Choosing programs for youth music project

[adamelemental]

Hello

I am working at a local youth music project, and I need to decide on software for linux-based workstations (Ubuntu at the moment).

My priority is to provide and teach with software that is transferable, i.e. so that they learn skills they can take elsewhere whether its at home, at a mates house or at a professional studio. The place I work at has a preference for free software. However, I am yet to come across free software that provides a smooth user workflow, is stable (across platforms) and is cross platform. I am going to look into LMMS and Ardour and give them a fair trial. My preferred DAW is Ableton currently, but I didn't have much luck getting it to run under Wine, plus a multi-user license would be quite expensive.

My current candidates are:

FL Studio - got this running smoothly via Wine and is now available on OSX so could be said to be cross-platform now, I have used this successfully in the past to teach music production. Very easy to get something going fairly quickly even for total beginners.

Reaper - seems to work well under Wine, is very affordable with a long evaluation period, and highly respected with long-time Logic users moving over. More for those with previous experience.

LMMS - need to check this out but some reports say a little unstable and not so intuitive, and read reports of it being unstable under Windows.

Ardour - also need to check this one out, but a little reading leaves me feeling that its lacking certain areas e.g. side-chaining. Not sure if this is available under Windows or OSX (this is important so anyone can use the software at home).

Renoise - this is truly cross-platform, and could be a good way to teach although the tracker workflow could put some people off.

Bitwig - also properly cross platform, probably the best contender so far but no idea of release date or price as yet, though some say it should be very soon.

Any input here would be much appreciated!

Thanks
Adam

[tatch]

My preferred DAW is Ableton currently,

yep. I've heard reports of it working under wine too, but haven't done that myself.

FL Studio - this would make sense, I've never used it myself but I've heard it's easy to understand.

LMMS - I don't like LMMS, it doesn't make much sense to me and also feels limited. But people say it's modeled after FL Studio so maybe it's still worth checking out.

Ardour - It's available for OSX, might cost money though. I haven't used ardour3 extensively but I think side-chaining is still a bit of a hack right now.

Renoise - It looks nice though. I really do want to try out renoise but I keep getting discouraged by the tracker interface. One day...

Bitwig - Even though I would support this you might want to wait since it would literally just be coming out of beta. Then again it probably isn't any more risky than using FOSS software

you might also want to check out zth's blog posts about a linux audio workshop for kids, which sounds rather similar to what you want to do:
http://www.zthmusic.com/fscons13-linux-audio-part-1/
http://www.zthmusic.com/fscons13-linux-audio-part-2/
http://www.zthmusic.com/fscons13-linux-audio-part-3/

[paulmerchant]

Just to make things more complicated, here are two other ideas to add to your list:

1. Use a music centered Linux distro that you can boot from a USB drive. This will give you an open source option that is highly portable and will run on most home machines. You could then center the workshop on Ardour, qtracter, or the non stuff while still giving everyone access to other open source tools that you don't have time to cover.

2. Use SunVox. This app is truly portable (runs on a ton of platforms, even mobile), self-enclosed, and might be easier to use in a workshop than Renoise. A bonus is that SunVox is free on Windows so your students can take everything with them and continue to make music without any cost.

[aprzekaz]

I use LMMS a lot now and find it is pretty stable and easy to use. At first I didn't understand it but after a youtube tutorial or 2 I got it down. It also looks like a video game so kids might like it. It's got it's own instruments and can play soundfonts and samples even a lot of Windows VST's. I have SunVox on my Andriod phone and it's pretty cool also coming with it's own instruments and effects . Both are good for sequencing and any type of electronic music but are limited in that you can not process or record audio in the same way you can in the other DAWS. I would say Ardour has more overall capabilities but it is not so easy and fun to use IMHO. It's more like Protools. I use it for recording and/or mixing audio and some sequencing. I would probably say if you need a totally full fetured DAW go with FL Studio or Reaper since they are not so expensive. But if you are going to be making music with synths and samples and such and want something free LMMS is the way to go. You can always use Audacity to record and edit your own audio samples and then import them into LMMS.

[gazpacho]

The best introduction combination in my opinion would be LMMS + Audacity + command line audio commands (batch).

Audacity is mainstream and well known, it would cover the audio part, recording, samples, formats, effects, types of soundwaves, etc. The interface is similar to many other programs they will use in the future. It has a w$ portable version to carry on a usb stick and work aywhere.

LMMS is the less painful way to produce noise in linux, just open it and start making music right away. It carries its own demo songs, instruments and samples included, but best is to add one's sounds and presets easily to experiment. A great feature is hearing a sample file as you click it, great to go through endless lists of sounds. At http://lmms.sourceforge.net/lsp/index.php LMMS has a nice user generated collection of thousands of songs to learn from (and get great presets), as well as samples and presets. The instruments included are variate and support for external vst through festige is nice, though only for the few ones that work well. The interface is clear to see, you work on a pianoroll for an instrument, a separate beat sequencer for rythms, and a mixer with 64 channel to which you can route any instrument or combination including chained effects (ladspa). You can import midi files which get opened with its soundfont player, freeze (bounce to audio) tracks to save cpu, the automation of effects is easy. On each version you have to live with certain bugs you have to avoid. There is also a w$ portable version.

Command line tools are important to get inmediate results and making batch scripts. A good collection toolbox of pre-cooked bash scripts and audio command oneliner examples would make it less arid and raise curiosity.
Good luck, please post your experience.

[kahrkunne]

LMMS looks like shit (which might scare users away from music production), also it's pretty limited.
REAPER runs god-tier in WINE, and has a 60 day evaluation period with ALL features, so that's a big plus. Also it's really cheap
FL Studio runs very well in WINE too (I think you just need to install some fonts for FL 11, other than that it works) but it's rather expensive should you want to buy it.
I've had Ableton running under WINE but it was buggier than FL and Reaper
Renoise is another thing to try out, but trackers can be sort of hard to use and aren't often used.

Or you could wait for bitwig studio to come out

[studio32]

Qtractor?

NSM + non-mixer + non-sequencer + Carla?