If you use Linux to edit audio, mix songs and work with audio in general, including having trouble making certain audio hardware work, it’s your chance to join a community effort to make Linux audio creation better and more accesible.
The Audio Creation SIG (Special Interest Group) is a hub for creators to help each other create and together try and find ways to get better hardware and VST support for Linux.
Personal anecdote: I connected my guitar to my shitty sound card a few weeks ago, ran guitarix (because real DAWs are overwhelmingly complicated and I just want an amp, a compressor, and some reverb), and thanks to PipeWire and pipewire-jack everything ran perfectly. Low latency, no crackling, no messing with jackd or ALSA, no restarting audio daemons, I could simultaneously play audio through Firefox and hear my guitar. I dare say that that part of the audio stack is now a solved problem.
I’m not a musician though so I can’t comment on hardware support for exotic sound/midi cards or the maturity of FOSS DAWs.
You didn’t have to tweak PIPEWIRE_LATENCY or adjust the latency in guitarix? In my setup the latency isn’t great out of the box.
Right, I did do that. Even without it the latency is noticeable but not catastrophic IMO.
I didn’t know about the existence of guitarix, thanks
Personally, I use Bitwig studio. It’s. It not Foss, but it’s well build, not as expensive as others, and it fulfils the “no Tux no Bux” requirement.
As far as exotic stuff goes, I only buy stuff that’s class-compliant so I don’t have to worry about the manufacturer sunsetting support in the future. Supporting those sorts of devices should be a priority over anything with weird proprietary issues (fuck you IK Multimedia!).
It was definitely easier to create music with my current tools when I used Windows and Cubase! I left Windows behind for good and haven’t been able to scratch that itch.
Would love to be able to get back to low-latency and tools I understand. I haven’t been breaking my back trying, but I spent a few days with different DAWs and not really getting anywhere close. If it became easier, I’d get my MIDI kit back out and my USB audio interface and mics and start creating music again. I’m no Dev, but a creative lacking the tools for expression.
Good to hear that something like this is possibly getting moving.
I think the real issue with audio work on Linux is the complexity of getting things working. MacOS and Windows are both much easier to work in with dealing with audio stuff and much like Adobe 's stranglehold on potential converts having to jump through so many hoops for an arguably worse experience really keeps some people at bay.
If you use a linux audio distro linux is easier than windows. Everything works out of the box, not weird drivers to install with all their bloatware.
Try to do it manually is hard, but there are some great pretuned distros that make it easy.
If you’re choosing to do audio production in Linux, the odds are that “easy” wasn’t your top decision criteria. lol
Personally, I recently hooked up my Berhinger USB audio interface to Mint, and Ardour and Audacity saw it immediately. I was impressed. I was ready to google around for how to use lusb and dmseg and shit because I never remember what I’m doing.
Ha yeah you’re right.
