5 ms·

Anyone who is serious about audio would not seriously consider the *nix environment, except, of course for macOS. I have read many blog posts about people who h

Anyone who is serious about audio would not seriously consider the *nix environment, except, of course for macOS. I have read many blog posts about people who have successfully gotten Ardour to work on Ubuntu (and variants) but this was after an unreasonable amount of patching and troubleshooting. I’m a busy professional with very little time for my music and audio production hobbies, and I want to spend zero time on diagnosing issues. Inspiration is a harsh mistress and does not wait around for me to finish installing some obscure library, or worse, compiling it from source. The biggest hurdle is with hardware. If you need low-latency, high-performance interfaces, you absolutely a need tightly integrated hardware/software stack - think something like Universal Audio’s Luna system. You simply cannot make that kind of tight integration work outside of macOS.

flatpanther 6y ago
Ubuntu Studio just works, and it’s way more stable for my workloads than windows. Debugging windows broken and slow midi support was just too painful. It really depends on what someone is doing. Ubuntu went off the rails years ago, and I would default to recommending OSX, but as someone who uses all three, Linux has been the least painful for me.
- oilbagz 6y ago
  I think the Linux-audio naysayers just don't have the experience with professional audio that they think they do. Once you get UbuntuStudio installed, out of the box - it just plain works, and is bundled with SO MANY GREAT THINGS. I once installed UbuntuStudio alongside a friend of mine in the pro studio, who had just gotten a new Mac. I was up and running and working on projects within 20 minutes from a fresh install - he was still hassling with UAD licenses and dongles, a week later. Seriously people, if you think you are an audio professional, and haven't yet had a dive into kxStudio or UbuntuStudio on a spare machine, you are missing one of the greatest parties in the audio world right now. And then, if you want to get REALLY sophisticated, as an audio professional, you NEED to dig into - and most important of all, understand - what is going on with the Zynthian folks. http://zynthian.org/ http://zynthian.org/ This is the future of audio - not just for DAW's, but embedded audio devices, too. When you grok what Zynthian is, and how it works, and what it is doing, you will change your mind about everything you think you know about audio on Linux. (Hint: it takes the extremely powerful Linux Audio/DAW software ecosystem, wraps it in a functional and simple UI, and exposes EVERYTHING in the Linux Audio world to the musician .. from synths to FX units to MIDI processing and generators and beyond. Simply a massive leap forward for audio professionals...)
  - venamresm__ 6y ago
    I think this is a filter bubble thing. Considering the difference in the time of the posts, I'd say the user base that was previously commenting was mainly from the USA where Apple is king and has its own bubble. Around the world it might be different.
    - oilbagz 6y ago
      A lot of it has to do with the perceived elite nature of the MacOS platform for Audio/Video in comparison with other systems.. and its true, Apple have prioritized audio/video on their devices for decades - see for example, iOS versus Android audio thread priorities, which until recently were very much in Apples favour. The trouble is, most "audio pro's" don't really have the technical chops to understand why this is the case with MacOS, nor why Linux represents a parallel advance in audio processing technology. You can do things with Linux audio that are impossible with MacOS, due to its general-purpose nature - but MacOS still provides great value to the consumer, not just professionals. The great thing about Linux audio is that the devs pushing it forward don't have any of the constraints that the MacOS/iOS folks have to work under. This gets mis-underestimated by audio pro's, imho. But with things like kxStudio and UbuntuStudio and Zynthian out there, this is going to change radically. I think the audio world is in for some very big upheavals in terms of Linux adoption over the next few years .. but I have all of these systems operational in my pro studio, and have poked these beasts multiple times. Linux rules for audio, and hardly anyone knows .. thats another kind of elite realm left to be explored by the curious and adventurous.
      - venamresm__ 6y ago
        Great points, thanks for the insights.
  - temporallobe 6y ago
    I am actually somewhat aware of UbuntuStudio and its related technologies, and one of these days I will take a week or so to set up a spare machine. My original point was more about hardware than anything else. I do not think (please prove me wrong) that there is any DAW/hardware solution that actually offers true zero-latency monitoring (and I don’t mean direct hardware monitoring, which has been around for decades, I mean true analog-like near-zero latency monitoring of your input channels with effects, synced with your playback tracks) other than UA’s Luna system which was just released last year. I don’t mean to sound like a UA shill, but this (ARM - Accelerated Realtime Monitoring) is a brand new unprecedented technology that has and will revolutionize audio production. The caveat is that it only works with macOS - even though the Luna system is available with Windows, ARM is not and likely never will be. This can only work because of the extremely tight hardware/software integration and thunderbolt connectivity. Does UbuntuStudio or or anything in the *nix realm offer anything like this? I’m not just being oppositional - I am just truly unaware of an equivalent.

flatpanther 6y ago

Ubuntu Studio just works, and it’s way more stable for my workloads than windows. Debugging windows broken and slow midi support was just too painful. It really depends on what someone is doing. Ubuntu went off the rails years ago, and I would default to recommending OSX, but as someone who uses all three, Linux has been the least painful for me.

oilbagz 6y ago
I think the Linux-audio naysayers just don't have the experience with professional audio that they think they do. Once you get UbuntuStudio installed, out of the box - it just plain works, and is bundled with SO MANY GREAT THINGS. I once installed UbuntuStudio alongside a friend of mine in the pro studio, who had just gotten a new Mac. I was up and running and working on projects within 20 minutes from a fresh install - he was still hassling with UAD licenses and dongles, a week later. Seriously people, if you think you are an audio professional, and haven't yet had a dive into kxStudio or UbuntuStudio on a spare machine, you are missing one of the greatest parties in the audio world right now. And then, if you want to get REALLY sophisticated, as an audio professional, you NEED to dig into - and most important of all, understand - what is going on with the Zynthian folks. http://zynthian.org/ http://zynthian.org/ This is the future of audio - not just for DAW's, but embedded audio devices, too. When you grok what Zynthian is, and how it works, and what it is doing, you will change your mind about everything you think you know about audio on Linux. (Hint: it takes the extremely powerful Linux Audio/DAW software ecosystem, wraps it in a functional and simple UI, and exposes EVERYTHING in the Linux Audio world to the musician .. from synths to FX units to MIDI processing and generators and beyond. Simply a massive leap forward for audio professionals...)
- venamresm__ 6y ago
  I think this is a filter bubble thing. Considering the difference in the time of the posts, I'd say the user base that was previously commenting was mainly from the USA where Apple is king and has its own bubble. Around the world it might be different.
  - oilbagz 6y ago
    A lot of it has to do with the perceived elite nature of the MacOS platform for Audio/Video in comparison with other systems.. and its true, Apple have prioritized audio/video on their devices for decades - see for example, iOS versus Android audio thread priorities, which until recently were very much in Apples favour. The trouble is, most "audio pro's" don't really have the technical chops to understand why this is the case with MacOS, nor why Linux represents a parallel advance in audio processing technology. You can do things with Linux audio that are impossible with MacOS, due to its general-purpose nature - but MacOS still provides great value to the consumer, not just professionals. The great thing about Linux audio is that the devs pushing it forward don't have any of the constraints that the MacOS/iOS folks have to work under. This gets mis-underestimated by audio pro's, imho. But with things like kxStudio and UbuntuStudio and Zynthian out there, this is going to change radically. I think the audio world is in for some very big upheavals in terms of Linux adoption over the next few years .. but I have all of these systems operational in my pro studio, and have poked these beasts multiple times. Linux rules for audio, and hardly anyone knows .. thats another kind of elite realm left to be explored by the curious and adventurous.
    - venamresm__ 6y ago
      Great points, thanks for the insights.
- temporallobe 6y ago
  I am actually somewhat aware of UbuntuStudio and its related technologies, and one of these days I will take a week or so to set up a spare machine. My original point was more about hardware than anything else. I do not think (please prove me wrong) that there is any DAW/hardware solution that actually offers true zero-latency monitoring (and I don’t mean direct hardware monitoring, which has been around for decades, I mean true analog-like near-zero latency monitoring of your input channels with effects, synced with your playback tracks) other than UA’s Luna system which was just released last year. I don’t mean to sound like a UA shill, but this (ARM - Accelerated Realtime Monitoring) is a brand new unprecedented technology that has and will revolutionize audio production. The caveat is that it only works with macOS - even though the Luna system is available with Windows, ARM is not and likely never will be. This can only work because of the extremely tight hardware/software integration and thunderbolt connectivity. Does UbuntuStudio or or anything in the *nix realm offer anything like this? I’m not just being oppositional - I am just truly unaware of an equivalent.