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Back to linux!
(lemmy.one)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Linux
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I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.
Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.
As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.
Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.
Bitwig isn't open source, but it's fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They've also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.
I've found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I've thrown at it, but it's a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you're new to the concept.
And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.
So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it's worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.
Studio1 is now running on Linux (using Distrobox at least). Ambisonics and Binaural stuff are what I am mostly interested in, the IME Ambisonic toolkit poorly is not available as a Flatpak, otherwise Ardour would be awesome!
I've heard good things about Studio1, but I haven't tried it myself.
Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox...
I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to ~~export~~ save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It's really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don't have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol
*It doesn't work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.
Nice, how do you export Distroboxes? I am on Kinoite, funny seems to be quite common in the Lemmy Community.
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore
I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).
It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again... (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)
Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.
Nice! Wait you have Wine in a Distrobox making Windows VSTs work as a module for a Linux DAW? Thats crazy.
Meanwhile I would already be happy flatpakking the IEM ambisonit toolkit, to be a runtime and run with Ardour. I would love to do Ambisonic music, its such an old invention and never used, which is so weird?
Uh, yeah... So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:
--homeparameter when making a distrobox container.Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.
So it's kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it's really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I'd like but it's not too bad), and just make music. :)
This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!
Be sure to check out the README if you're having problems with certain plugins (Kontakt for instance).
Yes, I know loading VSTs are possible, I just need to figure out how.
Yeah! Don't sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)
The basic yabrigde workflow is:
yabridgectl addwhere all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).yabridgectl syncyabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into~/.vst3or whatever.~/.vst3or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).Sadly there's no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it's pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you've got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.
But yeah, I've got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I'm able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.
Wow, thank you for the guide. I will try it out as soon as I can.
Or use this video to turn your vanilla distribution into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency, incredible!
I am finally getting around to doing this! I will admit, I had Windows on all of my machines... I first rehabilitated my laptop, and I finally brought back my main desktop from hell.
Running the script. Let's see what my computer becomes!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Check out Zrythm (currently in beta) as a FOSS Bitwig alternative.
https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html
Nice!! Linux has so many options for DAWs I never realized.