I'd like to use Linux but...

anyone tried ardour?

yea, if anyone has any experience with ardour, I'd love to hear about it.

I looked at the webpage once

lolz

I have used audacity on ubuntu with no problems for more modest recording of band jamz purposes

if I am deep in the creative process I hate to suddenly get some bug to fix - garageband is great in that sense. it owuld be nice to have a really basic yet solid "tascam porta studio" type app

the jack aspect scares me... linux audio in general does...

as in the audio input on the machine? or a usb input?

jack the extra extra layer of audio libraries on top of pulse / alsa / oss / whatever

http://jackaudio.org/

yeah the interaction between jack / pulseaudio / alsa / oss is something i've never understood either

http://www.indygo.de/misc/linux_audio.png

lol

linux in a nutshell

Recording music on a computer is beyond me, but have any of you tried the UbuntuStudio flavor? It claims to be preloaded and configured for creation.

also, DeadBeef is my favorite music player. It's closest to boring unmodified foobar2000 in use.

audio in linux is so fucked.

whyfucked?

that diagram is a pretty good explanation! there are a whole bunch of different libraries/driver sets and all of them are half-finished and sometimes programs only like one of them, or two of them, or one of them only if it's "wrapped" inside another one, and sometimes updates break them, etc.. for a while after installing ubuntu i couldn't get sound from more than one program at a time, which i tell people i "fixed" but which really just stopped being a problem one day because i lit the right number of votive candles. things have been pretty smooth since then (although the sound in the native linux version of quake 3 could not be convinced to work and i eventually just installed the windows version under wine) and like everything else in linux It Gets Better but it's still the thing i've had the most problems with.

(what bugged me this morning was trying to remember the name of the program that handles pdfs. works when i double-click on them but i was trying to add a pdf to the task bar and just dragging it there didn't work. was 'evince' ffs)

― koogs, Thursday, June 30, 2011 9:08 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

loled @ this btw, love/hate the gnomic (gnumic) linux app names. "ekiga", "gwibber", "brasero", "pitivi".

hate microsoft and everything but you know what was a good name for a program? "word".

lol that's a good point actually

like everything else in linux It Gets Better

lol

the first ubuntu release that used pulseaudio was pretty dreadful - even the startup sound got the glitch remix treatment. second version was MUCH better. and it's a while since i've had any specific trouble (about a year ago, mplayer -ao oss to get decent playback of some media or other)

love/hate the gnomic (gnumic) linux app names. "ekiga", "gwibber", "brasero", "pitivi".

― my Sonicare toothbrush (difficult listening hour), Sunday, 3 July 2011 04:37 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also all the kde names that absolutely must begin with a k (no love there, just hate)

i experimented with ubuntu for a couple weeks before giving up in frustration by the sheer amount of effort i needed to put into things just to run super simple tasks. plugins, plugins, plugins, plugins....

so i aint h8in but can anyone explain to me the appeal of linux outside of server usages?

You feel cool

- no viruses
- no adware
- no spyware
- free stuff
- no windows
- less nagging (less an issue c/w win7)

Linux is good for my yak shavey moods when I want everything to be esoteric and command line based and use tiling window managers that you have to recompile to configure and stuff like that.

i've probably mentioned it before since i'm so rmde proud of myself but i went to linux because my Vista hard drive died and i didn't feel like replacing it so i used an ubuntu livecd and no hard drive for like a year. eventually i updated to booting off of an SD card. it's the living in a van down by the river of computing.

anyway other than flash, mp3, and some video codecs i don't know about any plugins.. but i just web surf and draw stuff so..

sheer amount of effort i needed to put into things just to run super simple tasks. plugins, plugins, plugins, plugins....

what are these super simple tasks?

most things in linux now are pretty easy!

please do not mention moonlight/silverlight

also all the kde names that absolutely must begin with a k (no love there, just hate)

I can live with this as it's the only clue most of them give you that they need KDE before you install them, and I don't run KDE

they must be confused by the word knome/gnome

On the subject of audio in Linux, I've had a lot success with AV Linux.

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

The developer has JACK working fairly well, and its a Realtime Kernel so latency isn't really an issue when it comes to recording.

Ubuntu Studio on the other hand is just vaporware.

I've also heard really good things about Studio64, but I only run Linux on older 32 bit systems so I've never tried it.

As far as Ardour goes, it works, but I'd suggest paying for it you want anything other than basic functionality. You can't even really edit with the free version. You can pop files back and forth between Ardour and Audacity but its extremely time consuming and tedious.

I use the native Linux version of Renoise and its very very stable. One of my favorite pseudo DAWs, but its still tracker software at heart, so if you can't stand coding I'd suggest something else. All that being said I also own a Macbook and wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in one basket if you've only got one computer. I've tried about 8 different flavors of Linux before I found one that I liked and that was stable enough to use for audio editing and songwriting.

One word of caution: AV Linux is kind of a bear to set up.

Its much easier to transition from Ubuntu to it, than doing it from a Windows PC.

I'd suggest getting Ubuntu set up on a partition and then using it for a month or two before moving over. Get to know various software in the Debian environment so that you know what kind of stuff to tweak the basic AV Linux build with. I'm no coder, I just smash together bits and pieces of other people's code until something works. It really helps to be willing to completely scrap an OS and start over again if you have to.

But AV Linux does have very detailed step by step install directions which is a refreshing change of pace in the he-man world of open source software. Seriously though, this guy built an OS by himself and it works really well. That's Bill Gates territory in my book.

As long as I'm doing the knowledge dump thing.

http://www.64studio.com/faq_user

I found this FAQ on Studio64's site enormously helpful when I was setting up my USB audio interface with JACK.

"The performance of my USB audio interface with Jack is poor. I can't get low latency without xruns, using the default Jack settings. What do I need to change?

USB audio interfaces can act strangely when set to 2 periods/buffer, the usual default for PCI sound cards or onboard chipsets. In Jack Control, please set Periods/Buffer to 3 and Frames/Period to a fairly high figure, say 256 or 512. Then try lower Frames/Period settings until you reach the lower latency limits of your system. If you don't need full duplex, setting Jack to Playback Only or Capture Only will improve performance."

I use a cheapo Alesis one, its got 2 ins, 2 outs and a Midi In/Out.

With Renoise running the JACK server you can do some really amazing stuff, it makes Rewire seem like a quaint toy in comparison. On the other hand if you use VSTs heavily in Windows getting them running in Linux is enormously difficult. That's one of the few battles I gave up on. I just settled on using Linux based plug ins, which are mostly pretty terrible.

These days I mostly use Renoise for composition and then move the file over to the Macbook and edit them in Logic.

I would like to try all that if I had the time. As it is I am considering getting my cassette based tascam out of the basement.

I have a Mac at work. I would like to read files on a 2 TB USB drive with an ext3 filesystem. If I install VIrtualBox (virtualbox.org), will I be able to do this? The VirtualBox documentation mentions Linux 2.6. How is Ubuntu related to Linux 2.6? I've heard the former works with ext3. Has anyone done this before? Should I be concerned about memory or anything like that? Thanks in advance.

Check out Vagrant: http://vagrantup.com/

More than likely you'll get a command line-only linux install you can connect to locally, but the setup time will be very low.

go with Ubuntu 10.04, the latest LTS (long term support) release. it's the most stable and doesn't have Unity.

any recent ubuntu will work with ext3 (ext3 is commonest but last generation file system, probably 10 years old now (yes, added to kernel in 2001) and superceded by ext4 (2008) and, soon, btrfs).

and 2.6 is the kernel revision, and any recent ubuntu will have a 2.6 kernel.

the bigger issue might be usb support in VirtualBox. was a time when the free version didn't support it.

Actually, this is probably easier:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/

Support for ext2/ext3 disks in OS X.

Thanks! I haven't had a chance to try this yet because I've been sidetracked with other projects, but hopefully before the weekend, I'll get to try different options ... This is when I am truly thankful for ILX!!!

Hello Justin86,

We at Ubuntu Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

lol

I am very disappointed at the lack of nerdery in that birthday greeting. Like I'm sure the slackware forum sends you a message in obfuscated c or something.

also kind of lol that this is the first one of these i get after being inactive on the forum for like 3 years

pysched for the linux spotify if it ever occurs

http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2010/07/12/linux/

well look at that

I tried it but after install it would not allow me to log in - shit!

you need to be a premium member.