To briefly describe the position I'm coming from:
Linux wise, I'm a doing 2nd year CS courses, so I'm no pro, but I do have some experience with it. For the past 6 months I've also been experimenting with using Ubuntu as my primary OS.
Music wise, I studied classical music in school and really enjoyed composition, which at the time was using sheet music notation software (the infamous Sibelius). Recently I've bought myself a basic midi keyboard and I'm interested in experimenting with various electronic music production (software synths etc.)
My keyboard came with Ableton Live Lite and I've used that to get a taste of software synths etc. But in the long term, I suspect live lite is going to be a bit too limiting, and I don't have the money to buy the professional version (and besides, doing stuff on linux seems like a fun way to integrate my love of music with my love of tech).
Right now my focus is definitely on learning more with MIDI and software synths etc., but in the medium term I might want to explore some more serious mixing/mastering,and in the long term might want to get some proper equipment for audio recording as well.
From what I've seen by reading around this forum and elsewhere, I see a few options:
- Using a DAW or similar (Qtractor, MusE, or LMMS). Probably not Ardour because people say it's midi isn't quite up to scratch
- Build-it-yourself by using JACK to combine things like Rosegarden, various synth and/or effect software, and potentially one of the DAWs as well.
Anyone have any advice on which route to consider, and/or what software to look into further for my use case? Thanks