Fedora Muscian's Guide

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Musicians_Guide/index.html

by brudgers • 6 years ago

88 81 6 years ago

docs.fedoraproject.org

ptah2• 6 years ago

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Musician...

this is completely wrong. internal audio interfaces tend to be worse than external audio interfaces. what internal soundcard can compete with a universal audio apollo?

C1sc0cat• 6 years ago

Exactly the average internal sound card is normally the cheapest part you can get away with and wont have AISO drivers

It wont also have proper Line and Instrument just a 3.5 jack if your lucky and a combo jack in a lot of cases

johnr24• 6 years ago

this is completely wrong. internal audio interfaces tend to be worse than external audio interfaces. what internal soundcard can compete with a universal audio apollo?

Audio engineer here. It isn't wrong. PCI and PCIe cards with external AD/DA converters have better performance, reliability and higher channel counts. Eg.: https://www.rme-audio.de/hdspe-madi.html

64 channels in, 64 out. Works fine on Linux.

ptah2• 6 years ago

genuinely curious: what daw software are you using with this on linux?

casion2• 6 years ago

You're confusing internal/external and USB.

USB devices _do_ incur extra latency. The USB apollos do suffer from this. The firewire and thunderbolt do not.

Whether a devices is internal or external is irrelevant. There are "Internal" devices that are PCI based which have excellent performance, and external devices that are Thunderbolt based with equal (and better!) performance characteristics.

I believe you're talking about onboard sound, not "internal", in which case you're correct. However, that's not what the link is talking about.

smcphile• 6 years ago

Be warned that this guide was written in 2013 for Fedora 18. A few months back, I tried using this guide with Fedora 31 and I found things have evolved since the guide was written. For example, I gave up on installing the Planet CCRMA packages separately and just used the Fedora repository version. For some programs, in order to get a recent version, I installed from source code. Etc.

Also, there is currently no Fedora Jam Audio spin, so be prepared to fiddle around a bit if you want to use Fedora for music.

nightfly• 6 years ago

Can someone please fix the typo in the title?

montalbano3• 6 years ago

Music production software is the only thing keeping me from going 100% Linux. Unfortunately this guide doesn't help me much with the key issues

I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't) and the DAW that I use (Reaper) only has experimental Linux support. I would guess the Linux compatibility of other DAWs is worse. Audacity can only get you so far.

I would guess many of the audio plug-ins I rely on within Reaper would also have issues running on Linux.

johnr24• 6 years ago

I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't)

Most of the RME HDSP/HDSPe PCI/PCIe cards work on Linux using the ALSA snd-hdsp or snd-hdspm drivers. The ADI-2 can use the generic Linux USB audio driver AFAIK.

montalbano3• 6 years ago

Interesting I will look into this more now. Given the other comment suggesting that Reaper is stable it looks like two of my main impediments to using Linux may be voided. Plug-in stability and cross-compatibility is my last unknown then.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 6 years ago

Many studios use USB interfaces these days and the majority of them work on Linux. I'm the lead developer of Ardour and for the last couple of years I've been using a MOTU UltraLite AVB, which works out of the box (24 channels of I/O, and a totally web-based configuration utility).

Many, many production-grade devices (another example: the Behringer (Midas) X32) work right of the box. The fact that the iPad did not allow drivers forced almost all audio interface manufacturers to clean up their act and get fully compliant with the USB audio specification. The side effect of this is that they Just Work (TM) with Linux too.

(*) the one issue is that this particular device requires a specific version of the firmware to avoid a bug that only shows up on Linux. This is not true in general.

iovrthoughtthis3• 6 years ago

Fyi, been using Reaper on Linux for over a year now and it has been incredibly stable.

montalbano3• 6 years ago

Good to hear, what sound card are you using? Also what plug-in formats? If more than stereo in/out number of connections, do you have access to them all within Reaper?

Most of my plugins are VST but many are home-brewed and only just about stable on my windows machine.

jcelerier3• 6 years ago

I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't)

hum strange, I've been using a multiface II on linux for almost 10 years without issue

rwmj3• 6 years ago

As a Fedora developer and amateur musician, I really couldn't recommend Fedora (or Linux in general) for music. The DAWs I've tried are terrible. They all have horrible UIs, trouble doing basic stuff and are crash-prone (hint to developers: the DAW should never ever ever crash!) My band uses free GarageBand on Mac which is not very good but night and day better than any of them I've tried. Setting up Jack instead of Pulseaudio is horrible and invasive. Routing USB midi is an exercise in command line randomness.

Can we make this better? Probably. And I guess I should work on it. But right now it's not there.

iovrthoughtthis3• 6 years ago

I mostly would agree in the past.

Now that Reaper is available on Linux this has changed for me! I record on Linux all the time now.

There are fewer plugins. You still have to wrestle with jack / pulse. There are other warts but it is a vast improvement. :)

alkonaut• 6 years ago

Do you mean that the Linux versions of DAWs are worse than their non-linux counterparts, or just that some linux-specific DAWs are worse than DAWs that are not linux specific?

Because Bitwig for example is amazing, and it supports Mac/Win/Linux - but I haven't used it outside windows. I'd worry about sound drivers and plugin support (I doubt plugin makers spend a lot of time on linux GUI support) but I'd trust the core functionality to be the same across all platforms.

acomjean• 6 years ago

I’ve used bitwig Linux. Coming from ableton on Mac. I haven’t used it for much yet but it works quite well (pop-os).

A little work to get it set up but nothing difficult.

rwmj3• 6 years ago

The second - I only tried free software DAWs on Linux. I've not tried proprietary DAWs on Linux, because if I'm going to do that I might as well go all-in on the Mac (not least because Macs and Windows don't have two competing sound systems that you have to switch between to use a DAW and do regular stuff like watching videos).

stefanha4• 6 years ago

I use Fedora to jam online several times a week and to record a few times a year. The open source Linux music software ecosystem is behind proprietary software available on Windows and macOS but it can do what I need.

Audio system: JACK

DAW: Ardour 5

Synthesizer: zynaddsubfx

Pianos: PianoTeq 6 (proprietary)

Drum machine: Hydrogen

The lack of good drum kits and patterns is my current pain point.

I haven't tried Reaper or Bitwig on Linux yet, but they should be decent if you are willing to use proprietary software.

The Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 USB soundcard that I use is a class-compliant USB audio device and I've never had trouble with it.

vibrafox5• 6 years ago

Reaper and Live have spoiled me. I tried to like Ardour, and it would be great if it's all I had, but it has too many rough edges.

LMMS is good though. I must have made 200+ songs in it before switching to Reaper. I could get by with LMMS and the included synths if I had to. It makes me wish Reaper supported LV2.

Papric0re2• 6 years ago

The lack of good drum kits and patterns is my current pain point.

True. But I have little tip for you: There's an experimental feature in Carla that lets you use Plug-Ins that rely on wine. Currently I use this feature with MT Power Drum Kit (decent sounding - still not ideal) and some other free Plug-Ins. But I will agree that this increases the fiddling and virtual wiring. As Carla is able to save all that, it's still quite handy.

By the way: I use the Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6, works like a charm (and only uses hardware switches). Do you use Gen1 or Gen2 of the Scarlett? - I've heard of some issues with Gen2.

Edit: I use the drums for making Metal music. Might not be ideal for other genres.

wheels2• 6 years ago

The lack of good drum kits and patterns is my current pain point.

If you mean electronic drum samples, and are on a Ubuntu-based distro, give Sitala a shot:

https://decomposer.de/sitala.html

sammorrowdrums2• 6 years ago

Ardour is pretty sweet. I do have Bitwig, but not latest as I can't afford to keep it upgraded!

giancarlostoro4• 6 years ago

I know its Debian / Ubuntu based but have you tried Ubuntu Studio at all? It seems geared towards music and video editing out of the box so it might involve less command line incantations.

indigochill• 6 years ago

I tried Studio with a MIDI keyboard for input, but getting it to register the input was still a hassle to figure out. Had to go through JACK and explicitly wire the inputs and outputs of the various devices and apps to get everything working, which on a hack-everything level is kind of cool but on the other hand I just wanted to jam on a keyboard, not fiddle with a network of devices and applications.

I can say, though, Studio is a huge step up from trying to get this sort of thing working in stock Ubuntu.

pb82• 6 years ago

Can I ask you what your opinion on LMMS is? It seems to get recommended a lot and I wanted to use it to get into DAWs at some point.

rwmj3• 6 years ago

Pretty sure I tried out LMMS, but don't recall anything specifically. The main ones I looked at and stuck with for a while were Ardour, Rosegarden, plus Audacity which is more of a sound editor. Just found out on this very thread about Non, which looks promising, so that's one I'm going to try next.

I want to say the main problems are: having to set up Jack and switch between that and PA - why isn't there one sound system? - the whole USB midi routing situation, software with obscure UIs, and software that crashes. Apart from the first one these are all fairly easily solvable.

These days I mostly write stuff using synths. The Deluge for example has enough built in that you don't need to use a DAW at all.

billfruit• 6 years ago

May be that isn't the only approach that will yield good results, there are really powerful tools on a fundamental level like csound etc that I think fully leverage programmed computers and music.

jcelerier3• 6 years ago

As someone developing a daw (https://ossia.io) - "hint to developers: the DAW should never ever ever crash!"... yeah, I'd like it not to have bugs too but there are only so many hours in a week-end :)

I also had some cases / user projects where it was much more important to have maximum performance than guarantees of not crashing.

wheels2• 6 years ago

Things have come leaps and bounds on Linux in the past 5-ish years. Linux is now viable (if not recommendable) for professional audio production. It wasn't before.

Not only has Ardour gotten better, but also Bitwig is available, and Reaper too. Bitwig has the most polished UI, but Reaper has a particularly dedicated user base and is very extensible, if a little hard on the eyes.

Routing MIDI is mostly a matter of using QJackCtl, which isn't pretty, but it gets the job done (and really, MIDI routing isn't pretty on any platform).

Again, I wouldn't recommend someone building a system from the ground up for music production to go for Linux, but for someone who's already a long-time Linux user, it is now finally possible to do music production at a non-toyish level without switching OSes.

As a side note, loads of audio "devices" (synths, grooveboxes, etc.) these days are just ARM devices running a modified Linux audio stack.

sammorrowdrums2• 6 years ago

Have you Tried Bitwig? I have found it works pretty damn well, and is the most polished interface. It's just expensive.

I've tried numerous packges, and MIDI devices etc. and I agree that things can be hard and decisions like "do I set up low latency kernel etc." have implications if you're using your machine for work other than music production, but I think things are better.

I've tried Bitwig with external midi keyboard, USB keyboards, and Ableton Push - It's probably not my suggested setup for most musicians, but it's not a bad one.

EamonnMR• 6 years ago

I've had good results with Renoise on Ubuntu

kagenouta• 6 years ago

You might want to look into Pipewire - it's a next-gen A/V framework being developed by one of the creators of GStreamer.

It isn't ready for prime time yet, but the long-term goal on the audio side is to replace both PulseAudio and Jack.

_qbjt• 6 years ago

You can actually do a lot with FOSS music production software like Ardour these days, although I’ve been using Ableton for over a decade so it’s unlikely I’ll be taking the time to learn another DAW any time soon. But if you’re interested, check out unfa [0] on YouTube. He puts out a lot of tutorials on free / libre audio production.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/unfa00

willismichael• 6 years ago

I think that Ardour 5.x has only crashed on me due to a bad plugin, and even at that it's usually a plugin that I'm developing when I haven't worked out the bugs yet.

emmelaich• 6 years ago

This is Fedora 18, which is very old .. 2013

me551ah• 6 years ago

Making electronic music is so much more than just operating system support.

You need a DAW and most of the ones that you get on Linux are horrible, except Bitwig. So you would be forced to use only one DAW.

Most of the well known plugins like Serum, LFO Tool and Massive are not available either so you would be limited to the ones included in Bitwig or the basic VSTs that you find for Linux.

And while JACK is pretty good at low latency audio you would miss out on the ASIO control panel provided by your sound card driver. While its possible to get asio working on linux using wineasio, it's a cumbersome process since you need to compile the asio dlls which have licensing restrictions.

You would have a much better experience if you just install Windows on KVM and use PCI passthrough for your sound card.

justaj• 6 years ago

Most of the well known plugins like Serum, LFO Tool and Massive are not available either

Though everything that those VSTs can do, can also be done in Bitwig Studio starting from v3.

miss out on the ASIO control panel

What does this add that the usual tools in Linux can't fix? Also, it's recommended to go with class compliant USB audio interfaces or otherwise interfaces that are supported on Linux. Going with MOTU gear for example is a bad idea.

casion2• 6 years ago

"Can do" is not particularly useful. You "can" sit there and sequence thousands of sine waves in audacity to create any sound that you want... but nobody wants to do that.

Bitwig's grid is capable, but the ease of access for particular workflows is burdensome. Replicating Serum in the grid isn't possible practically, both because of filter designs and the wavetable capabilities, and getting close requires some significant acrobatics.

Massive... much easier. LFO Tool, basically impossible to replicate in Bitwig because the main draw is the _workflow_.

Bitwig is a very capable, fun and useful product for electronic music creation but I think your response to the OP is correct on a very technical, and pedantic level, but extremely unhelpful regardless.

vibrafox5• 6 years ago

Surge isn't a replacement for Serum, but the original developer cofounded BitWig. It's probably the best sound you'll get out of a Linux-native synth. You can even use Serum wavetables with it.

cupantae• 6 years ago

Ok so many people are commenting that this article is out of date. I've been searching for what the best out-of-the-box music Linux distro would be, so I can dual boot that for any music work. Namely it must have:

- jack set up and default for everything

- complete DAW solution: synth set up etc

- updated, stable software

- MIDI set up fully

- real time kernel is definitely a plus

- acceptable performance on modest hardware

A lot of the recommendations online like Musix are not current at all! I wonder if Ubuntu Studio is the answer, just purely based on the website being updated and professional-looking. I've considered KXstudio but cannot confirm that it is a distro rather than a software repo. AVLinux?

Any firsthand experience? I will test Ubuntu Studio today and report back

rudenoise• 6 years ago

So after trialing a few of the "audio-centric" distro-flavours I couldn't find any that were particularly compelling (most, Ubuntu Studio included, were installing huge quantities of tools that I was never likely to explore).

I've ended up using Manjaro, with Jack, Reaper, Renoise, Airwindows plugins, a real-time kernel and very little else. It's pretty good.

I found this guide was helpful https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio

jcelerier3• 6 years ago

ArchLinux has a pro-audio package group which does some system setup IIRC : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio ; of course software is up-to-date.

I know that more and more Linux audio devs are using Arch as main OS also, so things may be a bit better tested there :)

jimbosis• 6 years ago

KXstudio is now a software repo only for "Any Debian or Ubuntu based system, running GNU/Linux. For Debian, version 10 (Buster) is required; on Ubuntu, 18.04 (Bionic)." https://kx.studio/Repositories:FAQ

I was able to use the KXstudio repos on Devuan ASCII 2.0, if anyone is wondering about Devuan compatibility.

KXstudio used to also have their own distro, based on Ubuntu, but the last release was based on Ubuntu 14.04, based on my memory and the DistroWatch page. The ISOs are still on GitHub, but, it goes without saying, are no longer supported. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=kxstudio https://github.com/KXStudio/KXStudio/releases/

netphobee• 6 years ago

Here's some thoughts: The current resources aren't entirely better but you can absolutely get things done now. There's more software choices than offered here and more developers willing to build worthy native plugins for the platform, Bitwig is absolutely comparable to Ableton with the addition of various modular tools that wipe the need for at least a few plugins a lot of my EDM buds rely on, and on the more unstable end of things, Wine + LinVST does work. Spire works, Serum works, Omnisphere works, NI Reaktor and Kontakt 'works' (it's painful), there's a decent list of VSTs that are either performing near-natively or just 'works' using frameworks like LinVST and Airwave. Midi works like any OS and you actually do not need the use of a real time kernel these days from my own usage. it all bubbles down to a decently useful workstation.

Distro wise, I've hopped from 'media' centric distros, Arch to Pop-OS and now considering Kubuntu, and my experience has been fairly the same:

- Install the KxStudio package repo - Install cadence and it's dependencies which includes jack2 from the repo (I'm not going to go into the mess between choosing jack1 and jack2) - Install Bitwig - Install Wine and LinVST to my binaries

which alone is more system fiddling than macOS, but I think you just simply expect it though. Cadence and it's suite of routing and config tools would help make up the loss of any ASIO panel, it's more in line with how audio setup on macOS is.

Biggest problem right now to me is hardware support, and Linux support goes from cheap and not enough, to really expensive and not specific towards me. Finding an interface to fit my eventual needs... 6+ ins and 6+ DC coupled outs, 2 XLR ins, possibly some type of ADAT, and maybe a word clock... these are Universal Audio or Focusrite type of needs. I own a MOTU Traveler and I'm lucky that the built in MOTU driver 'works' but it's sort of messy. MOTU's lack of interest in sharing the interfaces' beans doesn't help and it's nearly the same story for every interface manufacturer: it's a trade secret risk to let the community build a driver, and or there's just no money to come out of allocating resource towards an official driver. It sucks, but with my Traveler, I've managed to have some fun when everything is stable which is at least more than I expect. There's days where I look at Universal Audio hardware and want to end up buying a Mac and a UA interface.

I wouldn't recommend it because workspace and consistent stability is incredibly important if you're full time, but you CAN make it work if you're curious like me and be fun. I've managed to cut a few dance records for some labels on my build but issues do arise which I think may get in the way in the moment my workload would have to speed up or expand to recording more than a microKorg and using native vsts and Wine, and for that moment I'm always down to Hackintosh or just buy a real Mac. I love linux development and making music on it feels nice until those issues arise.

taylodl2• 6 years ago

I'm a professional developer and amateur musician. Honestly, I believe this is a case where the "Apple tax" is well worth it. You can get far with GarageBand and where that falls short you can use Logic Pro, which for $200 is still a far sight cheaper than the other commercial DAWs. Interested in hearing other people's experiences.

Bootwizard• 6 years ago

I feel like the audience this article was written for would do well to try out Reaper. It's a FOSS DAW that has almost every feature you wpuld ever need, but also has a steep learning curve.

uxp100• 6 years ago

I don’t think reaper is open source. It is, however, pretty good, and cheap.

squeaky-clean• 6 years ago

Reaper is neither free nor open source. Cockos (the company behind Reaper) has several open source libraries used within Reaper, but Reaper is proprietary software that costs $60 for a personal license. The developers don't believe in wasting time on anti-piracy checks, so it's very easy to use Reaper without paying. Kind of like Sublime Text.

Reaper is a great DAW, and I would recommend it to everyone. Whether a beginner looking for their first DAW, or a pro with a million dollar studio. Just pointing out it's not free/foss because that's something I've seen people claim about Reaper for over a decade.

auiya• 6 years ago

Logic Pro's built in plugins are also top-notch. You'd be hard pressed to find comparable in the commercial space piecemeal for $200.

LeonB• 6 years ago

Reading this i didn’t feel it was addressed to me as a musician. But as an engineer I felt it was addressed to me.

jfengel• 6 years ago

That would be "Musician", not "Muscian". The actual link spells it correctly.

AdmiralAsshat• 6 years ago

Props to Fedora for their thorough documentation, but to a musician looking for a prospective Linux distro to serve their needs, this looks dense as all hell.

I wonder if they might be better served taking a page from something like Ubuntu Studio[0], and just making a spin that tries to preconfigure all of this stuff out-of-the-box for the end-user, so that they can simply install the ISO and get going.

[0] https://ubuntustudio.org/tour/audio/#

mushufasa• 6 years ago

section on training yourself to listen https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Musician...

cies• 6 years ago

Check out "Unfa" on YT, he makes vids on opensource music production. Very good quality content IMHO.

He uses KXStudio iirc.

beat• 6 years ago

Ugh. I've been using Linux since the .9 kernels/SLS distro days (1995 or so), and I've been producing albums for 13-14 years and recording longer than that, and I wouldn't even consider doing real music production in Linux. It is absolutely not worth the bullshit and the spoons. I want to be recording music, not putzing around with device drivers or scrounging for plugins that don't completely suck.

I mostly use Reaper on a Mac, and pay a monthly subscription for Plugin Alliance plugins. It's well worth the money, because it works, sounds great, and is straightforward to use. Given a choice between spending two hours improving the eq/compression/reverb of a mix and two hours trying to figure out why no sound is coming out, I know which one I prefer.

zwieback• 6 years ago

Yes, Reaper is great. I played around with various options and Reaper is the winner for me. I found a 8 channel Firewire Presonus interface in a cabinet at work and that still works great with Reaper.

krn• 6 years ago

It's closed-source, but Bitwig Studio[1] is probably the best DAW that supports Linux natively since its initial release in 2014. At least for electronic music production, it's considered on a par with Ableton Live.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwig_Studio

deeblering4• 6 years ago

For me music creation is a process of capturing lightning in a bottle.

When I'm ready to record something, my kit needs to work and get the idea into a track right away while I have the idea and the juices are flowing.

If I have to troubleshoot or configure anything while in this mode the creative idea is lost and I get super frustrated.

This is why I've shied away from linux as a music platform, setup and troubleshooting is the last thing I want to do when feeling creative, I just want to plug-in and hit record.

With that said my approach is around physical instruments, maybe it's different if your studio is entirely in the box.

Fedora Muscian's Guide

Related Stories