checkbox. Something in me wants a foss plugin to come with a cool skin like the free ones do, but I know that's silly.

by bnastic

1 subcomments

I used this site as a reference earlier this year quite often, as I attempted to establish some baseline for a Linux DAW. I use Mac for serious audio stuff, but 'what if' (since I use Linux for everything else anyway).
I came back pleasantly surprised with the current state of things. Minus the underlying linux sound system, which is still a mess of things that barely work together. (I have a lot of expensive/pro plugins and all the DAWs on the Mac, so this was mostly a filtering exercise - what I can use on Linux that can still mix/master a whole project).
- I'm not a FOSS purist in audio, so that wasn't a requirement. But I am 'linux purist' so no VST wrappers of windows DLLs etc.
- Watershed moment for me: Toneboosters and Kazrog coming to Linux. Along with u-he, these make for a very, very high quality offering. You can easily mix a commercial release just with these. Kazrog isn't even 'Linux beta' like the rest, proper full release on Linux. I was briefly involved in beta testing for Linux, Shane & co are incredible people.
- I have most/all DAWs for the Mac. Reaper and Bitwig on Linux are enough for me and feel like good citizens in Linux. (ProTools is never coming, neither is Logic. But addition of Studio One makes for a really good trio).
- Any USB class-compliant audio interface will work (modulo control applications which generally aren't available on Linux, so ymmv).
- iLok is missing, which removes a whole host of possible options (I have 500+ licences on my iLok dongle, none of that stuff is accessible). I can't say I miss iLok, but I do miss Softube (not that it's available on Linux, iLok or not).
I made a few 100+ tracks mixes on my thinkpad with Reaper and the above combo of plugins, it worked just fine.
But Linux is still Linux, and 30 years later still annoys me with typical 'linux problems', which generally boil down to 'lack of care'. UI is still laggy, compositors be damned. While Reaper is butter-smooth on a Mac, audio thread never interferes with UI (and vice versa), it can get quite choppy on Linux. If you allow your laptop to go to sleep with a DAW open, chances are good that upon resuming you'll have to restart it as it will lose sound. And a lot of smaller annoyances that are just lack of polish and/or persistent bugs, that I'm sadly used to on Linux (want to switch users on Linux Mint? The lock screen can get hella confused and require a lot of tinkering to get the desktop back). But overall, it's a million miles away from a hobbyist endeavour that Linux audio used to be until recently. I could get actual work done with Linux this time around.

by raaron773

0 subcomment

Is it just me or does the website feels very very snappy. I like it

by metalman

1 subcomments

it's an add for apps that cost as much as a box of decent used pedals and rack mount gear. though "linux musicians" does appear to be a thing, and the bot used to check if you are human, is amusing and fully automated.
https://linuxmusicians.com/

by londons_explore

6 subcomments

The real-time low latency multi channel audio streaming needed for musicians is awfully similar to the real time low latency multi channel audio streaming required for telephony.
Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.