this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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As someone who uses windows to produce music, bloat is a huge issue, latencymon Is a great tool to check for programs and drivers that can cause audio dropouts.
And win 11 has been great, didn't have to change much to get it to work. I tried several forms of Linux and it was too slow, driver issues, and plugins that were impossible to get working.
Win 10 was bad, but 7 was worse.
It really is a shame that music production is so painful in Linux. All I need to make the final switch
After leaving Macs (and Logic) (Apple software great, Apple iMac shit) switched to LInux over 10 years ago. Haven't made music since (hardware in boxes). Fully learned that Linux music ain't got that swing.
I recently heard that newer PipeWire has improved things a quite a lot. Haven't tried it yet ... not sure I remember how to play any instruments any more.
You could try bitwig, the daw is really good and has a native linux client for years.
Ya know ... I'll just give that a close hard look. Thanks!
Exactly and some other media/creative stuff as well. Windows is the only way to run Ableton with full VST support on my own hardware. Then if I'm going to need a Windows workstation anyway, I might as well use it for gaming too, and lump in all my other "power station" uses. It's sometimes frustrating when you mention this and people who aren't familiar with these programs to try to debate you or assume you haven't entertained the alternatives. In my case I run Linux on my laptop and servers, and even some of my instruments like the monome norns and m8 are rpi based. Real time audio synthesis on linux is actually amazing, PureData and Supercollider are the ones I'm somewhat familiar with.
Yeah but slightly lower latency is irrelevant really, windows based can get lower than 2ms now. And it just works.
Yeah and in those linux examples its not really latency that's important, plus those things run on Windows too. The Monome Norns is a raspberry pi shield with a linux platform and development community around it, where people write scripts to turn it in to all manner of musical devices. When it comes to a full DAW with VST support it's basically OSX or Windows, and if you don't want to be restricted to Apple hardware then congrats, you're using Windows.
Driver issues aside, have you played with JACK on RTOS kernel?
JACK is very cool and if you're willing to tinker there's some really awesome stuff that can be done with LADISH session management and e.g. native Linux VSTs.
It's still a non-option for musicians who just want to do music, not tinkering.
I was mostly referring to the latency. RTOS kernel prioritizes timing over performance, so it should be right up your alley when it comes to music handling. I know it has been used in some instruments and mixers.
Jack is kind of iffy to tinker around I agree, however PipeWire, which is these days standard on up to date distributions should handle latency much much better without any great need for tinkering as it supports all the interfaces of Jack, PulseAudio and others. So you can just use whichever application you want and you get low latency backend regardless.
Things are improving at a rather fast pace in Linux world and even giving developers feedback is a useful contribution.
Thank you! I know all these things. This still doesn't help when the DAW support and VST compatibility aren't there.
If you're intent on doing music production on Linux, at least do yourself a favor and get a Reaper license, there are few enough pro DAWs that are Linux native. But be aware that many of the big industry VSTs are still not going to work. If you're fine sticking to e.g. ZynAddSubFX or Pianoteq, though, knock yourself out.
But you can't reasonably expect musicians to jump those hoops and abandon their fav VSTs when their Windows tooling is there, and works.
Am not expecting anything. Am just wondering how people in the industry are fairing with recent changes.
No, but it hardly matters, since most of my plugins won't work on linux.