Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

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GMaq
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Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

I see Zrythm is approaching a 1.X release, I have watched from a distance and it 'looks' good but it it usable for production? I can't use EnergyXT forever! :lol:
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by digitsun »

For MIDI addicts zrythm looks like a good alternative. For Debian (MX Linux and AV Linux) is a problem try to use zrythm, 'coz don't exist a .deb package. Flatpak version has an annoying spec: only use flatpak plugins :? . Don't exist appimage without limitations and compile it is a dark science for beginners.

Please @GMaq consider add zrythm package to MX repositories, that would be good news for all Debian (and derivatives) musicians.
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by GMaq »

digitsun wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:30 pm For MIDI addicts zrythm looks like a good alternative. For Debian (MX Linux and AV Linux) is a problem try to use zrythm, 'coz don't exist a .deb package. Flatpak version has an annoying spec: only use flatpak plugins :? . Don't exist appimage without limitations and compile it is a dark science for beginners.

Please @GMaq consider add zrythm package to MX repositories, that would be good news for all Debian (and derivatives) musicians.
Hi,

What 'package' format do you get if you're a Zrythm subscriber?

If zrythm is Open Source but payware similar to Ardour then I wouldn't ask MX Linux to put it in their Repos, I also suggested to them that they don't put Ardour in their repos either because the Ardour Devs don't support any Distro packaging and they fund their project with User subscriptions and by selling binaries.

In the case of Ardour I have been a supporter of the project for many years and have arranged with Paul Davis to provide a fully functional and supported binary on each AVL Release but if you upgrade Ardour I expect you to buy the upgrade or subscribe.

I'm not in the business of doing end-runs around what the Audio Developers intend and sneaking free Packages in through Repos. I'm here to support and promote the work they are doing not be a Robin Hood.. :wink:

Now if the developer of Zrythm would be interested in providing a binary to be put on an AV Linux release then that would be a different situation.. I am interested in becoming a subscriber but would like a bit of real world User feedback first..
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by MyLoFy »

I did some 7 or 8 full tracks with zrythm over the last year (some are in the zrythm showcase section) and it has really taken shape over time. Beta is just out and the project format is stable, so that's good for potential long-term projects. It barely seems to crash nowadays.
Of course there's still stuff missing, but it's good fun taking it for a test drive and perhaps ending up with a new track :D

btw there's binaries for Debian on the zrythm download page, if you wanna support the author's hard work.

Cheers!
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by digitsun »

GMaq wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:51 pm
digitsun wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:30 pm For MIDI addicts zrythm looks like a good alternative. For Debian (MX Linux and AV Linux) is a problem try to use zrythm, 'coz don't exist a .deb package. Flatpak version has an annoying spec: only use flatpak plugins :? . Don't exist appimage without limitations and compile it is a dark science for beginners.

Please @GMaq consider add zrythm package to MX repositories, that would be good news for all Debian (and derivatives) musicians.
Hi,

What 'package' format do you get if you're a Zrythm subscriber?

If zrythm is Open Source but payware similar to Ardour then I wouldn't ask MX Linux to put it in their Repos, I also suggested to them that they don't put Ardour in their repos either because the Ardour Devs don't support any Distro packaging and they fund their project with User subscriptions and by selling binaries.

In the case of Ardour I have been a supporter of the project for many years and have arranged with Paul Davis to provide a fully functional and supported binary on each AVL Release but if you upgrade Ardour I expect you to buy the upgrade or subscribe.

I'm not in the business of doing end-runs around what the Audio Developers intend and sneaking free Packages in through Repos. I'm here to support and promote the work they are doing not be a Robin Hood.. :wink:

Now if the developer of Zrythm would be interested in providing a binary to be put on an AV Linux release then that would be a different situation.. I am interested in becoming a subscriber but would like a bit of real world User feedback first..
Your position is valid and I respect you.

I followed the develop of Zrythm and now is beta (for a time was an alpha software) and it promise be a good midi alternative to Ardour, well I suppose that I will wait for the moment when Zrythm will be added to official Debian repos for try it.
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by digitsun »

MyLoFy wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 12:00 am I did some 7 or 8 full tracks with zrythm over the last year (some are in the zrythm showcase section) and it has really taken shape over time. Beta is just out and the project format is stable, so that's good for potential long-term projects. It barely seems to crash nowadays.
Of course there's still stuff missing, but it's good fun taking it for a test drive and perhaps ending up with a new track :D

btw there's binaries for Debian on the zrythm download page, if you wanna support the author's hard work.

Cheers!
Your screenshots and videos are very interesting and a sample of the potential of Zrythm. Congratulations for your contribution to the community.
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by miuzik »

Well, I can say that compile Zrythm on Debian 11 is difficult for noobies like me. More info here
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by Basslint »

GMaq wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:51 pm I'm not in the business of doing end-runs around what the Audio Developers intend and sneaking free Packages in through Repos. I'm here to support and promote the work they are doing not be a Robin Hood.. :wink:
As a packager myself, I fully agree that developers should be funded and I wish we packagers could in some way contribute to that. I think package managers from major distros should incorporate ways to directly donate to the projects, that would be a step in the right direction.

I respect your point of view and I share it to a degree but I don't think that packaging programs like Ardour and Zrythm amounts to Robin Hood'in, for these reasons:

1. I assume GNU/Linux users to be often more technically-minded than most Windows (and many Mac) users, so they can figure out how to compile a program. If I don't package a program, someone else can write a tutorial for it.

2. Now that there are Flatpaks, AppImages, Nix, Guix and Snaps there is a very high chance that someone is already shipping binaries which work on every distro. Just to name two programs selling binaries, both Ardour and Zrythm have Flatpaks. At least on the distro I use (openSUSE), installing a Flatpak is as easy as installing a package from RPM repositories!

3. Many programs accept donations/payments but some follow Ardour's model of selling binaries, others (like LSP) distribute them for free (as in beer). Why should Ardour's model be rewarded by packagers (i.e. by not distributing it) compared to LSP's, for example? They both accept money and if anything, Ardour probably makes more. So by not packaging Ardour and packaging LSP, I might be discouraging people from donating to the project which adopts the more altruistic business model, LSP.

4. Packaging software can increase its popularity and as such, bring more contributors (in terms of code, money and especially precious bug reports). If I bring 100 people to Zrythm and 1 person pays for them, that's some money that Zrythm would have never gotten, at zero extra cost for them (because my package does not use their bandwidth for all 100 people but just once).

5. A huge competitor to both Ardour and Zrythm, REAPER, basically gives away their binaries for free (as in beer) by not deactivating itself after the trial. It leaves the moral/ethical choice of paying to the users (more in the next point). As far as I know, it does well financially! There is also a lot of high-quality proprietary freeware out there, like synth1. FLOSS does have competition even in the realm of free as in beer.

6. Finally, paying for libre software is a moral issue, since not paying for it is legal. If someone does not feel morally obliged to pay for the programs they use (at least those programs which don't have huge corporate funding like the Linux kernel), they will not pay for them. If they feel morally obliged to pay for programs they use, they will pay for them regardless if they are available in the package manager or not.

If I am wrong about packaging programs which sell their binaries and giving selfish justifications for doing it, I apologize to all developers. My intention was never about harming their finances, it's just that I think that, in the end, everything comes down to the cultural issue. And that's what we should change. If there were a culture of financially supporting FLOSS, people would probably do it more. How do you create such a culture? Of course, we (programmers, packagers, contributors, FLOSS activists) should be more vocal about it, highlighting the problems that affect our community due to the lack of funding. There are FLOSS developers living in personal poverty, others who have to work at a full-time job they hate, others who have to quit development entirely due to the hate they receive for not delivering what some users perceive as owed to them. And let's not talk about the ones affected by mental health issues like depression, anxiety or burnout! This stuff is not good for our community, for society.

I think FLOSS was never supposed to be Neverland. It's a civil rights matter and as such, it requires a moral effort.

WARNING: Personal religious opinion below.

As a Christian, I think paying for FLOSS aligns well with what Scripture says: "Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts." (James 5:4), or "A worker’s wage is credited not as a gift, but as something due." (Romans 4:4) and "Woe to him who builds his house on wrongdoing, his roof-chambers on injustice; Who works his neighbors without pay, and gives them no wages." (Jeremiah 22:13). Well knowing that I myself gave very little over the years compared to what I received, I think that we Christians should be a driving force for (6), because we really have no excuse for not rewarding the authors of programs we use!
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by alextee »

Hi, stumbled upon this in an online search
GMaq wrote: is it usable for production?
The project format is stable now and there are no major issues being reported so I'd say so. The stuff remaining for v1 are minor things (mostly graphical)
digitsun wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:30 pm For Debian (MX Linux and AV Linux) is a problem try to use zrythm, 'coz don't exist a .deb package.
There is a .deb package included with the provided binaries. Debian 11 & 12, Ubuntu 20.04 & 21.10 are currently supported.
GMaq wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:51 pm What 'package' format do you get if you're a Zrythm subscriber?

If zrythm is Open Source but payware similar to Ardour then I wouldn't ask MX Linux to put it in their Repos, I also suggested to them that they don't put Ardour in their repos either because the Ardour Devs don't support any Distro packaging and they fund their project with User subscriptions and by selling binaries.

In the case of Ardour I have been a supporter of the project for many years and have arranged with Paul Davis to provide a fully functional and supported binary on each AVL Release but if you upgrade Ardour I expect you to buy the upgrade or subscribe.

I'm not in the business of doing end-runs around what the Audio Developers intend and sneaking free Packages in through Repos. I'm here to support and promote the work they are doing not be a Robin Hood.. :wink:

Now if the developer of Zrythm would be interested in providing a binary to be put on an AV Linux release then that would be a different situation.. I am interested in becoming a subscriber but would like a bit of real world User feedback first..
Subscribers get the same types of installers as the demo version: Flatpak/Appimage/Distro packages. The difference is that save/load is disabled in the demos and there will be additional things added like premium plugins and sample packs in the paid versions.

I don't mind distros packaging Zrythm. I added a trademark policy for this. Basically, you can package it and keep using the Zrythm trademarks as long as you don't patch it, otherwise you would have to change the name and logos/images. I intentionally added text that says "please consider donating/purchasing an installer" on first run unless I'm building the paid binaries.
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by Basslint »

alextee wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 12:04 pm I don't mind distros packaging Zrythm. I added a trademark policy for this. Basically, you can package it and keep using the Zrythm trademarks as long as you don't patch it, otherwise you would have to change the name and logos/images. I intentionally added text that says "please consider donating/purchasing an installer" on first run unless I'm building the paid binaries.
Do you mind bug reports from distro packagers? I know some people who sell FLOSS see themselves as selling support and aprioristically dislike bug reports for unofficial builds but I personally think that by linking against bleeding-edge libraries (as we do on openSUSE Tumbleweed, rolling distro) can be useful to find bugs which might affect the program in the future.
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by alextee »

Basslint wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 12:43 pm Do you mind bug reports from distro packagers? I know some people who sell FLOSS see themselves as selling support and aprioristically dislike bug reports for unofficial builds but I personally think that by linking against bleeding-edge libraries (as we do on openSUSE Tumbleweed, rolling distro) can be useful to find bugs which might affect the program in the future.
I think it could be a problem in the future if we get a lot of bug reports, especially for old versions of the software. In that case it would be best to report to the distro, but for the time being we need more users/testers/reporters, especially if they use a recent release, no matter where they installed it from.

EDIT: I misread, I thought you meant distro package users. Reports from packagers are always welcome
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by GMaq »

Basslint wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 8:43 am
GMaq wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:51 pm I'm not in the business of doing end-runs around what the Audio Developers intend and sneaking free Packages in through Repos. I'm here to support and promote the work they are doing not be a Robin Hood.. :wink:
As a packager myself, I fully agree that developers should be funded and I wish we packagers could in some way contribute to that. I think package managers from major distros should incorporate ways to directly donate to the projects, that would be a step in the right direction.

I respect your point of view and I share it to a degree but I don't think that packaging programs like Ardour and Zrythm amounts to Robin Hood'in, for these reasons:
Hi,

I composed a Tolstoy-length response that I deleted, I just want to clarify I wasn't pointing fingers at GeekOS DAW or anyone else in the Distro Packaging field... I'm not and haven't been a Packager for anything but my own AVL Utilities and a few stray Plugins for a long time and I plan to keep it that way so not up to me to opine too much about what other Packagers do... My comments were informed by my experience with Ardour and that's it. Anything about Zrythm Packaging was just extrapolating from that since from the outside their funding ideas look somewhat similar.

In any case I subscribed and am looking forward to seeing and trying Zrythm!
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by GMaq »

Oh-oh..

Problem already, I installed the Deb for Debian Bullseye (11) in AVL-MXE 21 and I pulled in the dependencies but I'm getting a terminal error:

Code: Select all

zrythm: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zrythm/libgtk-4.so.1: undefined symbol: wl_proxy_marshal_flags
Anyone else using it on Debian 11 or any guidance @alextee ?
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by Basslint »

GMaq wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 4:06 pm Hi,

I composed a Tolstoy-length response that I deleted, I just want to clarify I wasn't pointing fingers at GeekOS DAW or anyone else in the Distro Packaging field...
Sure, had no doubts about it! :D I just wanted to clarify my stance as a packager because I really feel this issue, especially since I am unable to earn a living developing FLOSS myself and have to look for jobs elsewhere. I am privileged and passionate enough to be able to do FLOSS as a hobby but the last thing I want to do is damage others who have more skills or entrepreneurship than myself!

The point of my post is that I share your concerns but in my personal analysis (which I've posted and is open to critique, I am more than willing to change my mind!) packaging benefits both users and developers. If a developer is not OK with me packaging their software, I will more than gladly stop doing it as I don't believe that just because something is legal, it should be done.
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Re: Z-curious... anybody using Zrythm for actual production?

Post by alextee »

GMaq wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 4:23 pm Oh-oh..

Problem already, I installed the Deb for Debian Bullseye (11) in AVL-MXE 21 and I pulled in the dependencies but I'm getting a terminal error:

Code: Select all

zrythm: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zrythm/libgtk-4.so.1: undefined symbol: wl_proxy_marshal_flags
Anyone else using it on Debian 11 or any guidance @alextee ?
Ah I think this happened due to the updated gtk version... If you go back a release or 2 it should work. I need to roll back to previous gtk versions on debian 11 or see if I can include lib wayland client without messing with the distro.

I'll fix this for next release
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