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.
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
I just don't think the economics of this work. Software synths are just such cutthroat competition that there is no profit margin.
I have a Pittsburgh Modular TAIGA that cost $800. How much am I willing to pay for a software synth doing analog modeling? Basically nothing.
To get everyone a piece of the pie to make it worth it for this, it would cost the end user so much for the pie that no one would bother.
My experience with music collaboration is that the technical challenges have been minimal for a long time now. The challenges of collaboration are social and being on the same page musically. Even in the 90s, it wasn't hard to find people to make rock music with locally. The problem was always what was meant by "rock music" to begin with.
It is exactly the opposite problem of video games. It would be like the economics of video games if the goal was to team up to play video games no one else was playing.
I think this would only work if every musician's goal was to be Taylor Swift.
This is a great list. Even the first line item would be amazing. I'm really feeling this pain presently as I am moving my setup to a new dedicated machine.
Put aside the bit rot that occurs constantly with digital project files in a way it never did with tape, just getting my DAW, plugins, samples, projects working has been a giant pain. I am a big fan of deterministic/reproducible computing environments in general. My primary machine is setup declaratively with Nix. It would be great if something like this existed for my music setup without having to compromise on creative choices.
Most of these plugins are of dubious software quality, but that is not mutually exclusive with their ability to accomplish great sounding results. One of the reasons I bought a dedicated machine for music is that I inherently don't really trust them to be running on the same device as my personal computing. Some of them (Universal Audio Apollo) even require kernel extensions on MacOS.
If anyone is attempting to solve this, I'd like to hear about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
23 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 54.6 ms ] threadTurning 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.
Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.
https://linuxmusicians.com/
https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46
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.
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.
- 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.
I have a Pittsburgh Modular TAIGA that cost $800. How much am I willing to pay for a software synth doing analog modeling? Basically nothing.
To get everyone a piece of the pie to make it worth it for this, it would cost the end user so much for the pie that no one would bother.
My experience with music collaboration is that the technical challenges have been minimal for a long time now. The challenges of collaboration are social and being on the same page musically. Even in the 90s, it wasn't hard to find people to make rock music with locally. The problem was always what was meant by "rock music" to begin with.
It is exactly the opposite problem of video games. It would be like the economics of video games if the goal was to team up to play video games no one else was playing.
I think this would only work if every musician's goal was to be Taylor Swift.
Put aside the bit rot that occurs constantly with digital project files in a way it never did with tape, just getting my DAW, plugins, samples, projects working has been a giant pain. I am a big fan of deterministic/reproducible computing environments in general. My primary machine is setup declaratively with Nix. It would be great if something like this existed for my music setup without having to compromise on creative choices.
Most of these plugins are of dubious software quality, but that is not mutually exclusive with their ability to accomplish great sounding results. One of the reasons I bought a dedicated machine for music is that I inherently don't really trust them to be running on the same device as my personal computing. Some of them (Universal Audio Apollo) even require kernel extensions on MacOS.
If anyone is attempting to solve this, I'd like to hear about it.
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.
it's rather customisable, reasonably priced and just works great as a daw for electronic music.
https://renoise.com/download it even comes with a demo and it's own vst for other daw'.
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