Getting into Music and Audio

General system Gaming, sound and video
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I’ve started playing the piano and am wanting to dabble into song recording, mixing, music apps, synth apps, etc. I am completely new to it all. I picked up a music bundle at Humble Bundle that included Mixcraft 8 and 9 and was thinking of installing that to start with. Unfortunately, its Windows only so looks like I will need Wine.

Are there any musicians on here who can recommend their setups and what to install to get everything up and running smoothly. This is my first adventure into music and audio, so I really appreciate the help.

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Depends on your use case…

I use Bitwig as a native linux daw…there are others (Reaper , Ardour, etc…)

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge - For running windows VST’s

You may or may not want to set up Jack (with something like https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/studio-controls-git/ or qjacktl)

If you don’t need what jack brings, you can just stick with ALSA or pulse (but I find Pipewire to do better if your game)

I believe soon pipewire will be the easiest method…but if your stressing things with Jack perhaps it is not quite there (from teh commit pace it will be soon).

Free synths like Surge and Vital are good for a start and have linux native versions

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Thanks for the quick reply. I think I will start with one of the Linux Native apps, since I want to spend time actually recording and mixing and not a ton of time trying to get it to work. Bitwig looks nice, but is a bit out of my price range as I am just starting.

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Yeah Bitwig is nice, epsecially for experimental/electronic stuff.

Something like Ardour, lmms, Reaper , Zrythm etc are probably worth looking into.

There is also VCV rack and a number of free synths in the arch repos

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Thank you. I am gonna give Ardour a go to start with and see how that goes. Will also check out the synths. VCV looks pretty cool, though I don’t pretend to understand what they all do

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Nice.

Have fun! :slight_smile:

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I also think Ardour would be a good fit. I know there is a learning curve when it comes to this stuff.

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If you do any audio work, you will soon find PulseAudio to be woefully inadequate. In fact, it’s utter rubbish, the moment you try something more complicated than watching YouTube videos.

Your options, as mentioned above, are Jack and Pipewire.

Pipewire is much simpler to use, as it does not require any setup, just install it and pipewire-pulse.

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Here is a good starting point with jack / pro-audio:

I personally use Renoise (which ir proprietary, but native Linux) it’s an old-school tracker! :partying_face:

You can make some crazy programming in there like that

or that

or whatever else :upside_down_face:

Also i use loads and loads of VST through Wine and LinVST + LinVstManager :slight_smile:

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Oh, and someday you’ll become him :rofl:

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Never used tracker style… don’t know much about em is this what happens?

I do hear that trackers have/had great modifiers/logic for each step ala elektron style sequencing
. Bitwig just added soemthing like that called operators.

I’m just too lazy for ‘regular’ daw sequencing…I either jam it live… or put it together in a way where it does it self…

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Yeah pretty much, it’s perfect for drum programming in my opinion - you can easily do all sorts of crazy stuff when / if you need precision.

But technically it’s just sequencing style - you can do simple stuff very fast too, whatever floats your boat :upside_down_face:

You mean like generative?
And then the robots took your job again! :rofl:

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Yeah that’s nice. Rhythm and probability goes so well together.

The robots hahaha. They can have it if they want…If I just turn them on and they play sultry sounds into my ears who am I to complain ?

Still…someone has to connect the wires

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This guy is awesome!

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So i’ve installed Jack and it seems to be running. I added permissions for it according to Unfa’s (the guy in the video above) manjaro setup video. However, I get the following error when I start Ardour. Is there something I need to add to remove that error?

"WARNING: Your system has a limit for maximum amount of locked memory. This might cause Ardour to run out of memory before your system runs out of memory.

You can view the memory limit with ‘ulimit -l’, and it is normally controlled by /etc/security/limits.conf"

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Hey shockwave,
I’m into music and use Reaper.

Your post is quite old now but I’d love to know how you managed with everything you described.
Moving to Linux can be challenging when it comes to audio but things a much better now than they used to be.

I’m new here and will post about audio stuff soon.

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Ardour can be used almost right away… without “mastering” it …
and you can learn a lot later on

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Hey, sorry for the late reply. I used Ardour, but since I could only find time to do it every once and a while, I feel I spent a lot of my time getting it to work each time. I also have a mackbook and have been using that a little more since everything just works and I can focus on the music and not setting it up. Would love to learn more about what you are using though.

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TL;DR

Pulseaudio sucks but I don’t care what’s better, it works for me because I’m rendering stuff to audio files anyway and arranging those and trying to rely on plug-ins the least possible. Wine is a terminal requirement for me on any Linux distro. Unhappy that Wine v7.0 and later started breaking compatibility with 32-bit in a few cases, like Windows10 did. That’s why I must insist on “outdated” Debian but better the ones descended from it such as NeptuneOS.

I dislike Ardour because it’s counterintuitive to me, it should not be the first stop for MIDI creation to trigger synthesizers. Basically my not having an external MIDI controller made Ubuntu Studio worthless. For at least eight years I got into a comfort zone using VST2 32-bit plug-ins with old versions of REAPER and RENOISE. I have a license for REAPER v2 and v3 but I don’t use v3 any longer. I used it on Windows but after I cleaned it away from my other laptop I don’t care if v3 is better. I have checked things out with the latest version but it has gone even further than I thought being bloatware and an ergonomical nightmare.

I have RENOISE v2.8 as the last licensed one but it could be temperamental. On Solus it ran very well as 32-bit but one of the updates broke it, and about a month later I stopped using that distro. I also have the 32-bit Linux version, should have also picked it up in 64-bit. Not interested in what they are doing now because it’s bloatware. The big sign of it is Redux plug-in, which would have been enough for the thousands of XRNI files I created LOL.

I was unable to use ZRhythm as Flatpak, got the error message about its unable to reserve memory. Such programs seem to expect 16GB RAM, is that correct?

Qtractor is a great program but it requires Qjackctl which is hard to accept running it from AppImage. I couldn’t use AMSynth within and it has other issues which make it impossible to tolerate such as its creating MIDI files out of parameter automation. Why doesn’t it do like REAPER and include automation into the QTR which is actually text file? It isn’t hard.

On one distro I purposely set up Ardour with Cardinal LV2 but it’s uncomfortable working that way. I wish I could use Cardinal as VST2 plug-in but no program that I could use could deal with it without crashing. I don’t want to have to use virtual MIDI cable for anything and I’m tired of guessing when Jack would work for a given task.

I used Salix for a short time with LMMS AppImage and Carla for VST plug-ins. It worked well so I should have kept it, but that program sometimes gets on my nerves. I wish there was a version of the Beatbox which was more flexible.

I have found VST3 clunky and many free plug-ins are either buggy or insufficiently featured. Have to depend too much on Kushview Element. Generally working in 64-bit has gone against my workflow. I don’t do entire projects with 64-bit programs anymore, tried it with Ubuntu Studio. Another drawback is that many VST plug-ins for Linux do not work which was very frustrating if there isn’t an LV2 alternative.

But it’s because I insist on ancient software. It works for me, and I have no plans to change it. :wink:

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They don’t, you should just use portable prefix / version that works for you. Wine is extremely complicated software which has regression with almost every version update.