> Also consider that there are no good audio drivers for Linux (like Asio for example) so you're almost forced to stay in windows or Mac...
ASIO, really? Sorry but you couldn’t pay me to go back to that broken piece of crap after switching to Linux and JACK2. I’m actually traumatized by that piece of software, thinking of moments where ASIO would just break and cause my Live session to collapse into a glitchy cacophony of latency-induced noise. I’ve seen this happen on several computers with different Windows installations and external audio hardware and the problem always ends up being ASIO. Some of the producers I knew swore off anything that wasn’t a Mac because of this exact problem.
The problem with audio production on Linux in 2021 isn’t the audio protocol. It’s that most free and open source audio production software for Linux is dreadful to use. UX is actually very important for DAWs. I want to like Ardour but it’s a miserable piece of software to try to make music in. Feels like a chore to perform any action, kills my vibe, would not recommend. After trying really hard to become comfortable using it, I finally gave up and bought Bitwig. It’s a proprietary DAW and kinda expensive but I’ve been producing music with it for a couple of years and it’s a dream to use - sort of a spiritual successor to Ableton IMO.
> No plug-in or DAW has a CLI…
Most people who make music don’t care about this. I’m a software developer and musician who only uses Linux and I don’t care about this. In my opinion, Linux developers of free and open source creative software should spend less time building these features for other developers and focus more on making their software feel good to create with. If I feel bad trying to use your clunky-ass UI to make my art / music / whatever then I’m not going to hold myself back because it has a free software license. I’m going to find a piece of software that gets out of the way and lets me make what I want to make.
> I want to like Ardour but it’s a miserable piece of software to try to make music in. Feels like a chore to perform any action, kills my vibe, would not recommend. After trying really hard to become comfortable using it, I finally gave up and bought Bitwig. It’s a proprietary DAW and kinda expensive but I’ve been producing music with it for a couple of years and it’s a dream to use - sort of a spiritual successor to Ableton IMO.
As I've mentioned above, I get all kinds of email about Ardour, some declaring their love for it, and some much more condemnatory than anything you've said here.
The point is that "trying to make music" isn't much of a description: people's workflows for "making music" vary dramatically. Not many years ago, more or less the only way to do this was to record yourself playing one or more instruments and/or singing. These days, there are many fundamentally different workflows, and countless minor variations of each one. If Bitwig works for you, it's no surprise that Ardour doesn't. There's a bunch of people for whom the opposite is true. You have to be prepared to try different tools and figure out which ones work for you.
Finally, ASIO and JACK don't really at the same level. JACK on Windows actually uses ASIO. The comparison to ASIO on Linux is ALSA, and sure, I'd agree that it's better than ASIO is most ways (though maybe not 100%).
> The point is that "trying to make music" isn't much of a description: people's workflows for "making music" vary dramatically. Not many years ago, more or less the only way to do this was to record yourself playing one or more instruments and/or singing. These days, there are many fundamentally different workflows, and countless minor variations of each one.
Excellent point and apologies if that comment came across as inflammatory. I really respect the work you and the Ardour team have done even if it's not for me (and infinite thanks for your work on JACK, it truly is a special piece of software). My frustration has more to do with there not being a FOSS DAW that gives me that true Ableton-like experience. I understand why though, this stuff is hard to build and one workflow does not fit all as you point out.
Ardour is really great for recording and mixing. For a more "contemporary" workflow you might want to try zrythm¹, it's getting better and better. (I still use Bitwig though…) If you exclusively make electronic music you could also look into LMMS², it's more of an electronic-music-toy than an actual DAW but thats not necessarily a bad thing.
> For a more "contemporary" workflow you might want to try zrythm¹, it's getting better and better.
Oh wow, Zrythm looks awesome! Thank you for the suggestion, I'll be taking this DAW for a spin sometime soon. :)
> Ardour is really great for recording and mixing.
Yeah, I'm actually warming up to Ardour as a general mix & mastering environment. It reminds me of Logic Pro in that sense, being more suited for final touches than composition (in my personal workflow).
> If you exclusively make electronic music you could also look into LMMS², it's more of an electronic-music-toy than an actual DAW but thats not necessarily a bad thing.
How is LMMS these days? I tried it sometime last year and had a lot of fun but it crashed too much for my personal comfort (tbf that could have just been whatever buggy LV2 / VST plugins I was testing). It comes a bit closer to the "look and feel" I look for in a DAW - kinda reminds me of older versions of FL Studio which is kewl because that's the software I learned how to produce music on.
> I’m a software developer and musician who only uses Linux and I don’t care about this.
I am a software developer and musician who uses Linux and I do care about this. I run headless, and control my audio software through custom logic and hardware while playing live. I ended up writing a custom synthesizer and see because I couldn't find anything that works well for my use case
(I'm still open to something else; my synth doesn't sound very good. Designing custom sounds is not something I'm great at or something where I really want to focus.)
You can run Ardour headless and control it 100% using OSC (from the command line, with oscsend, or from a touch device (phone/tablet) using eg. TouchOSC). You could also get significant but not as extensive control using MIDI.
> I am a software developer and musician who uses Linux and I do care about this. I run headless, and control my audio software through custom logic and hardware while playing live. I ended up writing a custom synthesizer and see because I couldn't find anything that works well for my use case
That's pretty cool. Most modern DAWs allow you to define per-controller triggers for custom logic in the form of MIDI events. I guess you could write a CLI that maps custom commands to MIDI events and allows you to send those events to your DAW when they are called. It's not exactly what you're describing (and maybe it doesn't fit your use case) but is that something you've considered?
Havng had zero problems with this (already many years ago, in the days where getting low latency on linux was extremely hard) on a variety of machines but all with pretty decent cards is it possible that the problem has nothing to do with ASIO but rather with crappy drivers / manufacturers? Or perhaps you just had bad luck?
JACK2? Sorry my ignorance, it's been a while I abandoned Linux audio for Ableton on Windows with a focusrite Scarlet. Did they solve that JACK/alsa problem? Without running a2j in the background?
Which problem are you referring to? a2jmidi should work fine as long as you have access to the device. But in any case that should not be necessary anymore if you use pipewire, which should be able to manage all the devices at once.
The problem was that extra a2jmidi hoop adding a lot of friction to my creative process. Also I wanted to keep it on indefinitely to use it as an instrument, and a2jmidi would crash after a few days.
Also there was the night spent recompiling the right version of bison in the middle of Qsampler's dependency hell, so that I could have a piano sound. That was all in 2017.
I'm not sure what you mean extra hoop? You just start a2jmidi and then connect the device. Crashes would indeed be an issue, generally if you want to mitigate those, you would want to:
- Auto restart any important services (with systemd or similar)
- Use JACK/Pipewire session management
- Report the crash to the developers (of a2jmidi in this case, but it could be anything)
I honestly have never used LinuxSampler so I can't comment on that, I believe they have some strange licensing thing going on.
I have switched to Pipewire but last time I tried JACK2 there were tools that would auto-start a2jmidi for all available midi ports. This is trivial to do. If hotplug was a concern then someone could just write it to run based on udev triggers.
I don't run a2j or even have it installed so in my case it doesn't seem to be a problem. My audio production setup isn't highly complex FWIW but with the following configuration I have had no issues with audio or MIDI input and output. All of my devices are just plug-and-play for both Bitwig and qjackctl:
- Distro: Arch Linux
- Audio backend: JACK2 and PipeWire
- USB Audio Interface: Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD
- USB controllers: Akai APC 40 mkii, Casio CTK-6200
- Microphone: Zoom H6
I run this exact setup on my Ryzen desktop and a Thinkpad T480 with no problems. I've also tried routing the audio output of various software directly into my DAW using qjackctl, works perfectly fine.
I kind of dropped out of Linux audiosome time ago. Can I ask why both pipewire and jack? I thought pipewire was supposed to implement most (all?) the stuff that jackd does.
Sorry, looking back at my wording I can see how that's confusing. You are correct. PipeWire replaces the standard JACK libraries with its own ABI-compatible implementations. This allows any JACK-compatible application to support audio through PipeWire using the same APIs it would normally use for JACK. This is also how PipeWire handles support for PulseAudio, ALSA and other multimedia libraries; it kinda reminds me of Wine for Linux audio protocols, if my understanding is correct anyway.
To use PipeWire in place of JACK, you have to install a specific package (`pipewire-jack` on Arch Linux) and run all of your audio applications using a wrapper command called `pw-jack`. You can update the `.desktop` entries for audio software on your system to automatically run this command; I've done that and everything I use launches correctly, tbh I forget that PipeWire is there. I just use Bitwig, qjackctl, Catia, etc. and they all think they're using JACK but really everything is being handled by PipeWire. Pretty kewl and it's been working perfectly for me for quite some time. :)
ASIO, really? Sorry but you couldn’t pay me to go back to that broken piece of crap after switching to Linux and JACK2. I’m actually traumatized by that piece of software, thinking of moments where ASIO would just break and cause my Live session to collapse into a glitchy cacophony of latency-induced noise. I’ve seen this happen on several computers with different Windows installations and external audio hardware and the problem always ends up being ASIO. Some of the producers I knew swore off anything that wasn’t a Mac because of this exact problem.
The problem with audio production on Linux in 2021 isn’t the audio protocol. It’s that most free and open source audio production software for Linux is dreadful to use. UX is actually very important for DAWs. I want to like Ardour but it’s a miserable piece of software to try to make music in. Feels like a chore to perform any action, kills my vibe, would not recommend. After trying really hard to become comfortable using it, I finally gave up and bought Bitwig. It’s a proprietary DAW and kinda expensive but I’ve been producing music with it for a couple of years and it’s a dream to use - sort of a spiritual successor to Ableton IMO.
> No plug-in or DAW has a CLI…
Most people who make music don’t care about this. I’m a software developer and musician who only uses Linux and I don’t care about this. In my opinion, Linux developers of free and open source creative software should spend less time building these features for other developers and focus more on making their software feel good to create with. If I feel bad trying to use your clunky-ass UI to make my art / music / whatever then I’m not going to hold myself back because it has a free software license. I’m going to find a piece of software that gets out of the way and lets me make what I want to make.