Music composer, game designer and cybermancer.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 23rd, 2024

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  • Welcome and congrats on your migration under GNU/Linux.

    VST is a proprietary format therefore it is made to not work on linux. On linux synth or virtual instruments are LV2 plugins (like Helm, Surge or Vitalium) or SF2/SFZ soundbank (played with Sfizz or Fluid Synth).

    Now Ardour, Bitwig and Reaper can load VST plugins, but :

    • Some won’t just work,
    • Some will work pretty much the same (Kontakt seems to be working for some person, but it depends on the version I think), BUT if the VSTs needs to be installed before hand (like Kontakt, Spitfire, SINE and I think Arturia V falls into that), you will have to install them first using Wine (or with a wine front-end, like Bottles, Heroic, Lutris). Then load them in your DAW, if they don’t work there after being properly download and installed, I don’t think there is anything much to do… … Apart from try using a bridge (like Lin-VST or Yabridge), but here against results are still very unpredictable. I got some pretty good results with both on the past, but on my new setup none would work for my plugins (Spitfires mostly).

    These companies won’t make their plugins available under Linux cause ‘there isn’t enough people using it on linux’ (words of someone at Spitfire who I was asking the question).

    My workflow for production in a few words :

    • One PC (recording, mixing, mastering) with a midi keyboard,
    • One PC virtual instruments only, I use it when project requires lot of instrument tracks.

    Edit : Yeah Carla can be used as well, it can load VST plugins and act like a plugin library (pretty much like Kontakt).



  • On the DAW, the three are good, I use Ardour cause it’s a free software, but I’ve been told the other two are good, specially for people coming from ableton who want something close. Ardour is really a old-fashioned daw like pro-tools.

    Check Librazik it’s a distro based on debian made for musicale production.

    I’d say you don’t need a specific distro for what you want to do : a Debian or Arch with KDE could do the trick, but I would recommend to use a lighter desktop environment like Xfce. You may not like it coming from mac but it will preserve machine resources for your audio work.

    Ardour runs pretty much on it’s own on any distro, you can still do some conf, I suggest to go to linuxmao.fr the website is mostly in French but have a lot of configuration documentation.

    This audio interface will not be an issue as it’s plug and play on Linux since a while now.



  • Noo@jlai.lutoLinux@lemmy.mlArdour 8.10 released
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    10 months ago

    Fruity Loops doesn’t have any easy equivalent on Linux. I’d say try reaper and ardour as they provide windows binaries. Be careful LMMS isn’t a FL clone, it’s midi only.

    For the Arturia plugins you can install them with wine and use yabridge to make them compatible if they are not in vst compatible format (ardour can take vst2 and vst3 but sometimes it will not work). You can also have a dedicated PC for instruments (it is what I do) on windows (using audio gridder). Gotta test the Linux server version of audio gridder to see if I can go back to linux on m’y second PC. Or you can just send the midi notes to pc2 then get the audio out to pc1.

    It’s doable to make proprietary plugins run on Linux but the reliability is the nightmarish part, as an update can break the wine compatibility and it can take a few mins/hours to restore.


  • Noo@jlai.lutoLinux@lemmy.mlArdour 8.10 released
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    10 months ago

    It’s a real issue because, technical aspect aside, lots of instruments cost a lot of money and are necessary to keep up with the trend. Also theses plugins can save you a lot of time, meaning you can provide more music on short time (effect plugins are concern as well here).


  • Noo@jlai.lutoLinux@lemmy.mlArdour 8.10 released
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    10 months ago

    As a professional music composer myself and working on Linux with Ardour, I’d say it is overall pretty good since many years. If you don’t like midi in Ardour you can use another soft to runs midi notes. On Linux the good thing is that if you don’t like something you can change, specially with audio softwares.

    To me the two major issues with professional music on Linux are :

    • Proprietary plugins for virtual instruments are a nightmare (hard to make them to work, expensive on machine’s resources and unreliable),

    • Most company still think free software = unprofessional/amateur, which can make it harder to get jobs.




  • It isn’t because he needs to be willing to teach in the first place. If a person don’t want to teach autonomy to another, the debate ends here.

    But to know if you want to take the time to teach someone, you have to consider the possibility in the first place not thinking ‘impossible’ then move along.

    Also we can debate on how to teach a family member without being overwhelmed, because it is a real topic of discussion.











  • Thanks for your reply :)

    I think the problem with roblox goes far beyond the individual freedom to access a program.

    What we both say isn’t mutually exclusive. But I do think that gaming Linux communities could take a stand on the kind of gaming world we want and the kind we don’t want…

    Looking at the downvotes I get here and setting aside people who don’t like/understand irony, I feel either there are a bunch of roblox-fan (I sincerely hope it’s not it) or there are people like you who took the individual freedom to use a computer and apply it with crushing dogmatism (but without taking the time to expend on it like you did). But do gnu/Linux communities have to be chain to this ? I’m not sure. When twitter was shit, do we just said ‘never mind it runs on Linux, we’re free.’ ? Or reddit or Facebook ? No we discouraged actively to use those platforms and we build alternative that are better for people. Here what do we have ? A gaming platform with predatory practices toward children and we give it access to our computer without even the game studio had to lift a finger for it. A new (and small yes, but still) market of users for what you called yourself a ‘asshole game studio’.