windows refugee from NYC

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braintree12
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windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

Hi, all. Detroit-ish 8 bit-ish techno producer/composer (bedroom variety) here. I used Cubase on Windows for a decade or so, until one morning, a popup appeared telling me that W10 was ready to install on my system. This was such a disgusting violation of trust that the next thing I did, after removing the W10 malware, was start looking for a Linux-based PC workstation. I'm not a programmer. I found a PC with a PCI slot so I could install the RME HDSP 9632 soundcard (incredibly, still in production - pricy though). The ALSA driver package includes an RME Totalmix clone (kudos to the reverse engineer from 15 years ago) so I can mix multiple channels of audio, ADAT and sp/dif. All very stable.
I use Ubuntu Studio and Ardour and have found both to be reliable but I am still gradually figuring out what works and doesn't work. What mostly doesn't work are certain plugins that crash Ardour. Generally, generic-looking GUIs are OK and anything with gradients is a ticking time bomb. So far in the YAY column are a-fluidsynth, LSP sampler, Loomer Aspect (loads slowly but doesn't crash), and Helm, and in the NAY column are Harrison plugins, Calf, samplv1, Tracktion BioTek (blam -- instant annihilation).
Also, an Ableton or Cubase user from Windowsville is going to have a tough time composing with Ardour's MIDI tracks. For my purposes they are (barely) adequate. I can use them to trigger notes in a modular synth and record back with almost 0 latency. The MIDI clock out will drive a modular sequencer such as the Doepfer A-154/155. I can also use MIDI to play the softsynths and samplers above but the "regions" are buggy on looping and hard to move notes around inside. Ardour seems to be mostly geared to recording and mixing audio and the MIDI is on the back burner for them. For what I want to do it's enough -- get some stuff recorded, then tweak and rearrange as audio, then export.
For a final "master" I've found Linux plugins that are an acceptable substitute for the PSP Vintage Warmer I used on Windows. I use Audacity to export wavs to mp3. Sorry this was so long but that's my history.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by folderol »

Welcome aboard.
Your experience seems to be quite common :(
You should find just about everything you want here.... several versions :lol:
Once you get a bit more comfortable, do try different things. You never know what you might turn up that's *exactly* what you're missing. Even just trying different desktops can be an eye-opener.
Last edited by folderol on Tue Feb 28, 2017 10:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by rghvdberg »

Hang in there. Ardour is steadily improving on the midi side of things.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by sysrqer »

Make sure you are using an up to date version of ardour.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

Thanks for the welcomes and encouragement. I've got the most current Ardour, downloaded from the site. One plugin, which I really like, was freezing (in the LV2 version) and crashing Ardour (in the LXVST version). I reported it to the developer and he tried it out and recognized there was a problem. I sent him the stack trace using GDB and a core file (something I learned how to do! as a newb) and he's looking into it now. He's pretty sure it's a GUI issue. I won't say what plugin because he's working on it (and the LV2 works fine as long as I remember to close it when exporting). Others have mentioned problems with Calf and Harrison in Ardour. It's easier to just keep looking for plugins that work (although I actually paid for Harrison licenses -- ouch). I look forward to seeing what's said about various plugins in these forums.
In theory I'm open to trying out other distros but I'm pretty challenged as far as setting up partitions, connecting drivers, etc. It's mostly a time/learning curve issue rather than innate tech-phobia. I started on Mint and found that it (and my PC) couldn't handle Ardour -- too many x-runs and slow graphics. I moved to Ubuntu Studio and got a faster processor and it was like night and day. I've been following some of the pro and con discussions of Ubuntu Studio but haven't been moved to change (yet).
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by mkornblum71 »

So this may sound a bit blasphemous, but as much as I love Ardour, there really is no comparing it with Ableton. Ideally, you should try to find a DAW that best reflects your work flow, whether it be proprietary, open source or otherwise. This may mean cracking open the wallet and purchasing a copy of Tracktion or Bitwig Studio. Although none of the DAWs I have mentioned will exactly map to the functionality you miss in Windows, one of them may have that special feature that you're missing.

The point I'm making here is that Linux as a platform is all about freedom of choice. While some take great pride in making music with open source software, others (for better or worse) require tools that have yet to make their way into the repositories of our favorite distros. Regardless, enjoy your stay here, and feel free to select whatever software you need to build something awesome.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

Thanks for the suggestion, Have been looking at Tracktion and will likely give it a go. In theory (and within budget limits) I'm all for companies that support Linux as an alternative to the Gates/ Jobs duopoly.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

Forgot to mention - I actually prefer Ardour's editing window to Ableton's -- it's much more flexible, easy to resize and do cutting and pasting. If they can just get MIDI editing working where notes don't drift around while you're moving them, and looping doesn't cause notes to suddenly go silent, it would be a very usable DAW for me.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

Installing Ardour 5.8 today fixed an issue with MIDI notes moving around while editing. I also installed the Carla plugin host (new beta version) and it seems to load the Harrison plugins that were otherwise crashing. The GUIs for Calf and Harrison don't entirely work but I can use "edit" to mess with the underlying parameters. I have an issue with Carla popping when MIDI is looping in Ardour, which I've posted to the KXStudio forum. Just wanted to note these followups to my gripes above.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by folderol »

Just a small point.
Managing looping with MIDI is a notoriously difficult problem. Because the actions are discrete and separate controls, not a continuous stream like audio.

In particular, noteon and noteoff. If your loop is simplistic and the loop point is just before a noteoff you'll quickly end up with a stack of noteons. If the loop time is long, you'll have 'stuck' notes. How the receiving software will deal with these situations is left as an exercise for the student :roll:
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by sysrqer »

I seem to remember something about the Harrison plugins in ardour on the ardour forum, I think they were saying that they had to manually replace some files in the ardour package. Maybe have a look on there for some info.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

folderol, Yes, thanks, those are the exact problems I'm having with MIDI looping (plus pops in Carla). I'll try to be more patient. Setting the loop points slightly outside the region in non-grid mode is the best workaround I've found but it's a pain to do that with every loop. Basically, I just try to write each loop, save to audio, and get out of MIDI as fast as possible.

sysrqer, The suggestion on the Ardour forum was to move the Harrison plugins from opt/Ardour to usr/lib/lv2. That didn't work for me, unfortunately.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by jonetsu »

Here is how I create and mix in Linux, since a bit more than a year now.

Machine: Linux Mint 17 (will be upgraded soon), i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16 GB RAM. Audio interface: M-Audio 1010LT. Hardware processing: ART MPA2 tube preamp, ART VLA2 tube compressor, Lexicon MX200.

Creation, sketching, arrangements: Bitwig 2.0

Plugins are used in this process to sometimes give and idea of how it would sound at the mixing stage, and sometimes the processing done in Bitwig remains there and is exported as such for mixing. I expect more of the latter could take place as the Bitwig modulators are used. Audio plugins varieties used: Overtone DSP, u-he, Tracktion DAW Essentials, Bitwig's own. Usually I prefer using OvertoneDSP vintage emulations in Bitwig as the risk for crashing is much less than in Ardour/Mixbus. Soft instruments used: u-he, DiscoDSP, Zynaddsubfx, Biotek, Pianoteq, Redux. None of them crashes.

Once cooked to a desired level, the audio tracks are exported and imported into:

Mixing: Mixbus 32C 3.7.27

Plugins used: Harrison, u-he, X42, Tracktion DAW Essentials, Calf. I use Calf with caution because of the tendency to crash Mixbus/Ardour and since Mixbus does not have any crash protection, the whole thing goes down instantly, which is not a nice feeling. I also used Tracktion plugins with caution since one of them has issued a max volume 'pop' once. None of the other plugins mentioned have this problem. An advantage of Mixbus32C is that it already offers, per track, the emulation of the 32C mixing console EQ for tone coloration, a standard compressor/limiter/leveler and a tape saturation. Harrison plugins are great at this stage, as well as u-he and X42 for metering and first stage EQ. As part of mixing, Mixbus' editing mode is put to good use and there could be structural changes at this time. Sometimes it mak happen that an additioal track feels required, so it's back to Bitwig to record that track and then exporting only that one back into Mixbus to continue mixing.

I have been doing that only for a bit more than a year and still have a lot to learn. You can hear some of the material I did by checking out the signature below.

Plain and simple: without Bitwig none of the creativity, and none of the growth in creativity could be accomplished in easy terms.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by braintree12 »

Nice tunes. I can definitely hear the warmer production from the hardware processors and use of a separate, Harrison mix. "Interlude1" is especially sweet but they're all good. You make a strong case for Bitwig; I hadn't really checked it out and didn't realize they use the Ableton style "scenes" page, and seem to have actually improved on it by making the scenes and timeline viewable at the same time.
I can see a threat to the concept of a "Linux musician" here. Bitwig seems very interested in locking the user into their ecosystem and even specifies "Ubuntu" on their download page, rather than "Linux." Contrast this with opening a Carla standalone patchbay and configuring a setup using nothing but indie plugins. But where the midi pattern is glitchy and the bpm on the step sequencer can't be set to a whole number.
The tradeoff Bitwig is offering is stability, which is a powerful incentive for a musician. Someone on the Ardour forum complained that if "I am fighting Ardour I am not making music" and that's a legit gripe.
Bitwig also seems somewhat chameleon-like in promoting the virtues of JACK to Linux users while singing the praises of the "touchscreen way of making music" to Microsoft Surface tablet users. I can see wanting some lines to be drawn.
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Re: windows refugee from NYC

Post by jonetsu »

Thanks for the comments ! About Bitwig locking users and specifying Ubuntu: recently in a discussion with Robin Gareus of Ardour/Mixbus/X42 I compared the dependencies of both Mixbus and Bitwig. The problem was that the Zynsubaddfx synth would not load in Mixbus. It turns out that Bitwig,being a commecial product, cannout link against most of the Open Source libraries for licensing reasons. This turns out to be a benefit in this case since the problem for Mixbus to use that synth is that Mixbus already loads libraries that Zynaddsubfx will attempt to load. In the same space. Zynaddsubfx will be fixing this eventually on their side.

This means that even though Bitwig specifies Ubuntu, it is pretty much self-contained. Opening up the Debian package and looking at the Debian install scripts will show how it's installed on a system. Should work on most Linux distros. I understand them for not providing .rpm and other compressed formats for different distros and keep it to a very popular one, Ubuntu (and its derivatives such as Linux Mint that I use).

About Carla, Bitwig provides its own host for plugin processes, which is configurable. Bitwig will not crash when a plugin does. As it was said here recently, it's more useful to access the plugin directly than to go through a host (topic mentioning Airwave) and I would agree with that. For jackd/Microsoft, there's no binding. Bitwig caters to all platforms they support so as long as their touch screen stuff does not interfere with the Linux use, then it's all right. And who knows, it could be in a few years that Linux will also have a compatible touch screen approach or some such (there are some now but perhaps not directly compatible).

What is a Linux Musician is a good question. After all it does not directly mean an Open Source Musician. It also brings the question of commercial interactivity with Linux and how it can benefit Linux in turn. There are advantages of running Linux in a studio: file system stability, use of resources and processes, simplicity of the system (or rather, transparency) which allows to customize a system for exactly what one wants and be certain there are no hidden processes and such, easy of backup configurations, etc. But then studio owners and musicians also want to use their favorite plugins, that market being targeted straight at Windows/Mac. For instance OvertoneDSP are the only ones making a couple of vintage emulations that can run on Linux. Not much at all.

How much can commercial interaction bring Linux a bit more closer to the forefront ? As far as I see it, it helps.

Having much, much less plugins and synths but nevertheless being able to tap into high quality ones also brings out creativity in sonic sculptures and mixing. One uses more of what is available and more theory to bring out sounds instead of picking up yet another plugin that would 'fix the problem'. Without commercial software in Linux this would be much more limited in quality as there is no way people developing software on the side can compete with businesses even if those are pretty small teams such as u-he and Bitwig. The number of man hours, or rather man years, simply does not add up on the Open Source side, even with all the positive vibrations so to speak.

So I see it as a good 'mix' to have both Open Source and commercial interests joined in such a venture and as such I'm afraid I do not see any 'locking'. If one wants to use only 8-bit synths and nothing else, then it could be a locking problem unless the music output it always aimed at 8-bit music which is then freedom within this universe. Freedom is after all relative.

Cheers.
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