Imagine a Mac versus PC ad about digital audio recording. The Mac guy would talk about his creativity, and how talented he is with multimedia. The PC guy – actually a Windows guy – would tell us that he is a stable workhorse, and very reliable. The banter would go back and forth. What would be missing from that ad? Linux.
This article was previously published on the AudioJungle blog, which has moved on to a new format in 2010. We’ll be bringing you an article from the AudioJungle archives each week.
Like Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, Linux is an operating system, but it is one that many people have never met. You won’t see ads for it on TV, and you’re unlikely to see it running on a computer in a shop. Nevertheless, Linux has a growing base of enthusiastic users, and there are good reasons to consider it for a digital recording studio.
This article comes in two parts. This week we will consider what makes Linux worth considering for digital audio. Next week we will look at the large range of audio software available for Linux. But first we’ll have look at what you may lose by choosing Linux.
1. What Do Musicians Lose by Using Linux?
Let me say at the outset that Linux will not be the best option for everyone. You may already be comfortable with Windows or Mac OS X, and have invested in a considerable amount of software that you have taken time to learn. And Linux is often regarded as a system for geeks. There is some truth in that, though it’s becoming easier to use and set up every year.
If you have never used Linux before, it may feel unfamiliar, especially once you start to look under the hood. And most of the audio programs you are familiar with (Audacity being one of the only exceptions) will not have a Linux version. There may be ways of getting some Windows programs to run, but isn’t the point of using Linux to explore Linux software?
Undoubtedly, the biggest thing most serious recording musicians will miss are their favorite commercial plug-ins, effects and soundfonts. Good alternatives are available, but the best plug-ins are subject to vendor lock-in, and those vendors aren’t making their software available for Linux.
And on a positive note, you’ll also lose lots of restrictions. Linux values freedom and openness. The software is free to use, free to customize, and free to share. It is also normally free of cost.
2. Linux Gives You JACK
Most Linux software is designed to cooperate and work together. More than this, Linux provides an entire audio infrastructure called JACK that allows you to connect hardware and software together in ways you’ve never dreamed of.
JACK is an audio connection kit which (as the JACK website says) “was designed from the ground up for professional audio work, and its design focuses on two key areas: synchronous execution of all clients, and low latency operation.” It is a system for handling real-time, low latency audio and MIDI.
Essentially, JACK has incredible patching abilities that allow you to connect music hardware and software in many ways. Here are a few suggested on the website:
- You can take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another (or two others).
- You can then take the output of those two other programs, and record it back in the first program.
- You can connect a number of different applications to an audio device.
- You can distribute audio processing across a network.
If you like the sound of JACK, but prefer to stay with Windows or Mac, you may be able to get JACK running on your operating system of choice, because it offers support for most operating systems. You may also like to look at ReWire from PropellerHeads and Steinberg, which offer some of JACK’s features.
3. A Studio On A CD
Most Linux distributions can run as a Live CD. This means that you are able to run the entire operating system from the CD without the need for a hard drive.
By using a Live CD, you can turn any computer into a music studio simply by inserting the CD and restarting the computer. While traveling, you can take your music studio with you simply by carrying a CD and external hard drive. The possibilities are endless. Because of this portability, you may wish to consider Linux for your secondary recording system.
CDs run much slower than hard drives, so the applications will load more slowly. But once loaded they should run at their normal speed. Some live CDs give you the ability to run the entire operating system from RAM. As long as you have plenty of memory, you may end up with the most responsive studio you’ve experienced.
Most of the Linux distributions mentioned below can be run as Live CDs. You can create an instant recording studio by downloading the CD (of DVD) image, burning it (if you use Nero, this tutorial may be helpful), and rebooting your computer with the CD in your drive.
Live CDs are also a painless way to see how successfully Linux recognizes your hardware and runs on your computer. There is no risk, because it will not touch or alter your hard drive. Some distros include drivers that others do not, so you may wish to try several Live CDs to see which works best with your setup.
4. Pre-built Custom Music Systems
Setting up a computer-based recording system is a daunting task. Your operating system needs to be tweaked for low latency, software programs need to be downloaded and installed, and settings need to be properly configured. With Linux, someone else does this work for you – before you even run or install the software.
A Linux distribution is not just an operating system, but a customized setup including software put together for a specific purpose. A music-specific distro comes with all of the software you need preinstalled, and all of the settings preconfigured. In other words, after installing the operating system, you don’t have to download, install and configure your software. It’s already there! That takes a lot of leg work out of getting up and running with audio.
Many Linux distros have been put together with music in mind. Here are the best of them, along with a summary from the distro’s website.
“ArtistX is a free live DVD which turns a common computer into a full multimedia production studio. It contains nearly all the available free audio, 2D and 3D graphics, and video software for the GNU/Linux computing platform. It doesn’t need to be installed, and boots directly into a running system without touching hard drives. The files produced with ArtistX can be easily stored on USB devices or CD/DVD medium while it is running.”
“Let Your Creativity Fly. Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional. We provide a suite of the best open-source applications available for multimedia creation. Completely free to use, modify and redistribute. Your only limitation is your imagination.”
“A Linux-based distribution that is designed for music needs to be flexible, powerful, yet easy and quick to use. It contain a full production environment for media production, primarily music. For this, the JackLab team added a Realtime Kernel version 2.6.19 to have fast audio processing with a latency up to 1.5ms. The default audio system will be based on the the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) which is designed for the needs of musicians and producers and gives a professional audio/midi controlling interface.”
“It’s a 100% free multimedia operating system intended for music production, graphic design, audio and video edition, and all kind of tasks. It contains an enormous collection of free (as in freedom) programs that can replace Windows. The system will boot from your CD/DVD drive, with no need to install anything on your hard disk. Later, it can be installed.”
“64 Studio is a GNU/Linux distribution tailor-made for digital content creation, including audio, video, graphics and publishing tools. It comes in both AMD64/Intel64 and 32-bit flavours, to run on nearly all PC hardware. We aim to combine stability and quality with a specialised real-time preemption kernel and the latest creative tools demanded by multimedia artists.”
“You don’t need to install anything, you don’t even need an harddisk to run a whole free software operating system running out of the box on your PC! dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb and more; all using only free software! You can employ this operating system without the need to install anything, and if you want to run it from harddisk you just need to copy a directory: the easiest installation ever seen!”
5. Make the Most of your Old Computer
Linux runs well on old hardware. If you are starting out with digital recording, consider using Linux to turn your old computer into a recording studio.
Some Linux distros specialize in working on old hardware. For example, the dyne:bolic website claims, “It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console – and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters.”
6. Outrageously Good Free Software
And finally, the topic of next week’s article: there is loads of excellent free music software available for Linux. Arguably much better than the free audio software for Windows we covered two weeks ago. Tune in next week to find out.
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Great article and very timely for me. I’ve been considering alternatives to my Windows Based Operating Sys (WinOS). This may focus my search.
I’ve ‘dabbled’ with Linux back in the 90s & never pursued actually using it. Recycling my old PCs (6 of them) is a great low cost way to do so. Thanks for the article. I look forward to Part 2.
Bravo! I wondered when you’d come ’round to the free world :)
After a decade of taking heat for SUPPORTING microsoft in a face of a great deal of flack from colleagues, by 1995 my faith was shaken, and I walked away from Windows after Win98; I toyed with WinME, gave Vista and XP each a fair trial, but I’ve been on the free outside of the commercial software world pretty much since 1999 without looking back.
What did I lose? I lost a lot of work. North Americans are OBSESSED with brand names. It isn’t enough to be a digital audio workstation, it has to have that designer name or you just don’t get invited to the party. That’s ok, I didn’t want to go to those parties anyway. There were times I thought I lost the chance to use some of the really slick software I’d see in the music stores … until I had the opportunity to try some of that software and found out that the glossy brochures and glitzy boxes decked in promises are overselling themselves. Mind you, I have never used Sibelius, I hear it is great, but the price tag is out of my league and while I do like Finale, I find Rosegarden is far more logically structured, I can touchtype music into Rosegarden because it was designed by musicians, it makes sense.
I also, truth be told, lost some flexibility. I don’t know what all is out there in the proprietary world, but in the Free World there are precious few credible choices. There are lots of promises, but lots and lots of inflated egos, or software that was really designed for music production in tiny video games, designed by geeks for a geek audience. Midi, for example: there is not a single Linux product that I have found which would give you enough MIDI control to submit your exercises to Berklee courses. That’s ok by me, though, because I don’t have any use for MIDI beyond “What does this phrase sound like?” previews.
What did I gain? Freedom and Friendship. If software is not what I want, I have the freedom to change it. If software only contains some small part that I need to build something else, I am free to snip out that part and re-use it. The culture of sharing is phenomenal, it is the stuff of whole books to the subject. Every single software that I use in music production is open and welcoming of my input, even naive input, I am welcomed in the door as a friend, a colleague, I get a say. “How would you prefer to do instrument transpositions?” might be the topic on the mailing list one day, it might be “Which method of entering repeat marks makes more sense to you?” the next, and as musicians will, we will all disagree and the coders in the crowd will grumble and say it can’t be both and they will go quiet for a while and lo in a week or two there it is, the feature we wanted done in a way that does both. It is amazing.
I don’t dare even dream of calling the 1-800 number for any commercial products, it just seems foolish to try. With Free Software, I know the key developers of my notation software, my non-linear video editor, my audio post-production and capture software, and I know them on a first-name basis. I don’t have their cell number, but then, I never asked, it wouldn’t seem, y’know, “friend-like” to impose. They are, after all, giving me a gift of their time and effort, sharing all this with me only because they needed it themselves and had the means to make it and now that it is made, it costs them little or nothing to share that capability with me. So I behave, I don’t demand like a spoiled rich kid, I don’t throw tantrums, I participate and try to understand and try to do something, anything to help. Psychologically, as a person who uses computers, I think that is a healthier way to do business.
My favorite Pro-Audio Linux distro is a hidden gem called AVLinux. http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html
It is built on top of Debian, and new releases are pushed out quite frequently. The Included software is always up to date on release. Another important aspect is that the distro does’t include just open source software, but also some shareware/demo software that is compatible with Linux Pro-Audio, including Renoise, Linux DSP, and Invada Plugins.
Thanks for bringing awareness to Pro-Audio on Linux, its a world of awesome!
To correct the opening paragraph, the free revolution was (briefly) televised: once upon a time we DID see Linux on the TV, and it was both poignant and hilarious.
First there was Novell’s fun hip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LAXg_UmzTY (people just GIVE you stuff??)
Then later the more biz-flavoured and calculated IBM take in a sci-fi spot they called ‘Prodigy’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 (what he learns, we all learn, what he knows, we all benefit from)
Highly unlikely.
“The PC guy – actually a Windows guy – would tell us that he is a stable workhorse, and very reliable.”
That’s actually the Mac argument. PC’s are fundamentally unstable since they use hardware and software from numerous companies. When I use my mac and launch Logic all I’m using is apple products. I probably use Windows more than Mac, but I wouldn’t ever try to pull the stability card on a Mac user because it simply isn’t true.
Awhile ago I remember createdigitalmusic.com writing an article about a coming flood of music apps to the Linux environment. With great articles like this (and the one mentioned) it opens people’s eyes to a different approach, which – when it comes to making music – is never a bad thing.
I tried Linux for Audio-production.
But I gave up because I didn’t find drivers for my soundcard,
and it seemed to diffucult sorting it out..
Good article.
Don’t know much about Linux, have always thought it’d be Mac Vs Windows, so its nice to find out about other possible alternatives.
Look forward to reading more.
Macs are the first point of call within a sucessful music studio (production environment). Its so easy for people to get lost in the arguement against pc’s. The idea of music production is to get the idea down as soon as possible, then spend countless hours tweaking and adding effects for which logic and pro-tools lead. Mac based systems are in every studio as they can handle a vast array of I/0 without the user wondering if the computer is going to crash.
A producer who I shall not name said to me a while back that “those who have macs can create to their hearts content, those who have pc’s constantly wonder if they can do better on a mac”.
When I got mine I did ask they guy at the store whether I should go down the pc route and save somen money and he replied with “if your serious about production then you’ll want to grow around your desktop, get a mixing desk, hardware etc, can you say that a pc will be with you still chugging away after 5 years?”.
Apple have cornered the market on the creative industry and as such their products a made to work with processor hungry programs.
if you can afford a mac get one, if not save up.
I’ve got digidesign mbox.
Can I run Protools LE 8 on linux ??
Running Pro Tools on Linux wouldn’t be my first choice. I generally prefer to run apps in the environment they were designed for. But it’s probably possible, and there is an interesting discussion on it in the Pro Tools forums.
Dear Adrian,
From the start, I fell in love with the Linux idea. But I’ve always used Windows because of the Cakewalk (and Sonar) and my old Ventura Publisher. Couldn’t get out.
By reading your tut, I will give a try for Linux Pro Audio/MIDI – hard work to get accostumed, long learning run.
Too much? I don’t think so. In the old times, I had a lot of work trying to run my PHP on Windows, while Linux had it native. So it’s worth this effort.
Thanks
Hi Marcos. Enjoy your Linux adventure. I hope it works out for you. Let us know how it goes.
Name a single commercial recording studio using Linux as it’s primary DAW.
You can’t because it doesn’t exist.
With Linux you get what you pay.
Nothing.
First of all, nice article. Though you missed out AVLinux, which was mentioned in the comments above, I’m going to install it as an upgrade for the system I have at the moment on my audio production laptop (a custom prepared zenwalk distro – but it’s getting dated and I want something more easy to update and more complete).
Second, I couldn’t resist to reply to the last comment, by Commo.
I’m sorry, but what you said is of just plain ignorance: you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
I’m not saying that a well-configured and well-equipped (that means: lots of money invested in software) mac is quite superior in some aspects to the best linux audio station you can “mount”, but that doesn’t mean that linux won’t be usable for professional audio production.
It IS perfectly usable, I’m a producer and musician and have done all my last recordings on Linux (have a look on my website if you like).
In some aspects it even comes close to the mac and in many aspects it largely beats windows as a platform (thanks to the fantastic jack).
Sure, I don’t have protools. But I have Ardour (and many other great and FREE programs) and I sure wouldn’t have the money to buy protools, either.
So, yes, Linux as audio platform IS an option, maybe not for the average recording studio in town, but for many producer at home or at a live event or even in his personal studio.