8 ms·

Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

293 points by prmoustache 10mo ago

cadr 10mo ago
Is there a way I can see which would run on a raspberry pi?
- jjrh 10mo ago
  They will need arm builds sadly so the list is likely going to be rather small.
  - jcelerier 10mo ago
    Pretty much everything in the linux audio world runs fine on ARM
- ofalkaed 10mo ago
  kxstudio supports rpi, it comes with a few DAWs and a great deal more, it is probably your best bet for this stuff on pi unless you want to compile stuff yourself. https://kx.studio/ https://kx.studio/
- jpetso 10mo ago
  Zynthian (a RPi-based synth collection & groovebox) lists some of the most prominent ones on its website: https://zynthian.org/engines https://zynthian.org/engines Its install recipes directory may yield a less fancy, but probably more comprehensive list: https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-sys/tree/oram/scripts/recipes https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-sys/tree/oram/scripts/r... With Zynthian OS up and running, the full list of plugins shows in its webconf page, it's so long that they have to hide basically most of the plugins from the main on-device UI. Roughly speaking, if it's open source, most likely it will work. If it's proprietary, assume that only Pianoteq and a small number of u-he plugins will work. Most commercial products with binary-only distribution don't feel like RPi devices are a large enough market for them to build binaries for it. Even if they otherwise offer ARM builds for Apple Silicon and Linux builds for x86.
  - MomsAVoxell 10mo ago
    Another vote for Zynthian, this is essentially the next generation of synthesizer platform, it has all the right elements .. And see also, monome (https://monome.org/ https://monome.org/) .. as yet another such example. Just to point out how flourishing the Linux-based DAW sub-culture really is.
cpuguy83 10mo ago
Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  Isn't the entire idea that you hook it up to physical hardware?
  - drabbiticus 10mo ago
    No. MIDI controllers have their place, but many people work without one, or only use one for live performances. There are often also way more knobs in the various FX chains in a DAW than you would reasonably want to map to a controller, but still want to touch at least a few times while making a song. Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - jennyholzer2 10mo ago
    [dead]
- adzm 10mo ago
  If not using hardware, you just click and move horizontally or vertically; not sure what a better interface would be? Though I do like it when the numeric value shows when changing. I really don't know what other UI would work well here. Usually there are so many knobs it makes sense to be compact. Though really it makes sense as well to match the visualization of the knobs on my midi controller anyway.
- 10mo ago
londons_explore 10mo ago
The real-time low latency multi channel audio streaming needed for musicians is awfully similar to the real time low latency multi channel audio streaming required for telephony. Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.
- saidnooneever 10mo ago
  irony amplified by the nature of the tech stacks xD surely they can figure out some channel to communicate over clearly haha
- dagmx 10mo ago
  This is very much not true. Telephony is significantly less latency sensitive than real time audio processing, it’s also significantly less taxing since you’re dealing with a single channel. The level of compression and audio resolution required are significantly different too. You can tune codecs for voice specifically, but you don’t want compression when recording audio and can’t bias towards specific inputs. They’re only similar in that they handle audio. But that’s like saying the needs of a unicycle and the needs of an F1 car are inherently the same because they have wheels.
- sroerick 10mo ago
  This is a very interesting thought. I'm not super experienced with low level audio and basically completely ignorant of telephony. I feel like most people doing audio in music are not working at the low level. Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface. The point of JACK or Pipewire is to basically abstract all of that away so people can focus on the instrument. The latency in music is a much, much bigger issue than in voice, so any latency spike would render network audio completely unusable. I know Zoom has a "real time audio for musicians" feature, but outside of a few Zoom demos during lockdown, I'm not sure anybody uses this. Pipewire supports audio channels over network, but again I'm not entirely sure what this is for. Certainly it's useful for streaming music from device A to device B, but I'm not sure anybody uses it in a production setting. I could see something like a "live coding symphony", where people have their own livecoding setups and the audio is generated on a central server. This is not too different than what, say, Animal Collective did. But while live coding is a beautiful medium on its own, it does lack the muscle memory and tactile feedback you get from playing an instrument. I would love to see, as you said, these fields collaborate, but these, to me, are the immediate blockers which make it less practical.
metalman 10mo ago
it's an add for apps that cost as much as a box of decent used pedals and rack mount gear. though "linux musicians" does appear to be a thing, and the bot used to check if you are human, is amusing and fully automated. https://linuxmusicians.com/ https://linuxmusicians.com/
- ofalkaed 10mo ago
  I actually assumed the link was linuxmusicians.com and I bet I am not the only one who assumed that. It is not an ad, but a store that also lists free software.
belter 10mo ago
Great demo of the JUNE - Classic Analog Polysynth JUNO-60 Plugin - AudioThing https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46 https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46
kosolam 10mo ago
The things I need are free and opensource
- bitbang 10mo ago
  https://lsp-plug.in/ https://lsp-plug.in/
- Joeboy 10mo ago
  I'm wondering if you missed that the site has checkboxes for "No charge" and "FOSS".
notepad0x90 10mo ago
For some reason "Linux musicians" made me think of someone making art out of 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp', and made me wonder what Windows musicians are like (lots of anger and frustration to express I'd imagine)
- Lapsa 10mo ago
  any noise oscillator can serve a similar purpose
- NickC25 10mo ago
  I currently run a PC based Ableton setup albeit one that is exclusively ITB and uses no external gear outside of a sound card and an Ableton Push gen 1. I've got no issues with it. deadmau5 is famously a PC guy as well, he seems to have no issues with Windows (that I know of or that are not extremely specific to a setup that involves millions of dollars' worth of hardware and multiple computers). His setup is like an amusement park for nerds.
- ofalkaed 10mo ago
  Back in the pre-alsa days when linux used OSS you could pipe /dev/random into /dev/dsp and get noise, you could pipe anything into /dev/dsp and generally get some sort of noise. Possibly can still do this on the BSDs since they still use OSS.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
    You can still do it with ALSA if it has the OSS compat modules loaded.
  - notepad0x90 10mo ago
    I've done this with my setup fairly recently. I don't recall having to do anything special.
- throaway45425 10mo ago
  "linux musician" once meant trying to get this audio program to compile that would never work because I am not a unix system admin. I didn't realize Dave Phillips had passed away. I remember he had an incredible page of audio software links but all stuff I almost never got to make any sound. Sometimes I would even blow up my whole system trying to get something to work and have to reinstall the whole operating system. Seeing how far we have come with this site is just incredible.
gkhartman 10mo ago
This is great. Makes these tools much more discoverable. I can help but notice the drop in plugin ui quality one you click the foss filter checkbox. Something in me wants a foss plugin to come with a cool skin like the free ones do, but I know that's silly.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  It really says something about designers when there's so few of them contributing to FOSS projects. It also says something about FOSS devs that they don't/can't find better UI for their projects. Especially for web based UIs where CSS isn't that hard to look at sites you want to emulate and get much much closer to a respectable UI.
  - jpetso 10mo ago
    A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations. Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit. Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects. As always, be the change you want to see in the world.
- Blackthorn 10mo ago
  Surge and vital have great UIs.
vlowther 10mo ago
It took quite a bit of scrolling until I found my old faves of dexed and zynaddsubfx, and I didn't see Helm (https://tytel.org/helm/ https://tytel.org/helm/) at all.
- Blackthorn 10mo ago
  Helm has been replaced in practice by Vital (same author), I think.
  - aeonik 10mo ago
    They are completely different synths. Vital is a wave table synth; Helm is a subtractive synth. Helm was the first synthesizer that I really excelled with. I would recommend anyone who wants to actually learn the fundamentals of synthesis, to start on it. Once you get good at to it, it's faster to dial in the exact sound you want than to reach for a preset. It's far more straightforward and less complicated than additive (ZynAddSubFX), FM, or wave table synths. That being said, if you just want a very advanced synth with a lot of great presets, Vital is far more advanced.
- anthony88 10mo ago
  Surge XT is also at the bottom of the list.
- nofu7ur3 10mo ago
  I submitted a suggestion to add the sophisticated multi-engine FOSS soft synth that I use, Yoshimi (https://yoshimi.sourceforge.io/ https://yoshimi.sourceforge.io/) which is a linux only fork of ZynAddSubFX.
bnastic 10mo ago
I used this site as a reference earlier this year quite often, as I attempted to establish some baseline for a Linux DAW. I use Mac for serious audio stuff, but 'what if' (since I use Linux for everything else anyway). I came back pleasantly surprised with the current state of things. Minus the underlying linux sound system, which is still a mess of things that barely work together. (I have a lot of expensive/pro plugins and all the DAWs on the Mac, so this was mostly a filtering exercise - what I can use on Linux that can still mix/master a whole project). - I'm not a FOSS purist in audio, so that wasn't a requirement. But I am 'linux purist' so no VST wrappers of windows DLLs etc. - Watershed moment for me: Toneboosters and Kazrog coming to Linux. Along with u-he, these make for a very, very high quality offering. You can easily mix a commercial release just with these. Kazrog isn't even 'Linux beta' like the rest, proper full release on Linux. I was briefly involved in beta testing for Linux, Shane & co are incredible people. - I have most/all DAWs for the Mac. Reaper and Bitwig on Linux are enough for me and feel like good citizens in Linux. (ProTools is never coming, neither is Logic. But addition of Studio One makes for a really good trio). - Any USB class-compliant audio interface will work (modulo control applications which generally aren't available on Linux, so ymmv). - iLok is missing, which removes a whole host of possible options (I have 500+ licences on my iLok dongle, none of that stuff is accessible). I can't say I miss iLok, but I do miss Softube (not that it's available on Linux, iLok or not). I made a few 100+ tracks mixes on my thinkpad with Reaper and the above combo of plugins, it worked just fine. But Linux is still Linux, and 30 years later still annoys me with typical 'linux problems', which generally boil down to 'lack of care'. UI is still laggy, compositors be damned. While Reaper is butter-smooth on a Mac, audio thread never interferes with UI (and vice versa), it can get quite choppy on Linux. If you allow your laptop to go to sleep with a DAW open, chances are good that upon resuming you'll have to restart it as it will lose sound. And a lot of smaller annoyances that are just lack of polish and/or persistent bugs, that I'm sadly used to on Linux (want to switch users on Linux Mint? The lock screen can get hella confused and require a lot of tinkering to get the desktop back). But overall, it's a million miles away from a hobbyist endeavour that Linux audio used to be until recently. I could get actual work done with Linux this time around.
- ofalkaed 10mo ago
  PipeWire seems to solve all the audio stuff for me, zero problems since I made the switch. I had audio fail on resume once when I first installed PipeWire; if memory serves it was that the default settings for PipeWire was to restart the audio server on resume which screwed things up because Jack kept running. Something like that. The fix was simple, just comment out a line and uncomment another. Everything audio has just worked ever since. I have not had any UI issues in at least a decade on Slackware. The few times I tried Mint over the years, it was filled with random annoyances like you mention. Edit: This is not advocating using Slackware for audio work, it works great but it is Slackware and most don't get along with the Slackware way. But there is a DAW module for AlienBob's Slackware Live Edition[0]. It worked alright when I tried it, as well as any other live distro. [0] https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak
sramsay 10mo ago
This. Is. Awesome. Really. It amazes me that I still find out about new Linux plugins after years of producing music on the platform. It could not have been easy to compile this; the information is all over the place online. The ability to filter (!) for compression, saturation, etc. is so great.
chaosprint 10mo ago
If you don’t wanna use a daw on linux you are welcomed to try https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli
- nartho 10mo ago
  Sure, as soon as you tell me how I'm supposed to record and mix a whole band with instruments with Glicol
ufocia 10mo ago
What about Ardour?
- Nales 10mo ago
  Ardour is listed. You need to search for it in the search bar. If your question was about using Ardour, I used it a bit and I managed to make a tune. I recommend this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJ1suTVouw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJ1suTVouw
gnarlouse 10mo ago
I’d like to see some company come out with a wrapper for Logic, Ableton, ProTools, etc with the following: - portable, reproducible environments: I suppose you could achieve this with a docker setup. If I jump to a different workstation, I want to be able to load my current project without playing setup wrangler. - license management like a dotfile database: all my licenses are fettered to the wind across two or three email addresses, and every time my PC crashes (twice in the past 5y) or something breaks I have to go recollect them. It’s a quest. Quests suck. - remote or cloud processing: connect to your workstation if you’re on the road, or a cloud cluster running DAWs. Sure, this introduces some lag which can force you into drag to piano roll contexts, but other times you’re just messing with mixes. But gaming giants like Sony figured it out for PS4/5 titles. - shareable projects with some innovative business solution to the license barrier. I want to be able to access somebody else’s project and load it in its entirety—whether I have Neural DSP’s latest Archetype or not. Whether I have Serum2 or not. Apple managed to get bands onto iTunes. We seriously can’t get Waves or Neural DSP to go the same route? Some royalty-based approach? I know these are outlandish requirements in some scenarios but I feel like this would fix the misery of music making in the era of Windows and macOS being goblinware operating systems.
- th0ma5 10mo ago
  Despite open plugins, and mostly open end result file formats, the entirety of the media software world is built around proprietary software primarily for several reasons: Ephemeral fads have you making money in one big upfront push, integration of some new technique doesn't lend itself to open standards, or the fact that the actual bulk of paying customers are presumably working musicians with budgets, and that market is ultimately small. The side effect of this, much like radios, rc planes and drones, and many other hobbies, is that a collection of smaller product producing organizations have an even smaller, more even playing field full of smaller professionals and some amateurs. Some of the modular hardware producers have the right idea and provide free versions of their hardware as plugins as a marketing gimmick for their actual hardware. However, outside of the Linux world, the mystique of a proprietary salve that will supplant your creative block pushes people towards short sighted sales pushes instead of trying to lock in a give and take interaction with the broader community. But I would love every thing that you list. I think things like PipeWire for better or worse are pushing things towards sanity, or least, better ideas for managing the mess in the open source world, which is decades in the making.
IndySun 10mo ago
Thanks for making the list but I hate endless scroll. Who doesn't? It makes no sense to me, GUI torture. why make it impossible to reach the footer?!
marttt 10mo ago
Side note: looking at the screenshot gallery on the linked site, it is interesting to see how often audio software GUIs mimic real, physical devices in remarkable detail. Carefully crafted graphics for volume dials, sliders etc.
raaron773 10mo ago
Is it just me or does the website feels very very snappy. I like it
jupake 10mo ago
This is fantastic! There are plenty of us out there that dont mind paying for software if its high quality. This is an excellent resource for people who are less militant about open source and just want to make music.
- skulk 10mo ago
  > This is an excellent resource for people who are less militant about open source and just want to make music. What a strange jab. People are militant about _freedom_, not getting things for free. If you don't care about freedom then just use Logic or Ableton or whatever, they're probably better than anything on Linux and they're industry standards. But they completely trash your freedoms as a user and that's what many people can't stomach. Plenty of software that respects the users freedoms is sold.
hardwarepirate 10mo ago
i can recommend renoise, not sequencer, but a tracker, used for creating demo tracks (the music in cracks) or genres like breakcore, jungle, edm. venetian snares uses it after he used cubase in the 90s/00s. it's rather customisable, reasonably priced and just works great as a daw for electronic music. https://renoise.com/download https://renoise.com/download it even comes with a demo and it's own vst for other daw'.
fractalf 10mo ago
Hi, author here. I was wondering why the hell my server was acting strange, then checked counter.dev and saw a huuuge spike. Ah, hackernews.. Anyway, thanks for the feedback regarding the site itself, both positive and negative. This is a 1-2 man project, just for fun, but any feedback are always welcome :) AMA
- fractalf 10mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38815893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38815893

293 points by prmoustache 10mo ago

cadr 10mo ago

Is there a way I can see which would run on a raspberry pi?

jjrh 10mo ago
They will need arm builds sadly so the list is likely going to be rather small.
- jcelerier 10mo ago
  Pretty much everything in the linux audio world runs fine on ARM
ofalkaed 10mo ago
kxstudio supports rpi, it comes with a few DAWs and a great deal more, it is probably your best bet for this stuff on pi unless you want to compile stuff yourself. https://kx.studio/ https://kx.studio/
jpetso 10mo ago
Zynthian (a RPi-based synth collection & groovebox) lists some of the most prominent ones on its website: https://zynthian.org/engines https://zynthian.org/engines Its install recipes directory may yield a less fancy, but probably more comprehensive list: https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-sys/tree/oram/scripts/recipes https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-sys/tree/oram/scripts/r... With Zynthian OS up and running, the full list of plugins shows in its webconf page, it's so long that they have to hide basically most of the plugins from the main on-device UI. Roughly speaking, if it's open source, most likely it will work. If it's proprietary, assume that only Pianoteq and a small number of u-he plugins will work. Most commercial products with binary-only distribution don't feel like RPi devices are a large enough market for them to build binaries for it. Even if they otherwise offer ARM builds for Apple Silicon and Linux builds for x86.
- MomsAVoxell 10mo ago
  Another vote for Zynthian, this is essentially the next generation of synthesizer platform, it has all the right elements .. And see also, monome (https://monome.org/ https://monome.org/) .. as yet another such example. Just to point out how flourishing the Linux-based DAW sub-culture really is.

cpuguy83 10mo ago

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

giancarlostoro 10mo ago
Isn't the entire idea that you hook it up to physical hardware?
- drabbiticus 10mo ago
  No. MIDI controllers have their place, but many people work without one, or only use one for live performances. There are often also way more knobs in the various FX chains in a DAW than you would reasonably want to map to a controller, but still want to touch at least a few times while making a song. Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- jennyholzer2 10mo ago
  [dead]
adzm 10mo ago
If not using hardware, you just click and move horizontally or vertically; not sure what a better interface would be? Though I do like it when the numeric value shows when changing. I really don't know what other UI would work well here. Usually there are so many knobs it makes sense to be compact. Though really it makes sense as well to match the visualization of the knobs on my midi controller anyway.
10mo ago

londons_explore 10mo ago

The real-time low latency multi channel audio streaming needed for musicians is awfully similar to the real time low latency multi channel audio streaming required for telephony. Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.

saidnooneever 10mo ago
irony amplified by the nature of the tech stacks xD surely they can figure out some channel to communicate over clearly haha
dagmx 10mo ago
This is very much not true. Telephony is significantly less latency sensitive than real time audio processing, it’s also significantly less taxing since you’re dealing with a single channel. The level of compression and audio resolution required are significantly different too. You can tune codecs for voice specifically, but you don’t want compression when recording audio and can’t bias towards specific inputs. They’re only similar in that they handle audio. But that’s like saying the needs of a unicycle and the needs of an F1 car are inherently the same because they have wheels.
sroerick 10mo ago
This is a very interesting thought. I'm not super experienced with low level audio and basically completely ignorant of telephony. I feel like most people doing audio in music are not working at the low level. Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface. The point of JACK or Pipewire is to basically abstract all of that away so people can focus on the instrument. The latency in music is a much, much bigger issue than in voice, so any latency spike would render network audio completely unusable. I know Zoom has a "real time audio for musicians" feature, but outside of a few Zoom demos during lockdown, I'm not sure anybody uses this. Pipewire supports audio channels over network, but again I'm not entirely sure what this is for. Certainly it's useful for streaming music from device A to device B, but I'm not sure anybody uses it in a production setting. I could see something like a "live coding symphony", where people have their own livecoding setups and the audio is generated on a central server. This is not too different than what, say, Animal Collective did. But while live coding is a beautiful medium on its own, it does lack the muscle memory and tactile feedback you get from playing an instrument. I would love to see, as you said, these fields collaborate, but these, to me, are the immediate blockers which make it less practical.

metalman 10mo ago

it's an add for apps that cost as much as a box of decent used pedals and rack mount gear. though "linux musicians" does appear to be a thing, and the bot used to check if you are human, is amusing and fully automated. https://linuxmusicians.com/ https://linuxmusicians.com/

ofalkaed 10mo ago
I actually assumed the link was linuxmusicians.com and I bet I am not the only one who assumed that. It is not an ad, but a store that also lists free software.

belter 10mo ago

Great demo of the JUNE - Classic Analog Polysynth JUNO-60 Plugin - AudioThing https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46 https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46

kosolam 10mo ago

The things I need are free and opensource

bitbang 10mo ago
https://lsp-plug.in/ https://lsp-plug.in/
Joeboy 10mo ago
I'm wondering if you missed that the site has checkboxes for "No charge" and "FOSS".

notepad0x90 10mo ago

For some reason "Linux musicians" made me think of someone making art out of 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp', and made me wonder what Windows musicians are like (lots of anger and frustration to express I'd imagine)

Lapsa 10mo ago
any noise oscillator can serve a similar purpose
NickC25 10mo ago
I currently run a PC based Ableton setup albeit one that is exclusively ITB and uses no external gear outside of a sound card and an Ableton Push gen 1. I've got no issues with it. deadmau5 is famously a PC guy as well, he seems to have no issues with Windows (that I know of or that are not extremely specific to a setup that involves millions of dollars' worth of hardware and multiple computers). His setup is like an amusement park for nerds.
ofalkaed 10mo ago
Back in the pre-alsa days when linux used OSS you could pipe /dev/random into /dev/dsp and get noise, you could pipe anything into /dev/dsp and generally get some sort of noise. Possibly can still do this on the BSDs since they still use OSS.
- PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
  You can still do it with ALSA if it has the OSS compat modules loaded.
- notepad0x90 10mo ago
  I've done this with my setup fairly recently. I don't recall having to do anything special.
throaway45425 10mo ago
"linux musician" once meant trying to get this audio program to compile that would never work because I am not a unix system admin. I didn't realize Dave Phillips had passed away. I remember he had an incredible page of audio software links but all stuff I almost never got to make any sound. Sometimes I would even blow up my whole system trying to get something to work and have to reinstall the whole operating system. Seeing how far we have come with this site is just incredible.

gkhartman 10mo ago

This is great. Makes these tools much more discoverable. I can help but notice the drop in plugin ui quality one you click the foss filter checkbox. Something in me wants a foss plugin to come with a cool skin like the free ones do, but I know that's silly.

dylan604 10mo ago
It really says something about designers when there's so few of them contributing to FOSS projects. It also says something about FOSS devs that they don't/can't find better UI for their projects. Especially for web based UIs where CSS isn't that hard to look at sites you want to emulate and get much much closer to a respectable UI.
- jpetso 10mo ago
  A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations. Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit. Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects. As always, be the change you want to see in the world.
Blackthorn 10mo ago
Surge and vital have great UIs.

vlowther 10mo ago

It took quite a bit of scrolling until I found my old faves of dexed and zynaddsubfx, and I didn't see Helm (https://tytel.org/helm/ https://tytel.org/helm/) at all.

Blackthorn 10mo ago
Helm has been replaced in practice by Vital (same author), I think.
- aeonik 10mo ago
  They are completely different synths. Vital is a wave table synth; Helm is a subtractive synth. Helm was the first synthesizer that I really excelled with. I would recommend anyone who wants to actually learn the fundamentals of synthesis, to start on it. Once you get good at to it, it's faster to dial in the exact sound you want than to reach for a preset. It's far more straightforward and less complicated than additive (ZynAddSubFX), FM, or wave table synths. That being said, if you just want a very advanced synth with a lot of great presets, Vital is far more advanced.
anthony88 10mo ago
Surge XT is also at the bottom of the list.
nofu7ur3 10mo ago
I submitted a suggestion to add the sophisticated multi-engine FOSS soft synth that I use, Yoshimi (https://yoshimi.sourceforge.io/ https://yoshimi.sourceforge.io/) which is a linux only fork of ZynAddSubFX.

bnastic 10mo ago

I used this site as a reference earlier this year quite often, as I attempted to establish some baseline for a Linux DAW. I use Mac for serious audio stuff, but 'what if' (since I use Linux for everything else anyway). I came back pleasantly surprised with the current state of things. Minus the underlying linux sound system, which is still a mess of things that barely work together. (I have a lot of expensive/pro plugins and all the DAWs on the Mac, so this was mostly a filtering exercise - what I can use on Linux that can still mix/master a whole project). - I'm not a FOSS purist in audio, so that wasn't a requirement. But I am 'linux purist' so no VST wrappers of windows DLLs etc. - Watershed moment for me: Toneboosters and Kazrog coming to Linux. Along with u-he, these make for a very, very high quality offering. You can easily mix a commercial release just with these. Kazrog isn't even 'Linux beta' like the rest, proper full release on Linux. I was briefly involved in beta testing for Linux, Shane & co are incredible people. - I have most/all DAWs for the Mac. Reaper and Bitwig on Linux are enough for me and feel like good citizens in Linux. (ProTools is never coming, neither is Logic. But addition of Studio One makes for a really good trio). - Any USB class-compliant audio interface will work (modulo control applications which generally aren't available on Linux, so ymmv). - iLok is missing, which removes a whole host of possible options (I have 500+ licences on my iLok dongle, none of that stuff is accessible). I can't say I miss iLok, but I do miss Softube (not that it's available on Linux, iLok or not). I made a few 100+ tracks mixes on my thinkpad with Reaper and the above combo of plugins, it worked just fine. But Linux is still Linux, and 30 years later still annoys me with typical 'linux problems', which generally boil down to 'lack of care'. UI is still laggy, compositors be damned. While Reaper is butter-smooth on a Mac, audio thread never interferes with UI (and vice versa), it can get quite choppy on Linux. If you allow your laptop to go to sleep with a DAW open, chances are good that upon resuming you'll have to restart it as it will lose sound. And a lot of smaller annoyances that are just lack of polish and/or persistent bugs, that I'm sadly used to on Linux (want to switch users on Linux Mint? The lock screen can get hella confused and require a lot of tinkering to get the desktop back). But overall, it's a million miles away from a hobbyist endeavour that Linux audio used to be until recently. I could get actual work done with Linux this time around.

ofalkaed 10mo ago
PipeWire seems to solve all the audio stuff for me, zero problems since I made the switch. I had audio fail on resume once when I first installed PipeWire; if memory serves it was that the default settings for PipeWire was to restart the audio server on resume which screwed things up because Jack kept running. Something like that. The fix was simple, just comment out a line and uncomment another. Everything audio has just worked ever since. I have not had any UI issues in at least a decade on Slackware. The few times I tried Mint over the years, it was filled with random annoyances like you mention. Edit: This is not advocating using Slackware for audio work, it works great but it is Slackware and most don't get along with the Slackware way. But there is a DAW module for AlienBob's Slackware Live Edition[0]. It worked alright when I tried it, as well as any other live distro. [0] https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak

sramsay 10mo ago

This. Is. Awesome. Really. It amazes me that I still find out about new Linux plugins after years of producing music on the platform. It could not have been easy to compile this; the information is all over the place online. The ability to filter (!) for compression, saturation, etc. is so great.

chaosprint 10mo ago

If you don’t wanna use a daw on linux you are welcomed to try https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

nartho 10mo ago
Sure, as soon as you tell me how I'm supposed to record and mix a whole band with instruments with Glicol

ufocia 10mo ago

What about Ardour?

Nales 10mo ago
Ardour is listed. You need to search for it in the search bar. If your question was about using Ardour, I used it a bit and I managed to make a tune. I recommend this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJ1suTVouw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJ1suTVouw

gnarlouse 10mo ago

I’d like to see some company come out with a wrapper for Logic, Ableton, ProTools, etc with the following: - portable, reproducible environments: I suppose you could achieve this with a docker setup. If I jump to a different workstation, I want to be able to load my current project without playing setup wrangler. - license management like a dotfile database: all my licenses are fettered to the wind across two or three email addresses, and every time my PC crashes (twice in the past 5y) or something breaks I have to go recollect them. It’s a quest. Quests suck. - remote or cloud processing: connect to your workstation if you’re on the road, or a cloud cluster running DAWs. Sure, this introduces some lag which can force you into drag to piano roll contexts, but other times you’re just messing with mixes. But gaming giants like Sony figured it out for PS4/5 titles. - shareable projects with some innovative business solution to the license barrier. I want to be able to access somebody else’s project and load it in its entirety—whether I have Neural DSP’s latest Archetype or not. Whether I have Serum2 or not. Apple managed to get bands onto iTunes. We seriously can’t get Waves or Neural DSP to go the same route? Some royalty-based approach? I know these are outlandish requirements in some scenarios but I feel like this would fix the misery of music making in the era of Windows and macOS being goblinware operating systems.

th0ma5 10mo ago
Despite open plugins, and mostly open end result file formats, the entirety of the media software world is built around proprietary software primarily for several reasons: Ephemeral fads have you making money in one big upfront push, integration of some new technique doesn't lend itself to open standards, or the fact that the actual bulk of paying customers are presumably working musicians with budgets, and that market is ultimately small. The side effect of this, much like radios, rc planes and drones, and many other hobbies, is that a collection of smaller product producing organizations have an even smaller, more even playing field full of smaller professionals and some amateurs. Some of the modular hardware producers have the right idea and provide free versions of their hardware as plugins as a marketing gimmick for their actual hardware. However, outside of the Linux world, the mystique of a proprietary salve that will supplant your creative block pushes people towards short sighted sales pushes instead of trying to lock in a give and take interaction with the broader community. But I would love every thing that you list. I think things like PipeWire for better or worse are pushing things towards sanity, or least, better ideas for managing the mess in the open source world, which is decades in the making.

IndySun 10mo ago

Thanks for making the list but I hate endless scroll. Who doesn't? It makes no sense to me, GUI torture. why make it impossible to reach the footer?!

marttt 10mo ago

Side note: looking at the screenshot gallery on the linked site, it is interesting to see how often audio software GUIs mimic real, physical devices in remarkable detail. Carefully crafted graphics for volume dials, sliders etc.

raaron773 10mo ago

Is it just me or does the website feels very very snappy. I like it

jupake 10mo ago

This is fantastic! There are plenty of us out there that dont mind paying for software if its high quality. This is an excellent resource for people who are less militant about open source and just want to make music.

skulk 10mo ago
> This is an excellent resource for people who are less militant about open source and just want to make music. What a strange jab. People are militant about _freedom_, not getting things for free. If you don't care about freedom then just use Logic or Ableton or whatever, they're probably better than anything on Linux and they're industry standards. But they completely trash your freedoms as a user and that's what many people can't stomach. Plenty of software that respects the users freedoms is sold.

hardwarepirate 10mo ago

i can recommend renoise, not sequencer, but a tracker, used for creating demo tracks (the music in cracks) or genres like breakcore, jungle, edm. venetian snares uses it after he used cubase in the 90s/00s. it's rather customisable, reasonably priced and just works great as a daw for electronic music. https://renoise.com/download https://renoise.com/download it even comes with a demo and it's own vst for other daw'.

fractalf 10mo ago

Hi, author here. I was wondering why the hell my server was acting strange, then checked counter.dev and saw a huuuge spike. Ah, hackernews.. Anyway, thanks for the feedback regarding the site itself, both positive and negative. This is a 1-2 man project, just for fun, but any feedback are always welcome :) AMA

fractalf 10mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38815893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38815893