Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

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jlborges
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Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by jlborges »

Hi all.
My main objective is to compose music and render it in high quality audio files.
I've been using LMMS with SF2 soundfonts and a few VST plugins (windows DLLs). Now it stopped working for some reason even on a fresh clean install with the KXStudio repos.
I've just tried MuSE but it simply dumps the core and doesn't start.
Is there any other software I can run under Linux to do the same?
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Re: Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by English Guy »

Ardour or Qtractor.
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Re: Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by sysrqer »

renoise, tracktion, bitwig, ardour, qtractor, non suite

A similar thread here - viewtopic.php?t=11430

If you want to use windows vsts then there are two options, you can use carla to load them or airwave. Then you can load them up in your chosen host. I use airwave inside renoise myself, and ardour for audio editing (vocals etc).

Also, reaper is pretty solid running under wine and from my experience with it windows vsts are more stable in that than carla or airwave in ardour etc. Depends what you need though.
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Re: Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by Symbient »

Audacity is very simple and user friendly interface and can do high quality audio formats included Wav and Flac. I suppose ardour does the job well enough too and qtractor is a well developed DAW aswell.
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Re: Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by Philotomy »

42low wrote:But with me first the question rases what kind of music you want to go produce. The anwer is important for the right choises.
That interesting. I'm just getting started with recording, and I'm using Bitwig. I mainly record mic'd guitar and vocals, but I also want sampler and MIDI for bass, drums, keyboards, effects, et cetera.

What categories would you put the various Linux DAWs into, as far as matching a DAW to a kind of music?
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Re: Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by bmarkham »

DAWS are sorta like politics ... everybody likes the one they use and persuading them otherwise isn't easy.

And there is a good reason for this. Becoming truly adept at using any modern DAW software is a monumental task. Once you get adept at a DAW you have invested a LOT of time and effort in learning its ins/outs/workflow/idiosyncrasies. Abandoning that investment is tough. Furthermore, once you get truly expert at any given DAW, most of them will do what you can do in any other.

That disclaimer out of the way ...

For loop/midi music, definitely LMMS is about the easiest. It includes super high quality synths as well and it even loads up windows vsts under festige. When I last used it, it had a few annoyances -- no midi export and no recording. I could get around the lack of recording and audio editing by using Audacity. But it works great with vocal samples, etc.

Ardour has improved tremendously in the past year and is actually a very good system for midi as well as audio. Great plugins like DrumGizmo and Drmr as well as the whole murderer's row of linux soft synths work with it fine. But what I like is that I can even integrate hardware midi -- send the midi out the midi port and recapture the audio output from my hardware synths. A downside is it is poorly documented imho. (I say this as a monthly payer to the project.) Features are way out ahead of documentation. However, there is an active and helpful user forum that makes up for this.

Another option now under linux well worth considering due to its fanatical fanbase and support community is reaper. Although it is in beta, you can download a linux NATIVE version of reaper. Works fine for me under KXStudio and OpenSuSE. RIght now its major shortfall is it only supports Linux VST and not LV2. But it is still super solid software especially with all the built in plugins ... and for only $60.

These are just my opinions. I can't offer good opinions on Daws I haven't used such as bitwig, renoise, etc.
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Re: Advice for a DAW under Linux (don't laugh, please!)

Post by wjl »

42low wrote:
Philotomy wrote:
42low wrote:... ardour ain't that great with midi (? hearsay).

I'm to unexperienced with other daw's (ardour just does it for me) so i can't say more than that i read everywhere that those who do productions mostly with samples and midi don't use ardour.
But instead i love Ardour. :mrgreen:
Same here. I used to think that Ardour isn't as good for MIDI as for instance QTractor, Rosegarden or other programs which open up an extra edit window for MIDI events.

But that may well be my inexperience with it; I started Linux Audio in February this year only, and have lots to learn. and like @bmarkham said above, that's a huge task (plus I'm not paying yet for Ardour, but I most probably will).

Now what I absolutely love about it is its ability to select a normalizing level in LUFS (I use the EBU R128 recommendation for broadcasting, which is -23LUFS, but if I want to export for Youtube for instance, I take the same commitee's recommendation of -16LUFS (tho Youtube themselves normalize even louder to -13LUFS as I've read in http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/). That's what I call a professional system at least for mastering, and this feature alone is the deciding factor for me to at least export everything with Ardour.

I also only thought: "dang, you cannot even export MIDI with it!", only due to my own non-knowledge and misunderstanding of it. In its project folders, everything is contained, and that includes the MIDI information for each track. So I stopped comparing and started learning it more and more. Love it so far.

But like @42low said above, I'm not the type of target user for programs like Ableton or Bitwig - I'm more a musician than a sound loops collector. So yes, the type of music you make, and the type of work you'd like to do also plays a role in deciding which program(s) to use. Speaking about Youtube: yes, you can do videos with Ardour, too - at least you have a video in the timeline, and can record, play, compose, voice-over, or whatever you might want to do with it. Been there done that, successfully (it was a company-internal video, so I cannot show or link to that here).

Hope that helps,
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