Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. When you need complete control over your tools, when the limitations of other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make things work the way you want them to.
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.
All I hear about is those damn plugins.
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).
Do you have any recommendations for anyone looking to switch from windows DAW to a Linux DAW? Are there any tips regarding getting the plugins to play nicely?
I would love to switch to Linux on my desktop, but the only thing holding me back is that I use FL Studio with the Arturia V collection and I feel as though it would be nightmarish to try to get such a thing working in Linux.
Depending on what you do, the professional options are REAPER as a standard DAW and Bitwig Studio for more sequencer-based worflows.
Not sure about plugin availability though.
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.