Using Linix instead of Windows.

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Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro,comp.os.linux.advocacy,cakewalk.audio,alt.steinberg.cubase (More info?)

After 12 years of struggling with buggy, expensive software I made the
switch over to Linux and I can say with confidence that I am not
looking back. I was using Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase SX2, Waves and all the
toys and quite honestly my work was not all that great sounding. Plus I
had to deal with all the crashes that Windows is known for.
Some guy clued me into Linux and while it was a trippin' to learn, I
stuck with it and now I am free of Bill's garbage.
I am using:
Ardour
Jack
Audacity
Rythumbox
xmms
and amarok.

I am doing mostly classical recording of quartets and things like that
and I have been easily able to record 24 tracks at once with 5 msec
latency on a RME board.

The effects/plugins that come with ardour and audacity are fantastic
and are all free.
I have been using a wrapper to run VST instruments and it has been
working great.

I would suggest anyone tired of spending a fortune on software, give
Linux a real try because you might be surprised.
Kiss all the instabilities of Cakewalk/Sonar and Cubase good bye
forever and use the money you saved to pick up the new Berhinger
Digital board that is about to be announced.

--
Marcus Wesson
Wesson Productions Inc.

 

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Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro,comp.os.linux.advocacy,cakewalk.audio,alt.steinberg.cubase (More info?)

Aphelion top-posted:

>Oh look, it's the same "jack off" post as before.

*plonk*

 

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Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro,comp.os.linux.advocacy,cakewalk.audio,alt.steinberg.cubase (More info?)

"Marcus Wesson" <bout_loopin@yahoo.com> wrote:

>After 12 years of struggling with buggy, expensive software I made the
>switch over to Linux and I can say with confidence that I am not
>looking back. I was using Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase SX2, Waves and all the
>toys and quite honestly my work was not all that great sounding. Plus I
>had to deal with all the crashes that Windows is known for.
>Some guy clued me into Linux and while it was a trippin' to learn, I
>stuck with it and now I am free of Bill's garbage.
>I am using:
>Ardour

Can't even compete with my old VST 5.2 version. Looks like Cubase 3.5 to me.

>Jack

That's more or less just an audio API (though obviously an extremely flexible one).
I'm using WDM. LOL ;-)

>Audacity

Not as good as full Wavelab. It can compare to the old Wavelab Lite version that came
with my soundcard several years ago.

From time to time I use the Windows version of Audacity, myself.

>Rythumbox
(don't know this one)

>xmms
You're just trying to list up programs here, are you? Well yeah, I use Windows Media
Player 8 on my Windows partition and xmms on my Linux partition. What's that got to
do with audio production?

>and amarok.
(don't know this one)

>I am doing mostly classical recording of quartets and things like that
>and I have been easily able to record 24 tracks at once with 5 msec
>latency on a RME board.
>
>The effects/plugins that come with ardour and audacity are fantastic
>and are all free.

Can Audacity do online FX like Wavelab now? Last time I checked, all FX processing
had to be done offline!

>I have been using a wrapper to run VST instruments and it has been
>working great.

A lot of plugins (especially freeware) use a native Windows GUI (despite the fact
that Steinberg's VST SDK provides a generic graphics API), because that's what many
programmers are used to programming.

Especially a softsynth will be a PITA to use with a generic slider GUI. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but the native Windows GUI won't run in your Linux VST wrapper and you're
left with generic parameter sliders.

>I would suggest anyone tired of spending a fortune on software, give
>Linux a real try because you might be surprised.

>Kiss all the instabilities of Cakewalk/Sonar and Cubase good bye
>forever
>and use the money you saved to pick up the new Berhinger
>Digital board that is about to be announced.

Cubase SE plus myriads of freeware plugins doesn't sound expensive either! Even a
decent soundcard will already be more expensive.

As for "Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase SX2, Waves and all the toys", sorry, but while Windows
is a toy when it comes to serious networking, web hosting, scripting, etc., Linux is
still a toy when it comes to professional audio and availability of innovative audio
applications and plugins.

I'd, too, wish it would get there, but so far it hasn't. Given the small market niche
of professional audio recording, I doubt it ever will. ... Just like Microsoft won't
bother with including a free Windows port of PERL as a standard Windows scripting
language, because the average Windows user simply doesn't give a rat's ass...

Bye,
Krid.

--
www.dirk-music.de

 

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Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro,comp.os.linux.advocacy,cakewalk.audio,alt.steinberg.cubase (More info?)

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:32:52 +0200, Krid wrote:

> "Marcus Wesson" <bout_loopin@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>After 12 years of struggling with buggy, expensive software I made the
>>switch over to Linux and I can say with confidence that I am not
>>looking back. I was using Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase SX2, Waves and all the
>>toys and quite honestly my work was not all that great sounding. Plus I
>>had to deal with all the crashes that Windows is known for.
>>Some guy clued me into Linux and while it was a trippin' to learn, I
>>stuck with it and now I am free of Bill's garbage.
>>I am using:
>>Ardour
>
> Can't even compete with my old VST 5.2 version. Looks like Cubase 3.5 to me.

Audio editing in Ardour is somewhat better than VST 5.2. You get proper
crossfades, flexible routing, draggable time stretch, plugin 'freeze',
sample accurate editing in the project window, multichannel audio tracks
and groups, phase buttons on the mixer etc...

Midi/scoring wise, Cubase wins, as Ardour has no midi recording support at
all.

>
>>Jack
>
> That's more or less just an audio API (though obviously an extremely flexible one).
> I'm using WDM. LOL ;-)

WDM/ASIO is the equivalent of ALSA on Linux. Jack is a sound server
somewhat like Rewire. It allows interconnection and synchronisation of
applications, which is something WDM/ASIO does not, and was never
intended, to do.

>
>>Audacity
>
> Not as good as full Wavelab. It can compare to the old Wavelab Lite
> version that came with my soundcard several years ago.
>
> From time to time I use the Windows version of Audacity, myself.

Rezound is a better 2-track editor than Audacity, though it's still not
Wavelab 5.

>
>>Rythumbox
> (don't know this one)
>
>>xmms
> You're just trying to list up programs here, are you? Well yeah, I use
> Windows Media Player 8 on my Windows partition and xmms on my Linux
> partition. What's that got to do with audio production?
>
>>and amarok.
> (don't know this one)
>
>>I am doing mostly classical recording of quartets and things like that
>>and I have been easily able to record 24 tracks at once with 5 msec
>>latency on a RME board.
>>
>>The effects/plugins that come with ardour and audacity are fantastic and
>>are all free.
>
> Can Audacity do online FX like Wavelab now? Last time I checked, all FX
> processing had to be done offline!
>
>>I have been using a wrapper to run VST instruments and it has been
>>working great.
>
> A lot of plugins (especially freeware) use a native Windows GUI (despite
> the fact that Steinberg's VST SDK provides a generic graphics API),
> because that's what many programmers are used to programming.
>
> Especially a softsynth will be a PITA to use with a generic slider GUI.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the native Windows GUI won't run in your
> Linux VST wrapper and you're left with generic parameter sliders.

VST plugins run with their native Windows GUIs in Linux. That's why they
need Wine. As plugins only use a small subset of the Windows API it's not
impossible. It's not very compatible (yet) either.

>
>>I would suggest anyone tired of spending a fortune on software, give
>>Linux a real try because you might be surprised.
>
>>Kiss all the instabilities of Cakewalk/Sonar and Cubase good bye forever
>>and use the money you saved to pick up the new Berhinger Digital board
>>that is about to be announced.
>
> Cubase SE plus myriads of freeware plugins doesn't sound expensive
> either! Even a decent soundcard will already be more expensive.
>
> As for "Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase SX2, Waves and all the toys", sorry, but
> while Windows is a toy when it comes to serious networking, web hosting,
> scripting, etc., Linux is still a toy when it comes to professional
> audio and availability of innovative audio applications and plugins.

Availability, yes, innovation.... well, to my mind, interesting
sound experimentation software appears on Linux as it tends to
attract academics. There is no direct equivalent to a spectral
manipulation app like freqtweak on Win/Mac for instance. (Though it's such
a CPU hog you really need a dedicated machine for that kind of heavy
duty sound design.)

>
> I'd, too, wish it would get there, but so far it hasn't. Given the small
> market niche of professional audio recording, I doubt it ever will. ...
> Just like Microsoft won't bother with including a free Windows port of
> PERL as a standard Windows scripting language, because the average
> Windows user simply doesn't give a rat's ass...

Out of the tiny niche of audio recording, and the sub niche within that of
Linux audio, it's a pretty small niche. Sadly, I think the amount of
people talking about Linux audio apps vastly outnumber those who have
actually tried any of them. I'm getting a little bored of correcting the
more bizarre assumptions people make about it all too, so I'll stop now.

>
> Bye,
> Krid.

 

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Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro,comp.os.linux.advocacy,cakewalk.audio,alt.steinberg.cubase (More info?)

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 20:19:36 +0200, Krid
<ray.me.krid@replytogroup.com> wrote:

>So it's not very attractive for home-users, yet, who will *always* need MIDI
>capabilities at least for programming / recording a drum track.
>
>(What use is a sophisticated audio recording software, if you still have too fool
>around with a hardware drum-machine, which usually is very cumbersome to program? And
>even then, you'd need MIDI clock-synchronization at least.)

>Hower my main criticism to the original poster was that he seemed to be trying to
>present a more or less impressive list of audio applications (like: "Look how many
>cool Linux audio apps there are."), but included basic things like an audio server or
>multimedia player in the list.

The original post was posted two weeks ago, it's just a linux user
trying to promote the platform. I've already looked into Linux, not
only is professional audio card support minimal, many of the audio
cards "supported" (and I use the term loosely) only have a small
percetage of their features working. Plugin support is hacked and the
programs available do not compare feature wise.

It's not ready for prime time.

Can you use it... sure, but who cares, it's free.... BFD, it has 15%
of the features I'm used to using, if that.

SBLive users are set, Linux has decent support for that card!

'nuff said.

Ap