Is Linux right for me?

[piovezan]

Hello,

I'm looking for a certain environment for composing instrumental music and I'm investigating if Linux suits my needs.

My current hardware setup is a Core 2 Duo PC with 2 GB RAM and dual boot (Windows 7 and an outdated Tango Studio install), a MIDI keyboard and a cheap USB-MIDI cable.

I'd like to combine MIDI tracks reproduced in real time on various forms of software synthesizers (waveform, Sound Fonts, sampled) with tracks that support PCM (.wav) blocks. I'd like to add effects to both; in particular, I'd like freedom of editing and applying effects to PCM blocks in a way which I'd describe as "Ableton-like" (I don't have personal experience with Ableton Live but I suppose it is the kind of commercial software which provides the highest degree of freedom in editing PCM tracks). I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to process the PCM blocks; I just want freedom to experiment, and I think it will come in handy when I try my hand at electronic music.

I'd like the environment to be as automated as possible with regards to loading the settings for a project and transferring that setup from one file system installation to another. Ideally, the mentioned environment would be a single DAW.

Is Linux right for my needs? Or should I look for commercial software?

Regarding my experience with specific Linux software:

- My experience with LMMS was that it only supports sampled and waveform synthesized instruments and despite its simple interface I had better experience with tracked music (such as Modplug Tracker / OpenMPT).

- The QTractor version I tried out didn't provide much support for PCM blocks. It also seemed to require some setup to load a project.

One extra question: if I were to improve my setup with a hardware synthesizer (for faster work), how would it impact such a composition environment? I mean, I would forward a few MIDI tracks to it and then feed its output back to the PC so it can be combined with the other tracks? Or to do so through a hardware mixer (which I don't have)? I'm not very experienced at hardware.

Thanks!

[rncbc]

- The QTractor version I tried out didn't provide much support for PCM blocks. It also seemed to require some setup to load a project.

what you mean about PCM blocks?

if that's about audio, PCM encoded, sample files (.wav, .aiff, .flac, .ogg, .mp3, etc.) then you probably failed to try simple file drag-and-drop from your favorite desktop file-manager; or try Track/Import Tracks/Audio... menu; or even Clip/Import... over an existing audio track.

and that is one os those things qtractor does regardless of the version you have, as i assure you it's a dang functionality that is there since... ever.

hth.
cheers

[piovezan]

I'm sorry; by PCM blocks I meant audio clips. Actually I haven't tried dragging-and-dropping audio, what I tried was creating a new audio track and when I did that I would only hear microphonics (I'm not claiming it was the application's fault; it could be due to some issue in my setup).

I'm sorry if I didn't give Qtractor enough try; I'll be glad to upgrade my setup and try it out more.

[glowrak guy]

Spend some time viewing linux software on youtube,
hydrogen, zynaddsubfx, rakarrack, qjackctl, and look
for related videos in the youtube sidebar. You'll get
some setup basics, as well as particulars.

There are also videos for using the package manager synaptic,
very important for updating the content in Tango Studio

www.libremusicproduction.com

has some great tutorials that you'll want to study,
especially the one on jackd.
It's easy to get swamped, so take your time, focus
on one aspect at a time.

For example, make a goal of loading amsynth in qtractor, on a midi track.
Then importing a drum track sample/loop into a qtractor audio track, to play along with.
Cheers

[piovezan]

Thanks. Libre Music Production seems to have some great tutorials. The hard part to me is to keep everything configured even across different Linux installations. I think that starting keeping my /home folder in a separate partition might help, but I'm not sure if this is the only thing I need to do.

Since Tango Studio is no longer maintained I was thinking on replacing it with 64-bit KXStudio, but I admit it would be a hassle. I didn't know I could update my Synaptic repositories to keep it up-to-date, is that really so?

[gimmeapill]

Since you mentioned trackers, I have to drop Renoise: Commercial and closed source, but reasonably priced and cross platform.
Not for everyone, but if you're used to modplug & co you might as well find your workflow there...

[maxime.levesque]

If you haven't chosed a distribution and like to get as many things working out of the box, you might
want to look at Ubuntu Studio https://ubuntustudio.org/

[nbd]

Hi. Check this out:

http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/