DAW & plugin help.

[strat4play]

I'm doing my research, specially this board. A little confused. I downloaded Adour, having trouble, but thats a side note. Everything I'm seeing, and if i'm wrong, I am sorry, is about mixing beats, sequencing and midi. Thought I will need something to make drum beats with, I want to record guitar and vocals. In another post where I had trouble getting my Scarlett 2i2 up and running, its fine, as a matter of fact I use it as my sound card instead of the headphone jack on this laptop. My computer is a Asus X550Z AMD Quad core w/16 gb of ram and a 1 TB hdd. I am running Mint 18.3 Cinnamon 64 bit. Now the question is should I be using a music friendly distro, be in mind that I dont do alot of recording, its just a hobby, or can someone advise what my best options are. Also want to know about plugins. I have read some DAWs use VST plugins, but do they have to be ported for Linux and can I use VST instruments so I can record my drums with more of a live feel. Now with Adour, it wont let me create a working folder, I have more 900 gb avail to me. Please any help, I'm still new to this, but willing to learn, unless MS wants to start making an OS that doesn't implode on itself every so often. Thanks in advance!

[Michael Willis]

Hi. There are a lot of people here that record audio, so you should be able to get answers to specific questions that you have.

Distro doesn't matter as much as you might think. The primary reasons for going with an audio centric distro are: 1. It is already configured for low-latency audio work, and 2. It comes with several audio production apps and plugins.

You *can* record audio without having the lowest possible latency, or you *can* configure pretty much any distro for low latency audio if you are willing to use the command line and a text editor and learn a bunch of stuff along the way. However, using an audio centric distro can get you going a lot easier.

Regarding plugins, there is some black magic that you can do to get Windows VST plugins to work on Linux. As I recall it involves using Carla along with the carla-bridge-wine64 and/or carla-bridge-win64, but I had some stability issues with the plugin that I was trying to use, so I switched to Linux-native plugins. Some other people here are successfully using Windows plugins with the Carla bridge, so they might be able to help. The Linux audio plugin scene is now much better than it used to be, so you might try finding Linux native VST and LV2 plugins that will do what you want. If you can tell us specifically what kind of plugins you want, we can give you suggestions.

Tell us more about your problem with Ardour. What version are you using? How did you download and install it? Does it give you an error message? Try running it from the command line and you will get more detailed logging that you can copy/paste here, it will probably give us a better clue about what's going wrong.

[strat4play]

TY Michael. gonna do alot of reading research over the next few days. I'm trying Adour 4. just confused on settings. I see my 2i2 as an input device, I/m using the alsa driver with jack, but still getting "not enough memory" issues when trying to configure. Let me spend a few days doing research, I may try KXStudio which should optimize everything upon setup. As I have used linux on and off for years, I still consider myself a newbie cause I'm not that good at cmd line things, I can copy what people tell me to get results, just dont know what i'm looking at, as I said newb! Thanks for your help, as I'm sure there will me more questions in the future!

[Michael Willis]

I'm trying Adour 4.

Definitely try a more recent version; Ardour 4 is history now. You can download 5.12 from http://www.ardour.org/ for a small donation, or you can install it from the KXStudio repos. You can install packages from KXStudio on your existing Mint, there's no need to scrap your whole OS. Follow the instructions on http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Repositories under "Debian / Ubuntu", which should also work for Mint. Also follow the additional steps to install the GCC5 packages. After doing that, run the following:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update

This will give you access to install cutting-edge version of several audio packages, including Ardour 5.12 among other DAWs, lots of Linux native plugins, and more. You might try out Cadence, which is useful for managing your JACK session. Also Carla is excellent for trying out plugins and managing signal routing outside of the context of a full DAW app.

[davephillips]

... Also want to know about plugins. I have read some DAWs use VST plugins, but do they have to be ported for Linux and can I use VST instruments so I can record my drums with more of a live feel...

Obligatory link:

http://linux-sound.org/linux-vst-plugins.html

Have fun !

dp

[strat4play]

TY so much for the info and advice Michael Willis, davephillips, and 42low. I actually ending up reformatting and installing KXStudio. Playing with it for one day and said...nope...it was a little over my head with not enough customization of the OS that got me frustrated. So I installed the newest Mint Cinnamon distro, and gonna install the KXStudio repositories on top which it seems like everyone is saying the best way to go. Again, I dont use the machine only for music production. Thanx again for all the help, will heed all your words and check out all your links, but I'm sure there will be more questions. TY everyone!