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Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

hydrogen-music.org

21–30 of 134 posts

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#21

I have tried Hydrogen some time ago when I tried to build a linux audio workstation with Jack and Ardour. As much as it pains me to say this, don't expect it to be even remotely as good as commercial software drum machines like EZDrummer, Superior Drummer or Studio Drummer in terms of sample quality or usability. Generally, I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, e…

For me a huge change the past years was the coming of Bitwig Studio audio workstation to Linux. Commercial software, but rock solid and high quality.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most DAWS might have drum machines but most serious users end up using a third party product. The built-in ones are undeniably good but thinks like Kontact/EZDrummer etc. are on another level.

Never used Kontact or EZ Drummer, but seems like it would be hard to beat Ableton Live Suite's combo of drumracks and stacking effects per drum sample... Do you have experience with both? Any reason I should look into the former when I've invested in the latter? edit: Nevermind, after looking at Native's offering (Kontact), I can see it has a lot of advantages for a certain kind of music, but that isn't the music I'm…

Kontakt is pretty cool, not just for drum machines but any samples. For example, the NI orchestra samples are absolutely amazing. For drums it's just another sampler, you're probably better off sticking with Drum Rack unless you want the specific samples offer d by Kontakt.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#24

I have tried Hydrogen some time ago when I tried to build a linux audio workstation with Jack and Ardour. As much as it pains me to say this, don't expect it to be even remotely as good as commercial software drum machines like EZDrummer, Superior Drummer or Studio Drummer in terms of sample quality or usability. Generally, I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, e…

I haven't used Hydrogen yet but it seems to be much more than just a drum synth/simulator, such as the ones you referenced as comparison (Studio Drummer, EZDrummer, etc).

Drum machines can mix and compose a variety to samples and synth sounds, these samples can be drum kit sounds but it's not necessary. So you likely only sampled a limited portion of the functionality.

You could also always purchase high quality drum samples and use it with this OSS programs if the built in library sucks. From experience, you could accomplish quite a bit with relatively simple drum machines.

The synth products on the other hand were the thing that was complex and needs to be high quality. Which is likely what you were looking for a drum simulation.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#26

Check out LMMS (Let's Make Music). It's like Ableton for Linux and already has VST's like Hydrogen, etc. built into the software itself: https://lmms.io/

LMMS is great for easy EDM composition, but lacks a lot of things essential for a serious workflow.

I'd recommend Ardour for more studio-oriented work: http://ardour.org/

Also, Ardour works with Alsa as backend.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#27
post #23

It's great on the pi3 runs well in arm. It's nice this isn't abandonware a lot of the open source projects for Linux audio became abandonware.

Yeah, the number of single developer projects combined with developer attrition has certainly orphaned a ton of linux-audio projects.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#28
post #23

It's great on the pi3 runs well in arm. It's nice this isn't abandonware a lot of the open source projects for Linux audio became abandonware.

Do you happen to have a good reference on using the Pi3 for audio? I spent a lot of Saturday trying to make mine do some stuff, and while a lot of the technical snafus were the usual sort, I did end up burning a lot of time googling around until I finally found someone who suggested turning off CPU performance scaling. Which was a forehead slap moment for me after that, but, still, it'd be nice if there was somewhere I could go that had that stuff more laid out.

(As implied, I've googled already. A lot.)

(The Pi3 seems to have more than enough CPU power for it to do what I want but I was having trouble just routing audio in a USB mic straight out to the speakers without dropouts and failures two or three times a second, even though the CPU is barely at 10%. I think turning off the scaling seemed to fix that, though I ran out of time just as I tried that to be sure.)

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