Do you use Linux for music production? What software and tools do you use?
I'm an amateur musician and amateur audio editor and creator. (I noticed the ~creative category isn't that active, and) I was wondering if there were any Tilders who make music with Linux. Activities such as:
- recording instruments or vocals
- producing music digitally
- composing and using score writing software
- editing and mixing audio
I'm interested to learn more and improve my craft(s), so perhaps people could share their go-to apps or hardware, and tips for beginners, like how best to configure Linux for audio work (minimize latency, etc.). I'd be interested in any finished (or unfinished!) works produced with Linux that anyone would want to share.
I mainly use ardour for audio production, including MIDI. I use Musescore for making scores / sheet music. I occasionally use command line tools like exiftool and ffmpeg. I've dabbled with LMMS, and have outgrown Audacity.
I use Renoise, and I'll use Zyn-Fusion, Helm or Surge if I'm using a VST. These three are available as Linux and Windows VSTs (not LV2 or LADSPA), and the SDK is dual licensed under their propreitary license, and GPL3 depending on your use case (building VSTs is fine). Renoise is proprietary software, but it's the one tool I can't replace after Aldrin (a BuzzTracker) clone died. It also has a load of built-in effects, so I don't need third-party effects, and a sampler robust enough that I generally wind up using it for most of my synthesis. I use it for recording, I mix and master in Renoise, and would even record everything I needed into renoise if I did that. Renoise is unique in that even in Windows, without ASIO, it's really low latency. It works seamlessly with JACK, as well.
For non-DAW stuff, I like to tinker with livecoding, which provides a means of creating algorithmically generated music, that stuff is labelled in my soundcloud below, and bought an OP-1 at the start of lockdown that I don't use nearly enough.
I've dabbled with Radium (developed by one of the original Octamed devs), but I feel like its feature set is more a result of creep than actual goals, and the crazy keybinds is has seems to reflect this. I can't quite get a nice workflow on it, either.
For minimizing latency, regular kernels are great, -rt is best -zen is alright, but the big difference is enabling realtime permissions. I'd need to know your distro to offer meaningful help, as they've all got slightly different ways of configuring it for you, despite all using the same exact technologies, but if your user can't enable realtime audio, you'll take a performance hit.
For some examples, everything here is done in Renoise, without VSTs, unless otherwise mentioned
As far as audacity: It's great for editing. I'll set up drumkits for my OP1 with it, and it's great for when you don't need to make dynamic changes to audio. The first piece of music I ever made, a decade ago, was done by generating each phrase in Audacity, often one note at a time, with a note-to-frequency chart. Took me two hours for a minute of boring music.
I use Gentoo on all my computers. I'm very comfortable changing kernel settings (
make menuconfig) and tweaking/etc/**/*, and so on. I'm just in the middle of transitioning to a new desktop. On my old desktop, I got the latency down to 8-10ms playing live MIDI, and I found that acceptable. For some reason, though, my new desktop, which is supposed to be considerably more powerful, I get xruns when setting JACK frame size maybe double what it was on the old. I'm assuming I missed some tweak somewhere that I made on the old one.http://linuxmusic.rocks/ - I came across this the other day
Back when I did music production on Linux, I really liked qtractor.
For music sheets, I really like lilypond.
I've started a new project recently which will work on all platforms, but it will take a bit of time before it's usable. It's hosted here: https://github.com/Apostolique/Texo
One of my main hobbies is making scores from recordings. I use MuseScore to enter notes and edit the bars. Then I manually make LilyPond files, proofread them on screen to match the MuseScore scores, and finally print them out to make final edits.
LilyPond produces gorgeous scores with dead consistent notation, but in my experience it's not pleasant to use unless you've already got a sheet to copy from. Also there aren't built-in functions to, for example, "make this section all staccato" or "put octaves above these notes". You can write those manually in Scheme, but I haven't been bothered to learn the interface.
For some other projects I use MilkyTracker and SunVox to produce audio. My requirements are basically "start putting in notes as fast as possible" which fits those programs really well.
I've got my eye on Orca to explore in the future.
I use Bitwig with an Akai MPK225 and a full size digital keyboard as a MIDI input going through a Scarlett 2i4 (along with any other line inputs). I find Bitwig to be great. I had tried Ardour as I wanted to stay in the FOSS world, but I couldn't get to grips with it whatsoever. Bitwig has full support for Linux however and works flawlessly in my experience. I remember reading that a good chunk of the core Ableton team left to start Bitwig a few years ago and the design is super similar and features are at parity as far as I can tell. Bitwig also seems to innovate more than competitors with the modular grid in the more recent release and the promise of collaborative sessions in future releases.
Bitwig looks pretty pricey, at least for someone of my (lesser) calibre https://www.bitwig.com/en/shop/webshop.html -- especially considering that there's an annual cost (for upgrades) beyond the upfront initial cost. I can admit, though, that, as an amateur, I guess I don't know what I'm missing, having not used expensive commercial software yet.
Not sure on the stance of the overall community, but personally I'm pretty guilt free about not paying for it as I'm a complete amateur also, only using it a handful of times a year. The free trial also allows you to use the software fully, only disabling the save project and export features if you wanna try it out!
I'm very interested. I would like to move away from Logic and Pro Tools. Would like to try open source alternatives. What distribution of Linux would be best for running a DAW?
I think the distro doesn't matter as much, as long as you do some research regarding some A/V-focused tweaks like
CONFIG_PREEMPT, and realtime kernel. I do know there are some AV-specialized distros. For example, here's a list: http://linux-sound.org/distro.html I haven't tried any of them. I've been satisfied so far with just using my day-to-day distro (Gentoo), and doing the kernel tweaks and whatnot.From that list of AV-specialized distros it seems they are either based around Debian or Ubuntu.
How much tweaking have you done with your Gentoo setup?
I believe all I've done is kernel config changes, and some local ALSA config (
~/.asoundrc). In particular: I'm not using a specialized realtime kernel or realtime kernel patch.Wait a minute. I read @knocklessmonster talking about kernels and I honestly thought he was talking about synthesis engines. Are you saying that you need to reconfigure the Linux kernel for better audio latency?
Debian and Ubuntu provide -rt patched kernels if you want to go that way and I believe they use CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT, but I've also seen discussion that this is more useful for embedded use, like in machine controllers, than audio latency.
Some tweaks I've employed were Con Kolivas's patchset, which included BFS (now MuQSS) his BFQ (Brain Fuck Queuing) and other tweaks on my old netbook, and these caused a significant improvement, particularly BFS because it takes the ideas of CFS (the current default scheduler) and removes some restrictions, allowing realtime applications to get queued much faster. By his admission, they don't necessarily provide faster throughput in a server, but his goal is to make things "snappier". This provides some benefit to audio and even heavy graphics workloads. If you don't want to build these, you can use the Liquorix kernel binary on Debian distros, or the zen patchset, or zen kernel package if available for your distro. Building isn't horribly difficult, but can be time consuming.
It's been a while, but I really enjoyed playing with AlsaModularSynth : a digital replica of an analog modular synthesizer. An easy way to reunite with the eerie sounds of the electronica of yore.
By easy, I mean easier than to buy a Moog or to DIY a hardware approximation ;-) It took me some effort to get started, but it was worth it.
I'm a little late to the party seeing this thread was posted over a week ago but I'll chime in here regardless: I use Fedora Linux for music production, but I haven't fully setup everything yet (particularly plug-in's). Getting FL Studio working at all was actually a fairly trivial process. Getting something like Serum working has taken a little bit more time; there are several performance and usability related issues that I haven't nailed down yet (move the mouse cursor within the Serum window and you get 0-1 fps, which means you can't actually manipulate anything).
I am also interested in trying out Bitwig for a number of reasons while using FL as the daily driver. For the most part, I think people are sleeping on FL Studio as competent audio creation software (Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) speaks at length about this and other topics as well; I recommend that channel - the dude knows his stuff).
I took a break from creating much since last December, a move that was intentional as I just needed to spend time doing and thinking about other things but I feel like I'm almost at the point where I'm ready to create again. I recently purchased parts for a new system: a 3800x with a Gigabyte X570-based motherboard and I'll still catch myself in passing thinking about how awesome of an upgrade it is over my prior 2500k system. It's going to be a powerhouse and I'm grateful to have it. I was "constantly" running into the performance ceiling.
The last step of course is to get everything actually running on Linux and I want to be committed to that. I really don't want to use Windows anymore. I'll be lying in bed listening to my machine spur up doing stuff for no reason even if there aren't any programs running whereas in Linux, I know my machine is truly mine.
I did find a forum you guys might be interested in, linuxmusicians.com. I registered there a little while ago and is actually decently active and I still find myself stopping by and learning stuff so it might be of note to someone here as well.
Fedora, by the way, is a super rad operating system especially in a non-default state (check out Gnome Extensions website). I think I'm also going to be playing around with a new shell (link #1), (link 2).
Happy to see more creativity / project oriented posts on Tildes; I really should be posting more here again and elsewhere. There aren't too many places* (I spend a lot of time on music tracker forums) online I find where stuff like this can be discussed both on a creative level and on a technical level and I really like seeing that here.
I think I'll start thinking about making music for a game, tbd.
Edit x2: oh also, check out https://llllllll.co/