Fedora Linux for music production.

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

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Anders
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Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by Anders »

I've used ubuntu studio for music production. Now I'm gonna try to use Fedora (cinnamon edition).

Does anyone have experience using Fedora for music production? Does it work as well as ubuntu studio?

Is it as easy to install and run audio software (jack, rosegarden, linuxsampler)? Is there an audio quality difference between the different distributions?

Is it smooth to install audio software with fedora. With ubuntu studio it was very smooth one could just use the gui installation tool and click on the software to install (most audio software was available to click on to install also)?

Any other experiences or comments!
jonetsu
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by jonetsu »

I used Fedora + CCRMA for some time. Works fine. Since then though I use plain Linux distros. Been using Linux Mint but they stopped KDE support, so it gave me the opportunity to look for something else and found Xubuntu which I like.
Anders
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by Anders »

Is it easy ti install the CCRMA package? Does one install it after one has installed the Fedora OS?

Did you notice any differences in Audio quality? Was it easy to run linuxsampler, rosegarden, audacity and the like?

Why did you switch to Mint and then Xubuntu?
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davephillips
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by davephillips »

Greetings,

I've been using Fedora 23 for quite a while, with the Planet CCRMA extensions. It's old, but it's a very stable system. I plan to upgrade to the latest Fedora supported by Planet C, just gotta find the time.

Best,

dp
jonetsu
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by jonetsu »

Anders wrote:Is it easy ti install the CCRMA package? Does one install it after one has installed the Fedora OS?
Yes, it's and add-on. It installs easily, at least it did back in those days. I do not know the status today but the last update was last month:

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

As Dave wrote, it's "Planet CCRMA" "CCRMA" being the audio (music and acoustics) research dept. of Standford University.
Anders wrote:Did you notice any differences in Audio quality?
Yes, it's getting better and better. Due to developing a knowledge of audio production. 8)

Apart from that, it's impossible to compare even though it's always the same audio interface (1010LT) the speakers have changed considerably.
Anders wrote:Was it easy to run linuxsampler, rosegarden, audacity and the like?
Those are three applications that I do not use. The whole point of Planet CCRMA is to provide tested packages for audio applications. So if you see those apps in their repository, it's then a good sign.
Anders wrote:Why did you switch to Mint and then Xubuntu?
One version of Fedora had some bugs for the machine I was using, so I switched to Linux MInt and ran LM for a few years. Then the people at LM dropped KDE support so I look for a replacement and after trying some (it's in a thread here) I settled for Xubuntu 18.04. I prefer the lightness of Xfce to KDE. I thought I really needed KDE but it turns out that's not the case. I prefer a general-purpose distro with a well-furnished repository than a smaller distro with less manpower to fix things and update.Caveat: I do not run much Linux open source plugins and audio apps. I use a low latency kernel that installs in a snap from the repo, plus jackd, jacksink, qjackctl also from the repo. The rest of the music creation stack is made of Bitwig and Mixbus32C plus various commercial Linux and Windows VST plugins.
Anders
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by Anders »

Has anyone tried Fedora with the LXDE or LXQT GUI for music production? If so how is the experience?

Are they faster than cinnamon?

Do they work well, can one easily install CCRMA on all these "spins"?

Do they all have gui software for installing new apps and software?
merlyn
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by merlyn »

I started music production on Linux with Fedora 12 on a 32 bit machine. The layout of the Planet CCRMA page hasn't changed since then. :)

The instructions on the Planet CCRMA site all involve the command line, and that's what I used.

There may be GUI tools now in Fedora 30. I would still use the command line personally.

I had a few DEs installed to try them out including the super-lightweight BlackBox window manager. It's possible to have a few DEs installed, and choose the one you want at the login screen. This doen't affect CCRMA at all.

Planet CCRMA is really a set of repositories and CCRMA core -- a low latency kernel and settings package.

It seems the polar opposite of Ubuntu Studio, but it was solid as @davephillips wrote. I don't remember it crashing once.
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Digital Larry
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by Digital Larry »

I just went through setup of Fedora 30 and then Planet CCRMA stuff on top of that. After going through all that, which took several hours, I was finally getting good non glitchy results with Hydrogen and the real time kernel. Then I rebooted and it didn't come back up. So I moved to Ubuntu Studio 19. Yes of course it has a few bumps to get through but nothing like Planet CCRMA. What bothers me about a fair amount of Linux stuff is (as you must know) the instructions are often out of date or completely obsolete, and there's not much help around if things go wrong. I posted a message onto the Planet CCRMA mailing list and the only response I got was from a guy saying my e-mail set off some warning system.

I also subsequently read this which may give you some perspective.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fe ... CCRMA.html

At this point apparently the only app that is unique to CCRMA repos is SuperCollider. I installed the KXstudio repo links on Ubuntu Studio and got Ardour etc. without incident.

Fedora's default desktop has this theme which I hate, where they (due to boredom or who knows what) decided it would be a REALLY REVOLUTIONARY UI improvement to remove the minimize/maximize/close buttons from the top bar and instead make you right click and select it from a menu each time. WOW. Talk about bad ideas. Of course like any distro you can change the desktop, but you wanted to make music right?
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Digital Larry
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by Digital Larry »

jonetsu wrote:
Anders wrote:Did you notice any differences in Audio quality?
Yes, it's getting better and better. Due to developing a knowledge of audio production. 8)

Apart from that, it's impossible to compare even though it's always the same audio interface (1010LT) the speakers have changed considerably.
I'm not sure it's possible to say that one distro audio-quality wise is better than the other if they are using the same apps and external hardware. The only thing I can imagine making a difference is a real time vs. low latency kernel. Maybe you were being facetious? That's fine. More to the point is there any reason to think that different distros running the same apps on the same hardware would have audio quality differences of than timing jitter/glitches? To be sure those are real possibilities. I just don't know how to quantify those. For sure, when I used Hydrogen on Fedora 30 before installing the RT kernel, it was glitchy and if I moved the mouse around it got worse. That's a pretty clear sign. After the RT kernel installation that did not happen. I ran the same test on Ubuntu Studio with the low latency kernel and also heard no glitchiness.
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by jonetsu »

Digital Larry wrote:I'm not sure it's possible to say that one distro audio-quality wise is better than the other if they are using the same apps and external hardware. The only thing I can imagine making a difference is a real time vs. low latency kernel. Maybe you were being facetious?
The gist of my reply was contained in: "Yes, it's getting better and better. Due to developing a knowledge of audio production.". In other words the distro does not matter :) But (on-going) knowledge about audio production does.

Cheers.
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Re: Fedora Linux for music production.

Post by Baggypants »

Digital Larry wrote: Fedora's default desktop has this theme which I hate, where they (due to boredom or who knows what) decided it would be a REALLY REVOLUTIONARY UI improvement to remove the minimize/maximize/close buttons from the top bar and instead make you right click and select it from a menu each time. WOW. Talk about bad ideas. Of course like any distro you can change the desktop, but you wanted to make music right?
Offtopic I know, but Gnome3 maximises windows if you drag them to the top of the screen. You can't minimise windows because there is no toolbar for them to minimise to.

I've been using Fedora for music production for about 7 years. I've not used Planet CCRMA for a long time. A useful repository is https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs ... /linuxmao/
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