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

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

#91

Post by gnarlouse »

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.

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

#93

Post by ofalkaed »

mkl wrote: post #87
mimischi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind sharing your DAW app?

Looks like it's nama: https://github.com/bolangi/nama

Nama is pretty good and for more traditional DAW workflows, greatly simplifies using ecasound at some cost. Would love to see ecasound start getting developed again.

Edit: was comparing nama to ecasound there, not the more common graphical DAWs.

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

#94

Post by ofalkaed »

leptons wrote: post #90
ofalkaed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 20 pixel knob has considerably greater resolution than a 20 pixel slider with its max resolution of 20. I don't think I have come across a digital knob that you have to turn with the mouse since the previous century, just drag up or down or left or right.

A slider is just a UI element as is a knob, the underlying resolution does not have to correlate 1:1 with the exact number of pixels something takes up on a screen. The resolution could be effectively infinite depending on the implementation of the controls.

Sure but if you need to resort to tricks to make it work are they really the right UI element for the job? Their being 1:1 is what makes these work. If you fill your UI with 20 pixel sliders which all cover .2khz to 20khz and use shift clicking or the like to make it work, it is going to get irritating rather quickly. 20 pixel knob will not be much better with such a wide range but has the advantage of being able to be used endlessly; one rotation per octave, it will still be a little irritating but a vast improvement.

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

#95

Post by th0ma5 »

gnarlouse wrote: post #91

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…

Despite open plugins, and mostly open end result file formats, the entirety of the media software world is built around proprietary software primarily for several reasons: Ephemeral fads have you making money in one big upfront push, integration of some new technique doesn't lend itself to open standards, or the fact that the actual bulk of paying customers are presumably working musicians with budgets, and that market is ultimately small. The side effect of this, much like radios, rc planes and drones, and many other hobbies, is that a collection of smaller product producing organizations have an even smaller, more even playing field full of smaller professionals and some amateurs. Some of the modular hardware producers have the right idea and provide free versions of their hardware as plugins as a marketing gimmick for their actual hardware. However, outside of the Linux world, the mystique of a proprietary salve that will supplant your creative block pushes people towards short sighted sales pushes instead of trying to lock in a give and take interaction with the broader community.

But I would love every thing that you list. I think things like PipeWire for better or worse are pushing things towards sanity, or least, better ideas for managing the mess in the open source world, which is decades in the making.

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

#96

Post by rewgs »

gnarlouse wrote: post #91

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'm a former film/game composer turned programmer, and you basically just outlined what I hope to be my life's work :p Each and every one of these is a white whale for me, and is something I'm working on in one way or another.

Get in touch if you'd like to chat more about this stuff (my email is in my profile).

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

#97

Post by jpetso »

cadr wrote: post #2

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

Zynthian (a RPi-based synth collection & groovebox) lists some of the most prominent ones on its website: https://zynthian.org/engines

Its install recipes directory may yield a less fancy, but probably more comprehensive list: https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-sys/tree/oram/scripts/r...

With Zynthian OS up and running, the full list of plugins shows in its webconf page, it's so long that they have to hide basically most of the plugins from the main on-device UI.

Roughly speaking, if it's open source, most likely it will work. If it's proprietary, assume that only Pianoteq and a small number of u-he plugins will work. Most commercial products with binary-only distribution don't feel like RPi devices are a large enough market for them to build binaries for it. Even if they otherwise offer ARM builds for Apple Silicon and Linux builds for x86.

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

#98

Post by jpetso »

dylan604 wrote: post #31
gkhartman wrote: post #30

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.

It really says something about designers when there's so few of them contributing to FOSS projects. It also says something about FOSS devs that they don't/can't find better UI for their projects. Especially for web based UIs where CSS isn't that hard to look at sites you want to emulate and get much much closer to a respectable UI.

A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations.

Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit.

Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects.

As always, be the change you want to see in the world.

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

#99

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ofalkaed wrote: post #82
notepad0x90 wrote: post #19

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)

Back in the pre-alsa days when linux used OSS you could pipe /dev/random into /dev/dsp and get noise, you could pipe anything into /dev/dsp and generally get some sort of noise. Possibly can still do this on the BSDs since they still use OSS.

You can still do it with ALSA if it has the OSS compat modules loaded.

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

#100

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gnarlouse wrote: post #91

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…

The site linked to by the title is about mostly FLOSS projects for people doing audio/music creation work on Linux. The problems you're describing, in particular the licensing ones, are endemic to proprietary software. While this still affects e.g. Bitwig on Linux, it isn't really a feature of Linux audio software in general.

Cloud work so far just hasn't had much appeal. People are walking around with Apple M{1..5} laptops with enough compute power to do things you couldn't do on a studio system 10 years ago. Sure, if you're doing sample based playback with really high end sample libraries, or physically modelled synthesis, you can always max out any system with a large orchestral piece, but the stuff you can do on a laptop on a bus or train or the back of car really does encompass most of what most people want to be able to do.

iTunes was useless for people on Linux, just as any system that convinced Waves to participate in some sort of "implicit licensing" scheme would be (even though they run linux inside the hardware units they sell). Again, this link was to a set specifically concerned with the situation for audio work on Linux; until plugin developers en masse recognize it as a valid latform that they should support (improvements every day, but very slowly), this will as useless for Linux as iTunes was (and remains).

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