I've always wanted to do music recording on Linux (literally since the 90s). The fact that my preferred DAW (Reaper) has long been native to Linux has tempted me. But I have Universal Audio "Apollo" interface and have bought into their whole ecosystem which is very good and runs really great on my mac.
If I made the plunge I would get an RME USB audio interface and use Reaper, maybe play around with Bitwig which is also native on Linux. I don't think I would mess with WINE, regardless of other's success stories with it.
I'm glad to see where things have gone in recent years though
There is also Ardour which is FOSS and would be enough for recording as well as Traktion Waveform which has a free and a Pro version, if my memory is correct the difference is what kinds of instruments/effects plugins come bundled with it.
Ardour is the OG for sure! I'm a huge Reaper guy though been using it since 2009. One of the few pieces of software that I truly enjoy using, and the community is great
I have a RME _PCIe_ Raydat card that is supported by Linux. It has 4+4 ADAT ports, meaning 32in+32out channels. You can connect basically every interface that has ADAT to it. I've connected two Ferrofish Pulse8 AE, a Focusrite Scarlett and a Motu Traveler. :-) If your UA Apollo has ADAT, you still can use it this way! Of course it hasn't to be a RME Raydat, any other Linux supported interface with ADAT does it too, f.ex. a Scarlett. You could get a cheap Scarlett and connect your Apollo to it. Hahaha. Seriously, this would work.
That's awesome. I have ADAT converters as well, but the Apollo itself does not operate as standalone, and unfortunately has very proprietary Thunderbolt drivers. I'm pretty sure we will never see Linux support for Apollo thunderbolt interfaces. I would definitely go RME for Linux.
Oh nice. I'd have loved to have had this a few months ago. It's not overly easy to find VST plugins for Linux, and I've missed that since moving from Windows last year.
I hope the CLAP plugin open standard[0] will lead to more VSTs being made available for Linux. My favourite synth, Diva[1], has already been ported over (its maker, u-he, co-developed CLAP.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLever_Audio_Plug-in [1] https://u-he.com/products/diva/
And honestly, if I was on a desert island with just u-he plugins . . .
Do you want a nice Juno? https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/
Early stages. No built-in presets, like you even need or want that right now.
Note that until later today when I get around to another build and updating the packages on that site you find that the CLAP and VST3 ones don't always play at the correct pitch because those formats initially lie to the plugin about the sample rate. If you stick to 44100 all will be fine.
Full source is available, patches in both senses of the term welcome. It's been tested on Ardour, Bitwig, and Reaper on Linux, and Reaper on Mac OSX and Windows.
Is it possible to wedge WINE between a Windows VST and a native Linux DAW?
Yes, with yabridge, it works very well for example with all the Valhalla Reverb plugins. But then there are others like FabFilter, they do not work so well. But luckily there are now native Linux FabFilter alternatives, like ToneBoosters EQ Pro, Tal EQ, ZL EQ, ...
I think you can do it with Carla if you build it with Wine libs linked.
As a FabFilter user, how do those alternatives compare? I mostly use Pro-C and Pro-Q
They _all_ offer Dynamic EQ, all the phase modes (linear, minimal and derivatives), freq matching, collision detection, side chaining, etc... Absolutely comparable imho. And cheaper. ZL Equalizer even is open source!
https://www.toneboosters.com/tb_equalizer_pro.html https://tal-software.com/products/tal-eq https://zl-audio.github.io/plugins/zlequalizer2/manual/
I'll put TB Barricade against Pro-L 2 and TB Reverb against Pro-R for sure. I mostly use other stuff for EQ and compression, but those two are really very similar to the FB offerings.
It used to be the only way to do it (LMMS is still kind of stuck in that time period). Fortunately there are a lot more native plugins now.
It's pretty sad that LMMS is stuck there. The wine hacks needed are not trivial either, you need legacy versions of it.
Yabridge works, and it's frankly incredible that it works at all, but it has some trouble figuring out where I'm clicking on EZDrummer. It's gotten better in the latest version of Linux Mint but it's still a bit off.
Yes with yabridge but it is really brittle.
Brittle in terms of crashes sometimes, or brittle as in "looses bit of connection always"?
Brittle in terms of GUI rendering, sometimes, never had problems with the audio though.
I absolutely love the progress that was made in the several last years! The number of VST/audio plugins available on linux has grown from being quite a problem to having an actual ecosystem!
This is a nice resource. Personally I use linux vst plugin on bespoke synth. But bitwig, renoise and reaper all support linux for those who want or need commercial audio applications on linux. With pipewire and new kernel changes everything is coming together for linux to perform much better than windows + asio.
Do any audio filters/plugins exist that are effective at disguising a voice in real time, such that it would be difficult to identify the speaker / match against samples of their unfiltered voice?
(Pitch shifting is easy and widely available, but also trivial to reverse, so it's not good enough.)
I'm mainly interested for anonymity in online gaming, but I could see it also being a helpful privacy measure in other situations.
So much choice. I a little too much -
How do I know which are good / worth trying?
Where do I start?!
First, you need to try to develop a serious GAS or PAS, after a while you'll get into a flow of trying things out. But be careful, this does not work, if you try to do actual music.