LinuxMusicians

Hi, this is Gordon. Music is my hobby, not my livelihood. I've always been a Windows user until now. But over the last several months I got so frustrated with Windows that I took the deep plunge and installed Kubuntu 14.04 wiping Windows into oblivion in the process. I chose Kubuntu because I thought KDE would provide the least painful transition into Linux Land for me. So far I find it very stable and elegant but not flawless - some optimization has been required. I'm still learning my way around repositories and command lines and so on. I accept there is a learning curve. So far, I've been able to find the help I need online. But its a slow process for me because I keep a busy schedule.

I've been a musician all my life but only now have I gotten interested in doing some home recording. I was surprised to learn there are so many open resources for creating and recording music with Linux. I''m a bassist/guitarist and I know my way around a keyboard. So far I've managed to install jackd, qjackctl, rakarrack, and Audacity, but haven't had time yet to figure out how to chain them all together and make them work. I was looking forward to reading through the newbie and intro sections of this forum to find my way and I just now learned there are distros pre-packaged and customized for multimedia users. So now I have a decision to make: continue to tweak my already installed Kubuntu or "upgrade" to a multimedia distro. I have a lot of reading to do. I may be back later with questions. I'm glad I found you.

I was surprised to learn there are so many open resources for creating and recording music with Linux.

There really are!

Here's a quick overview on how to make connections between audio apps using qjackctl:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowTo ... onnections

Also check out http://libremusicproduction.com if you haven't already

Thanks for sharing those links. I will definitely check them out.

Well I’ve read through the material on the Libre Music Production home page and it seems I have several paths to choose from. (I tend to panic when facing a lot of choices. If you want to see my head explode, take me to Baskin Robins for ice cream.) I will apologize now for the length of this post but I want to be clear about where I am now and where I want to be, then list the options I see with my questions.

My wife and I share a Lenovo B570 laptop (2Gb, dual core Pentium, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb disk, separate headphone and mic jacks). Our everyday needs are basic – simple word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and email. We each have our own user profiles. (She likes photography and would appreciate having some user-friendly tools for that, but they should be simple and intuitive because she is “non-technical”)

When I dumped Windows my only objective at the time was to stabilize my OS. Windows had become annoyingly unstable, rebooting constantly, and we couldn’t stand it anymore. I knew Unix/Linux stability is legendary, so… During my Kubuntu 14.04 installation I chose to let it manage the partitioning, wipe the hard disk clean, and install Kubuntu as the only OS. After installing and updating I retrieved my personal files that I back up on Google Drive. Mission accomplished - with no idea I would soon be interested in home recording.

I should say, up front, that I do not intend to record music for any commercial purposes, only as a hobby. I just want to capture the music that’s in my head so I can save it, play it back later, and share it with family and close friends. So a basic low end recording system is all I need.
When I started looking into doing audio recording I poked around for tools and proceeded to install Audacity, jackd, qjackctl, and rakarrack. Then a new world opened up when I saw the libre music production site and the resources here. In hindsight I wish I had found that first. I would have installed one of the recommended audio distros because “for someone who just wants to get down to making music, it is important to not have to deal with these [technical] issues.” There. That describes me. While I probably have the technical aptitude to dig through it all and build it from scratch if I have to, I really don’t want to. I have too little time and patience for it. I’m also afraid, because Linux is new to me, I’ll accidentally do something harmful or even catastrophic to the system in the process. So, how to proceed from here?

AV Linux – looks very appealing. Seems to have everything we need with the smallest requirement for “lifting the hood”, but is there still some system tweaking required? How much? I would happily trade the “latest and greatest” for stable pre-configured tools ready to use. I’m not sure how I feel about another complete installation so soon. Will the desktop environment be friendly enough for my non-technical wife? (Off topic: Trusty has given me problems with slow Wi-Fi connections. Is this distro better for that?)

KXStudio – I’m already on Kubuntu 14.04 so how much different would this be than what I’ve already got? How much would upgrading reduce the system tweaking I have ahead of me? If I add the KXStudio repositories and install the apps what would that do to the stuff I’ve already installed? But then I would have a “bloated” version because of my standard distro. Would installing the lighter desktop significantly improve performance on my relatively low end laptop? If I do that would I have to back up all my files and restore them later? KXStudio seems to come with audio tools only, no photography tools included. I suppose I could add that later.

Ubuntu Studio – wasn’t listed on the libre music production page but has good reviews. Not sure how this differs from KXStudio other than the desktop flavor and it includes many other multimedia types, some of which we would probably never use. I can’t tell how complete the “audio studio” is out of the box compared to the other distros. I assume a complete installation would be required.

So I guess it boils down to 3 options; 1- stay on my current path (seems like a lot of work and I’m out of my comfort zone here.), 2- “upgrade” to KXStudio (impact to/improvement over what’s already installed?), or 3- do a fresh installation of AV Linux or Ubuntu Studio (would force another unfamiliar desktop environment on my non-technical wife to get a working studio “out of the box”).

Suggestions/comments/other options I don't know about yet?

Ubuntu Studio will let you pick your focus when you install - audio, video, graphics etc., you can choose just audio apps

adding the KXStudio repos to your existing Kubuntu will give you access to the latest applications/plugins etc - some of these are not available in the standard Ubuntu repos (e.g. non-FOSS things) and some will be upgraded versions that will take the place of existing, older, Ubuntu packages on your system - note we run Ubuntu Studio here and still add the KXStudio repos - they are that useful

there is also a script that will test your system for audio friendly configuration and give you tips:

https://github.com/raboof/realtimeconfigquickscan

with the KXStudio repos + the realtime script you can in theory keep Kubuntu and still have a tuned system with the latest software, you are missing a low latency kernel which may be the real advantage of the custom distros, not sure what else they buy you, perhaps others can comment on that..

I finally decided to go with a fresh installation of KXstudio. After installing and updating I had to reinstall LibreOffice (Calc was missing) and add Muon myself but I think I'm ready to go now with a new MIDI keyboard controller and guitar USB interface. Next decision: Ardour or LMMS? I'll be spending some time on YouTube tutorials.

GordonKC wrote:Next decision: Ardour or LMMS?

Depends on what you wanna record. As I can understand, you're a live player, so Ardour is your choice number one. I recommend you to buy some basic $50 USB audio interface first since you'll need some noise reduction if you gonna record live guitar and/or bass via your laptop's soundcard. That's not gonna work without a cheap interface because of noise internal sound chips have in signal they record. Of course, you can record a multitrack in Ardour, stem-export a song, clean it up in Audacity and then load it back, but will it leave you any time for creativity? Also, heavily noise reduced tracks sound like... uhm, that brown substance you flush down your white throne. I highly recommend you to spend a little money in order not to kill your nerves. Your CPU seems to be capable of live recording and monitoring and relatively heavy processing with higher buffer size values, so the workflow won't be problematic if you have decent source tracks.