111–120 of 125 posts
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'.
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 plu…
I have not had any UI issues in at least a decade on Slackware. The few times I tried Mint over the years, it was filled with random annoyances like you mention.
Edit: This is not advocating using Slackware for audio work, it works great but it is Slackware and most don't get along with the Slackware way. But there is a DAW module for AlienBob's Slackware Live Edition[0]. It worked alright when I tried it, as well as any other live distro.
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 plu…
PipeWire seems to solve all the audio stuff for me, zero problems since I made the switch. I had audio fail on resume once when I first installed PipeWire; if memory serves it was that the default settings for PipeWire was to restart the audio server on resume which screwed things up because Jack kept running. Something like that. The fix was simple, just comment out a line and uncomment another. Everything audio has…
But generally that's my point, 'it works if you go and edit this obscure line in this obscure config file'. Mac has had a stable CoreAudio backend for quarter of a century now (counterpoint - Windows is also a mess). I wish Linux would stabilise their userland a bit more and stop rewriting stuff every few years.
Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro, I don't really care. But have it all released/patched at their own pace, as long as everything 'just works'. I'd be happy to pay for that. The whole 'OS due upgrade, is anything going to work tomorrow, I have a session' is still an unsolved problem on _every_ OS/platform. Most busy studio heads go years without installing/upgrading _anything_ for fear of having a lemon after said upgrade, with clients waiting at the door.
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 thre…
I have a Pittsburgh Modular TAIGA that cost $800. How much am I willing to pay for a software synth doing analog modeling? Basically nothing.
To get everyone a piece of the pie to make it worth it for this, it would cost the end user so much for the pie that no one would bother.
My experience with music collaboration is that the technical challenges have been minimal for a long time now. The challenges of collaboration are social and being on the same page musically. Even in the 90s, it wasn't hard to find people to make rock music with locally. The problem was always what was meant by "rock music" to begin with.
It is exactly the opposite problem of video games. It would be like the economics of video games if the goal was to team up to play video games no one else was playing.
I think this would only work if every musician's goal was to be Taylor Swift.
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)
I didn't realize Dave Phillips had passed away. I remember he had an incredible page of audio software links but all stuff I almost never got to make any sound. Sometimes I would even blow up my whole system trying to get something to work and have to reinstall the whole operating system.
Seeing how far we have come with this site is just incredible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PipeWire seems to solve all the audio stuff for me, zero problems since I made the switch. I had audio fail on resume once when I first installed PipeWire; if memory serves it was that the default settings for PipeWire was to restart the audio server on resume which screwed things up because Jack kept running. Something like that. The fix was simple, just comment out a line and uncomment another. Everything audio has…
I dont/didn't use Jack at all, straight into pipewire, which makes for a super unintuitive way to select 'audio device' in Reaper (iirc, something like select ALSA and 'default's for input/output and somehow that's all routed via pipewire). I'm not unhappy about pipewire, I finally have a low-ish latency audio system (enough for mixing, if not recording) that I don't have to spend hours on to get it to work. A la Mac…
That would be Ubuntu Studio or Kx-Studio. Mint is quite far from what you want unless you are willing to put in the time to set it up right. Most any distro which ships PipeWire with Jack support enabled will probably perform better than your Mint setup running ALSA. PipeWire speaks Jack so if built with Jack support, any Jack aware application will connect to PipeWire with no need to start Jack or anything, it just works.
It is not an obscure file that I had to edit, it is the file (script) which starts the server. Took maybe 5 minutes to get everything working flawlessly and that includes compiling PipeWire since Slackware does not build it with Jack support and a google search to find out why resume killed the audio.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Clearly made by and for goblins,” I think, but I’m open to riffing on the best interpretation
That clears up nothing.
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.
What a strange jab. People are militant about _freedom_, not getting things for free. If you don't care about freedom then just use Logic or Ableton or whatever, they're probably better than anything on Linux and they're industry standards. But they completely trash your freedoms as a user and that's what many people can't stomach. Plenty of software that respects the users freedoms is sold.
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 thre…
Put aside the bit rot that occurs constantly with digital project files in a way it never did with tape, just getting my DAW, plugins, samples, projects working has been a giant pain. I am a big fan of deterministic/reproducible computing environments in general. My primary machine is setup declaratively with Nix. It would be great if something like this existed for my music setup without having to compromise on creative choices.
Most of these plugins are of dubious software quality, but that is not mutually exclusive with their ability to accomplish great sounding results. One of the reasons I bought a dedicated machine for music is that I inherently don't really trust them to be running on the same device as my personal computing. Some of them (Universal Audio Apollo) even require kernel extensions on MacOS.
If anyone is attempting to solve this, I'd like to hear about it.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback regarding the site itself, both positive and negative. This is a 1-2 man project, just for fun, but any feedback are always welcome :)
AMA