I'm an amateur musician from Gothenburg, Sweden and I'm happy to be here!
I've been making music with Linux since about 2005. In these five years, a lot has been going on in the world of Linux audio and it has been fantastic to see it all happen. This far, I've mostly used Ardour along with Hydrogen and occasionally Qsynth and ZynAddSubFX. I'm currently looking into other DAWs, namely Traverso and Qtractor. I am also very interested in live looping, so I will give SooperLooper and Kluppe some attention. I'm interested in a lot of other programs as well but there's no point in listing them all here
Before the switch to Linux I used Sony Acid, an app that made it very easy to compose using audio loops - they were automatically beat-matched to the project tempo and could be extended by clicking and dragging (instead of having to be manually duplicated). Some of its features I'm still missing in the Linux programs I've tried. Another piece of proprietary software that I admire is Ableton Live, with its "scenes", its focus on live performance and its extendability. I haven't used it much myself but I've seen what it can do. If I were any better at programming, I would try to imitate some of these functions. In the meantime I want to support those who do make great music making applications for my favorite OS.
My impression is that the "modular" approach in Linux audio is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there is a fantastic variety of programs to choose from and combine as one thinks best. On the other hand, when you want things to just work already, you can get quite frustrated with all this freedom, which sometimes means you have to google confusing error codes, compile a certain application from source, install another from a PPA and discard a third one altogether. While the general user-friendliness of Linux distros has gotten to a point where I could even recommend it to my parents, there is still some work to be done when it comes to the user-friendliness in Linux audio, I think. But it has certainly come a long way already!
My music is usually based on audio loops but lately I've been getting into MIDI a bit. I'm not a pro musician but I do have ambitions and I've decided that from now on, I will try to take more time for music making. Which also means I will be lurking around here.
I currently run Ubuntu 10.04 with packages from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~philip5/+archive/extra
My audio interface is an Edirol FA-66.
I have a blog documenting my struggles with technology here: http://music-linux.blogspot.com/
And here's some music I've made: http://www.myspace.com/peter.toth
Thanks for reading! I look forward to discussing linux music with you.
