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Ardour is pretty great, but I'm not so sure the state of audio in general on linux is. Granted last time I struggled (as in a couple of days of trying out different things with god know how many different audio subsystems there were at the time) with it is about 5 years ago but it still seemed impossible to get a configuration with really low I-O latency (say <10mSec), nor did it 'just work' as on the other two main operating systems. Is this better with Ubuntu Studio? Does it work nicely with e.g. RME cards?

For almost a decade now, I have had rock solid, high-performance audio running on my multi-channel DAW running Ubuntu Studio.

Rock solid. Better than Pro Tools.

How?

I chose my hardware wisely. In my case, I've got two Presonus Firepod FP-10 interfaces, which work out of the box with JACK. Truly superlative Firewire audio interfaces, and I chalk that up to the fact that the Bridgeco chipset used in these devices was developed in a pro-Linux environment.

Of course, ymmv .. especially if you fall into the PulseAudio trap, which is designed - imho - to make Audio suck on Linux as much as possible. Not so with Jack and Firewire audio - in this case, its the best possible combination of audio hardware and software components, given superlative latency and multi-channel I/o capabilities ..

Do you have a link to a blog post about your setup? If not, would you consider writing about it?

I am also interested in this!

It would also be great to see some audio latency numbers for ubuntu vs the rest on common hardware

IIRC Ubuntu Studio (and most (all?) professional linux audio systems) uses JACK rather than ASLA/Pulse like most other versions of Ubuntu.

JACK has a reputation for being fiddly to set up, but puts great emphasis on low-latency/real-time and other professional use-cases. I'd expect it to be competitive, but don't really have the knowledge to make the comparisons myself.

I did find this unfinished review of latency in JACK from a few years ago: http://apps.linuxaudio.org/wiki/jack_latency_tests#does_late...

I also would like to know your setup! I'd be very interested!

I was looking into whether I should purchase Windows or buy a Mac to run a DAW, but if you're saying that Ardour is good enough, then I can just install that this weekend!

Just do it! BUT! Commit to using JACK for everything, and get rid of PulseAudio.

Ubuntu Studio isn't managed by Canonical (though I think they do receive financial contributions?) so that's a little different from the Canonical lead variations that the GP was discussing. However I do agree with you that Ubuntu Studio is a great product. I remember using it back when it was relatively new and even then I could see real potential in the making.

Looks like you got a lot of feedback from your comment, but if you have the time I'd like to ask a question too. I'm still getting my feet wet with more the more advanced aspects of Linux, primarily Ubuntu on my Chromebook. I always hear about people tweaking programs, but it never dawns on me what kind of tweaks are possible or even useful. I'd be interested in a couple use-cases you've come across, like problems you wanted to solve with a program and a brief overview of how you altered the source to do so. Maybe it's embarrassing to admit, but I've never tweaked anything outside of VS Code or Atom.

First, it is definitely not embarrassing to admit, and the answer may be overwhelming, but you can customize nearly everything.

One of the simpler things is to customize the look and feel. E.g. you could try out different desktop experiences and WMs (window managers). Most of them are just an `apt-get` away and when you logout and login again you can choose and try out a different desktop.

The only thing I could contribute to the conversation so far would be to NEVER use PulseAudio, and commit to using JACK for all your audio I/o needs, with regards to setting up Linux (UbuntuStudio) as a high-performance DAW.

This is really the great thing about Linux: we've got tons of options when it comes to audio I/o routing .. but its a liability too. My advice: commit to setting up Jack and learning it - definitely the best thing about Linux Audio.

I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for or not, but here's a situation I encountered in just the last couple of days.

I have a new workstation PC I just recently put together. It's currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS but I plan to switch over to Arch Linux in the near future. Because I want to use LUKS (a.k.a. full disk encryption) and ZFS (and multiple ZFS pools) on it, I decided to work through the installation procedure on a laptop first (just to make sure I've got the steps down right -- an installation w/ the root filesystem on ZFS is "non-standard", and LUKS throws additional issues into the mix) before I wipe out my primary work machine.

First, by default, the LUKS setup only supports "unlocking" a single encrypted drive at boot. Since the laptop has a pair of SSDs (in a ZFS mirror), I need to unlock both of them (and my workstation has an NVMe, two SSDs, and two HDDs, so that'll be an even bigger problem!). I had to "hack on" the initramfs stuff so that I could unlock both drives when the system boots up.

In addition, I have several Yubikeys and wanted to use them with LUKS. I set them up in Challenge-Response mode, programmed them with a "secret key" that I generated, and then came up with a (relatively) short(er) passphrase that I can use to unlock the disks. I also had to create a custom (initramfs) "hook" to prompt for my passphrase, detect if a Yubikey is attached and, if so, send the "challenge" to the Yubikey, receive the response from it, and use that to unlock the disks. If a Yubikey isn't attached, then I have to provide a (much longer, more secure) "backup" passphrase to unlock (each of) the disks.

On the laptop, this means I can enter in my (relatively) short(er) passphrase once and unlock both disks. On my workstation, it means I'll enter it once to unlock all five disks. The alternative would be to type in my much longer, more secure passphrase FIVE separate times every time I boot the system up.

None of this was very hard or time consuming, but it was necessary in order to meet my exact goals and I'm glad that Linux allows me the opportunity to do exactly this type of non-standard stuff.

I own a Toshiba Chromebook 2, there are things that doesn't work out of the box (sleep mode, laptop mode) so I wrote some scripts to fix those issues. Also I wanted to have the same keyboard experience that I had on chrome os, so I tweaked the keyboard (upper row media keys, shift+backspace=del, etc...)

I have no doubt that you can work efficiently in such an environment and I firmly believe that audio related works these days are rarely limited by the available tools, but knowing how to use them in-depth. However you're giving up a lot of third party instrument and effect options, aren't you? Again, those are not essential in any way, but there are really worthwhile options I wouldn't want to miss. Do you rely on internal plugins only?

And have you tried Bitwig yet? With its similarities to Ableton Live, I'm sure it has the potential to push audio production on Linux to some degree.

>However you're giving up a lot of third party instrument and effect options, aren't you?

You'd be surprised just how many VST's work smoothly and reliably under Linux.

>Bitwig

Tried it, but not a fan - I have too many external hardware sequencers to be bothered with setting it up with the rest of my system. (Hardware sequencers run forever!) I do, however, have Ardour set up for perfect multi-channel recording, so every instrument has its own digital tracking, and this has been wonderful ..

A few years back Linux Voice reviewed Bitwig and they seemed to like it a lot:

https://www.linuxvoice.com/issues/003/LV3bitwig.pdf

As plugins go, many good ones are available in LV2 or similar formats so no problem on that front.

>I'm a musician, so when people see that I'm using Ubuntu Studio for my DAW, I usually hear a few chuckles .. until I fire up Ardour, show them my plugin list, the standard suite of synths and effects I use, and so on .. that usually shuts them up at least.

Well, it's not that impressive compared to something like Live or Cubase.

Everything the Beatles, Sex Pistols, Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Lou Reed, Abba, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The White Stripes, and Miles Davis used to record with was infinitely less powerful than Ardour. Yet somehow they were able to cough up some acceptable music.

Yeah, and Bach wrote on mere sheets of paper.

Your point being? "A subpar DAW should be enough for everybody in 2017 as long as it's better than 70s era studio technology"?

Not to mention that you compare apples and oranges. These people did rock, punk and/or jazz, not modern r&b, pop or electronic music that are usually more demanding of a DAW for one.

Second they had tens of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars as a budget for a single record, great facilities with top-notch acoustics, multiple producers, access to orchestras and top-notch musicians, and crazily expensive consoles with people to operate them for them.

Third one doesn't compete against Louis Armstrong era sound but against their own's generation's sound and production techniques.

The point is about diminishing returns. There's nothing you can do in one modern DAW that you can't with the others. The enhancements you get year over year are minimal and the amount of users who are pushing those tools to their limits is negligible.

Heck, the more advanced users end up going with a lot of hardware-based solutions and analog equipment.

There is nothing sub-par about Ardour as a DAW. It ranks up there with the other tools you mention in terms of capabilities and features. I simply don't need to use anything else.

Less powerful but more usable.

Can you modify Live or Cubase?

Or even a better question : can you plug Live to Cubase? Audio on linux is not just playing catch up, the whole jackd system, allowing to take output from any program supporting jack (most programs for musicians) and use it as an input for an other one is unparalleled, afaik.

For those who don't know, Jack allows to plug any software, virtual instrument or sound card in/out into any other one almost as simply as it would be on a physical mixer. This is also the meaning of Freedom: you are not condemned to follow the editor choices in term of possibilities.

>This is also the meaning of Freedom: you are not condemned to follow the editor choices in term of possibilities.

There's also another meaning of freedom: freedom from having to care of worry about the platform, and being free to create, because you have a thing that "just works".

For musicians that's more important than "route everything to everything" (for which there are solutions even for commercial DAWs, e.g. Rewire for those that do care for it).

It's all about tradeoffs, but Jack and "freedom to modify DAW code" is pretty down on the list of priorities for 99% of musicians.

Why do you think the free/open source stuff don't "just work"?

Also, a lot of time using FOSS is a choice we make not because of the price or principals but for convenience. I simply don't want to juggle licenses and dongles between home and studio computers, or for that matter be forced to install licensing software that is more or less a rootkit...

Live, for one, comes with a full blown programming environment called Max for Live, where you can create all kinds of things on par with native plugins and controls.

But the more essential question is: does it matter?

If one is experimental electronic musician / sound artist, it might be worth it.

But the average musician wants a good environment with the features they need built-in (and easy access to quality third party plugins etc for FX etc), not to tinker (and even less so, in C/C++) with their DAW.

"modify" is a very flexible term, but at least Live offers lots of customization options, particularly when you consider Max for Live: https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/

Can you modify Max?

Do you know Max? It's basically a toolkit for building audio, video and other applications/plugins. Creating and modifying is its main purpose.

https://cycling74.com/products/max/

Then do it with Pure Data!

Why, so we can score some freedom points?

If Pure Data was as mature and polished as Max (which it is not) we just as well would.

If not, those things matter more than openness when you have music to record and work to do.

Does it matter at all when one doesn't want to?

This is a thread about a Free / Open Source operating system announcement. Why Cubase, Live and Max are even mentioned here?

The problem for me is not superior VS inferior or impressive VS unimpressive software but free software VS closed software.

>The problem for me is not superior VS inferior or impressive VS unimpressive software but free software VS closed software.

The problem for most people is good and inferior, or "getting my work done with this" and "this is lacking".

Free vs closed doesn't even come second to most people's concerns, and I'm not even sure it should.

Funny thing...

My main problem has recently been "why can't I open these songs anymore" vs "can still edit old productions anywhere, any OS, no need for intrusive DRM that takes over my entire laptop just because Steinberg"