The linux DAW thread

[farlukar]

If a relatively small company like U-he manages to do linux version, I wonder why Ableton and others can't.

I guess among linux-supporting plugin companies U-he is by far the largest, most are 1–3 person shops.

[edit]
… which is probably true for plugin companies in general, but still.

[uOpt]

I am surprised that hard core Linux users would want to use commercial VSTs made for Windows and OSX in thier chosen distro. Surely the point is to get away from all that? Or am I missing something?

Everybody is different.

Myself, I just hate broken computers. I use open source OSes because they work better for me and have a better future outlook. I have no religious or political feelings toward Linux, in fact I prefer FreeBSD (not for music).

As far as available software is concerned, I am very satisfied with synths/instruments between U-He and the open source synths. I am not satisfied with availability of effect plugins.

[glokraw]

I am surprised that hard core Linux users would want to use commercial VSTs made for Windows and OSX in thier chosen distro. Surely the point is to get away from all that? Or am I missing something?

Hi, modern innovation changes things. I'm also a musician first, tired of the painful salads that come with microsoft, and the painful pricing and round-robin incompatibilities of mac-OS releases. Linux let's me dial in what I want and need, without bowing to the sometimes daft corporate whims.

The 'hard core' have valid reasons, and are sometimes vocal about their preferences, but some of their opinions were formed when it was impossible to run windows plugins in linux. But now, they are still also running their open-source tools on closed source devices, with closed source code burned into chips whose industrial secrets are likely not fully publicly available. So 'the faith' has it's limitations Many new linux musicians bring commercial tools with them, used whenever possible alongside what they discover.

Happily there are great linux native tools, Yoshimi, Surge, Odin2, Vital, OBxd, Bliss, Discovery Pro, Dexed, Decent Sampler, Guitarix, Rakarack etc. There are some great large collections like LSP, AirWindows and Calf, and of course the wonderfully fine U-he and PianoTeq Ports. Smaller shops like Audio Damage, Auburn Sounds and TAL also have some fine products. The Ardour/Mixbus/Reaper/Bitwig/Qtractor/Carla daw teams also manage huge ranges of their own plugins

The BlueCat collection runs fine, as do many IK products. Using BlueCat Axiom with IK's Mixbox is a hoot! As is using Amplitube with Guitar Rig. Some of the Kontakt libs are amazing, would that there were 60 hours in a day, and a related gravity mod available
Cheers

[FapFilter]

hi,
hell froze over and i'm trying my luck with Reaper (RPM install) on Linux, but i'm having trouble with it finding the installed video codecs
ffmpeg is installed natively on my system from the get go and current and VLC is also installed, this one via Flathub though, but Reaper will only open empty media items when i insert videos.
it is also showing "VLC install path not found" in the video settings, which sadly can not be changed manually?
i've also tried installing Reaper via Flathub, so both being Flatpaks, but still no help

as i know there are quite a few knowledgable Linux guys on here, it thought that i might try my luck here

[farlukar]

Reaper (RPM install)

You know that's an unoffical 3rd-party repackage, right?

but i'm having trouble with it finding the installed video codecs
ffmpeg is installed natively on my system from the get go and current and VLC is also installed, this one via Flathub though, but Reaper will only open empty media items when i insert videos.
it is also showing "VLC install path not found" in the video settings, which sadly can not be changed manually?
i've also tried installing Reaper via Flathub, so both being Flatpaks, but still no help

From Options > Preferences > Video > Show decoder information:

This version of REAPER supports video decoding/playback via:

• ffmpeg: FFmpeg/libav: minimal build included with REAPER, v2.8-v4.2 can be downloaded separately for more functionality
• vlc: VLC media player: v2.x-v3.x for correct architecture must be downloaded separately

Reaper (or any other application) will not find libraries from any flatpak/appimage/snap or similar. It's the nature of these self-contained things, they work fine on their own but interaction with other software is nigh impossible.

On my system Reaper is also unable to find libav, maybe ffmpeg has changed relatively recently, I don't know.
So installing the distribution-provided VLC would be the way to go, never mind if it's a few point versions behind.

(I'd also say, use the installer from Cockos instead of 3rd-party stuff)

[edit]
I had never actually tried this before, I get sound but no image from a video. Huh. Will try to figure out later.

[FapFilter]

thanks!
i also thought that the sandboxing might have a play into this too, but i've set app interaction to on inside Flatseal, so i thought that this might help

the RPM was not in my repository via the store, nor did dnf list/install vlc yield anything either

funny thing is: when i set up Fedora first time, i had 3rd party repositories disabled during the installation process and thus closely followed the installation process via rpm-fusion on their website to have a chance getting it running

did a fresh install recently and this time enabled 3rd party repositories from the get go so i thought i didn't have to do these steps this time around, but dnf install vlc didn't find anything this way, so i thought they had dropped support for "native" RPM-Fusion and the only way was the Flathub route from now on

after installing RPM-Fusion again, things worked!

[audiojunkie]

Welcome to the Linux club!! If you need additional help, we’ll be glad to assist!

That said, I don’t recommend using Flatpak for music production yet either. As mentioned above, Flatpak is kind of a full commitment thing. If you go Flatpak, plan on just using plugins that are flatpak published. There aren’t too many. Otherwise, stick with non-flatpak publishing until all of the tools you use are available as flatpak packages.

There are a lot of plugins available that aren’t packaged as flatpaks. I have a great list of native linux plugins that you can get for open source, free, or commercial. Try some of these out:

Plugins:
LinuxSampler (Also needs Qsampler & Gigedit): H
Odin2: H, G
Surge-XT: H, G
ShortCircuit-XT (Coming soon!)
Airwindows (gui-less): W= airwindows.com
Linux Studio Plugins: H, G
Yoshimi: H
AVL Drums: H, W= x42-plugins.com
Cardinal: H, G
GxPlugins.lv2 (Guitarix2): H, G
X42-Plugins: H, W= x42-plugins.com (including midi strum)
MDA-lv2 Plugins (gui-less): G (David Robillard on Gitlab)
DrumGizmo:
Sfizz:
LiquidSFZ
Dexed: H, G
FluidSynthPlug, FluidPlug, Fluida.lv2, FluidSynthVST, ACE Fluid Synth (a-fluidsynth.lv2), SFZero-X, fluidsynth.clap
Monique - Bass and Lead synth: H
Helm: H, D
Dragonfly Reverbs: H (v. 3.2.7+), G
DSP56K Emulator (Requires ROM):
LibreArp
Elephant DSP Room Reverb (binaries on Github)
Mverb ( github.com/figbug/mverb )
LV2 port of the C* Audio Plugins Suite (caps-lv2)
Ninjas2
ADLPlug
Fire (Distortion plugin)
Geonkick
Guitarix.vst
PaulXStretch
Ninjas2
Neural-amp-modeler-lv2
Ildaeil
Carla (as an LV2 plugin)
No Budget Orchestra Plugins
Delay Architect
Aether Reverb
Vaporizer 2

Freeware Software


Apps:
OcenAudio: H

Plugins:
Xhip synth: H, W= xhip.net
Nil’s K1v (Kawai K1 Emulation: H, D, W= nilsschneider.de
Sitala 1: H, D
Tal-NoizeMaker: H, W= tal-software.com
Vital - Basic Edition (No Patches)
Tyrell N6
Xhip effects
Hypercyclic
Decent Sampler
Speedrum Lite
Apricot
Fluctus
Tal-Filter
Tal-Reverb-4
Tal-Chorus-LX
Tal-Vocoder
Zebralette
Podolski
Triple Cheese
Beatzille
Protoverb
Crumar
K-Whooms

Commercial Software

Diva H, $$
Zebra Legacy H, $$
Hive H, $$
Repro $$
Bazille $$
ACE $$
Tal-Sampler H, $$
Tal-Drum H, $$
Tal-J-8 H, $$
Tal-U-No-LX H, $$
Tal-Bassline $$
Tal-Mod $$
Tal-Dub-X $$
Tal-DAC $$
Bliss Sampler H, $$
Discovery $$
Discovery Pro $$
Vertigo $$
OPL $$
Speedrum H, $$
Quanta 2 H, $$
Integrate, $$
Hy-Poly $$
Synthesizer V $$
Venomode Phrasebox $$ - VST2/VST3 Phrase Arp
Twangstrom $$
Colour Copy $$
Presswerk $$
Satin $$
Filterscape $$
MFM2 $$
Uhbik $$
Pianoteq
Altitude (by Nakst) $$
AudioThing Plugins
Audio Damage Plugins
U-he Plugins
TAL Software plugins
Disco DSP
Loomer Strings
Sononym
Venomode plugins


Edit: Ignore the codes next to the app names. I had started developing a classification system that I eventually decided against and abandoned—I was too lazy to edit them out with my phone.

Edit 2: This list is by no means complete. New software keeps coming out faster and faster with more and more available. I’ve just listed most of the apps important to me.

[audiojunkie]

Another thing, as you noticed—it is always best to use the RPMFusion repositories.

Fedora is my distro of choice as well.

[FapFilter]

thanks for the list!
i have a lot of TAL and u-he stuff, and HY-Plugins seems on a way to fully embrace into Linux support too.

and yes, i try to minimize the use of Flatpaks whenever i can, but they also have their purpose as they are supposedly easier to fully remove without much danger of removing some libraries that other programs still depend on.

having said that, i'm still not planning to use that computer for music production, as my Macbook still has much better software support and some plugins i really like. and the battery life is much better too.
in fact, i mainly wanted a good audio editor, and since i already know Reaper well, i'm really quick with it.

having said that, Linux is still great and Fedora WS probably my personal most favorite OS of all time!

[dellboy]

Fedora is my distro of choice as well.

Its very slick and streamlined, but I hated the desktop setup until I foumd the "Dash to Dock" extension, that made it better for me. Ubuntu has a similar idea, but its much more useable out of the box and dosen't need an extension to make it workable.

[dellboy]

Hi, modern innovation changes things. I'm also a musician first, tired of the painful salads that come with microsoft, and the painful pricing and round-robin incompatibilities of mac-OS releases. Linux let's me dial in what I want and need, without bowing to the sometimes daft corporate whims.

I see a new breed of Linux users emerging now that a chosen distro can be installed to an SSD drive and plugged into a USB port. I am largely agnostic as to OS use, I think they are all great, with pros and cons for each. Somedays I spend the whole day in Linux making music and really enjoy it, but then I go back to Windows for an overall easier experience. Maybe the answer is to stick soley to Reaper in Linux, as that seems to be the most stable. I bought Waveform in the Black friday sale just to use in Linux, and am overall impressed, but it takes a lot of tweaking to get it stable.

[GaryG]

well, I'm happy now

asteroids.png

[glokraw]

Here is the Vaporizer2 lv2 version synth in linux Reaper daw.
It's yet another wavetable synth, and sounds great. It might be
fiddly getting the vsti/vst3i working depending on your system libs,
but the Open Suse Build Service has provided a large range of .deb and .rpm
versions, to help us pick one best suited, with an option to add a dedicated repository
for updates.

Vaporizer_lv2_Reaper.jpg

[glokraw]

BirdsInStormsAlbum.jpg

A new album at BandCamp, 'Birds In Storms', thirteen songs about surviving or thriving in the high winds of life. Runs around three hours at normal speed. We do normal here, on good days. And have fun on the other ones

Made using Reaper in AVLinux, with great plugins and instruments, hopefully put to good use.
Cheers

[GaryG]

you're a machine Glokraw...

today's ponderance: I built this new box with the intention of dual booting linux and windows and, to be honest, not seeing much reason to bother with Windows for my needs (have it on my laptop if need be). So, I intended to have windows and data partitions on an m.2 nvme 1tb drive with linux on an old separate 250gb ssd i have (further data drives to follow). Would there be much to gain moving linux to the m.2 drive? Or is linux ok with the 'slower' drive (running speedy to my eyes) and keep the faster one purely for data? I have 32GB of ram so guessing swap drives aren't a big issue, just not sure how Linux handles things like this. Thanks.