Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

hydrogen-music.org

319 pointsferrantim127 comments

I have tried Hydrogen some time ago when I tried to build a linux audio workstation with Jack and Ardour.

As much as it pains me to say this, don't expect it to be even remotely as good as commercial software drum machines like EZDrummer, Superior Drummer or Studio Drummer in terms of sample quality or usability.

Generally, I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, even though I had one of the few soundcards that had drivers for Linux (Edirol FA-101).

EDIT: That was like 5 years ago, maybe the audio landscape has changed until then. 2017, year of the Linux Audio Workstation!

2nd EDIT: Today I use Reaper on Windows. Reaper is amazing and the only reason I have Windows installed on my private computers. It is to audio editing and recording what Sublime Text is to text editing: slick, fast, inexpensive, easy to install, easy to use.

For me a huge change the past years was the coming of Bitwig Studio audio workstation to Linux. Commercial software, but rock solid and high quality.

Do you have to jump through Jack shenanigans to get it working? Or does it just work, nicely?

I don't care what OS your on. When you start talking about latency it is all a nightmare. If latency isn't an issue then Pulse Audio works totally fine.

I actually like Jack when it is concerning latency and think it is a good system. BUT it is a pain.

I used 2 separate sound cards. One is a Pro level I/O breakout box that Jack controls and the on board sound card is controlled by PulseAudio.

I have no issues with latency on MacOS with absolutely zero configuration. It's one of the reasons I won't switch from MacOS to linux.

Likewise, none of my audio devices have required special drivers for Mac, and I can easily get 3ms latency by just plugging it in and making sure buffer size it at a minimum. I produced on Windows forever and didn't believe there would have been a noticeable difference switching to OSX.

I have never in my life seen a Mac out perform a Window machine when it comes to latency and professional audio recording. When it comes to $100-$200 parts it comes to drivers and sometimes Mac wins and sometimes Windows wins. I have a bias that goes beyond Pro-Tools but Pro-Tools was a thing because Apple hardware was not capable of producing Professional level recording without spending thousands of dollars in their proprietary hardware.

Since Windows XP Windows and Audio Latency has not been an issue and both platforms require a lot of end user work to get lower and lower latency. The issue is really only significant for recording audio and not as much when doing live audio. Any modern platforms latency light years ahead of 2000 audio production.

The idea that Mac is better for audio or video because of the OS is marketing and not based on real life professional use of the platforms.

> Since Windows XP Windows and Audio Latency has not been an issue

Core Audio literally-just-works with low latency and aggregated devices.

DAWs on Windows still either use MME/DX for north of 50ms, often 100ms+ latency or ASIO (exclusive device usage and no aggregation, assuming your hardware even has ASIO drivers because ASIO4ALL is at best rickety) on Windows.

I don't know what you think is going on with OS X, but I suggest re-evaluating your assumptions.

... but with ASIO, it is quite possible to get 3ms latency in Windows at 96kHz. I agree it would be nice if the device weren't locked up by the DAW using ASIO, or if updated driver support weren't so hit-and miss, but it still works exceptionally well for what it is. It also makes Windows completely viable as a production platform.

No one here is saying Windows isn't a viable platform. Just arguing that OSX also works well, if not better by default. You yourself just listed some examples where Windows cannot do things that OSX can (device exclusivity through ASIO).

Yes, it totally is possible. But it's worse than Core Audio for most use cases.

All decent hardware has ASIO drivers under Windows.

The problem there, being a closed environment where the manufacturer dictates when the product must die, is rather the drivers life. If they don't update the driver your pricey gear turns into a doorstop overnight. Case in point: Tascam US122 audio interface. Under Linux I can still use it; far from being the best around but it works. Under Windows it became unusable when they stopped supporting it years ago.

> low latency and aggregated devices

Hang on, no way, you take one or the other. Aggregating devices adds a huge chunk of latency and, frankly, I don't think is that exciting a feature anyway. Maybe for your specific setup, but generally speaking you should buy gear that suits your needs, rather than try to cobble something together from existing devices.

Having used OSX and Win7 (on the same machine) I would agree CoreAudio is less hassle and definitely lower latency - IIRC, OSX reported just over half the latency of W7 on the same setup.

That said, I'm not sure what you think is going on with ASIO, since any class compliant USB audio interface has compatible drivers inherently..

> Aggregating devices adds a huge chunk of latency

In the situations where I have to do it--and it's less about "buying the gear that suits my needs," more "having to bash together other people's gear on a shoestring"--I find that aggregation ends up around 30ms, which is on the higher end of acceptable when monitoring in-ear. (To be specific--this is not for music but rather audio routing for video. Occasionally I'm on-site somewhere and need to be able to monkey up something a little faster than I'd like, you know?)

Trying to do that with ASIO at all is impossible. So it's a pretty big deal.

> That said, I'm not sure what you think is going on with ASIO, since any class compliant USB audio interface has compatible drivers inherently..

In theory, yes. In practice, I find ASIO a little unstable (my home setup uses Ableton on Windows as a live mixer through a TASCAM US-16x08, though I'll be going back to using a Mac when I get back my Mac mini from a friend). I have never had Core Audio kernel panic a machine, but I've had machines (in one memorable case, the same machine dual-booting a hackintoshed OS X and Windows) hard-lock as soon as I enabled ASIO on two different devices (my old TASCAM US-1200 and my a friend's 8i6).

It is not unusable, by any means, but for my purposes (again, live shows) predictability is a big plus.

> I find that aggregation ends up around 30ms, which is on the higher end of acceptable when monitoring in-ear

I haven't done that kind of work, so for video/speech, fair enough. 30ms (on top of whatever's already there) is not really acceptable for a musical performance, though - the performer will be expending half their brainpower trying to mentally align what they hear through bone conduction vs in ear monitoring and adjusting their performance based on outdated/scrambled information. It's a really confusing experience - if you've ever seen that Japanese "speech jammer" device[0] you'll get some idea what I mean (although it uses much longer than ~30ms, that's still enough to mess with you).

Working in a pinch, it would make a useful and more stable tool than ASIO, though I run either analog or dedicated devices for any live work - I just don't trust computers that much - but I get that working with video means you might not have those kind of options. I can't say I've had many of the troubles I've heard about with ASIO to be honest, but I undeniably do enjoy working on OSX more anyway. This conversation reminds me how badly I need to revive my ML Hackintosh..

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USDI3wnTZZg

ASIO isn't always exclusive usage. My Focusrite Scarlett 2i2's own ASIO driver can run alongside other audio just fine.

> Since Windows XP Windows and Audio Latency has not been an issue and both platforms require a lot of end user work to get lower and lower latency.

As the other commentor said, Core Audio "just works" for low latency. MIDI is great as well. Windows still needs third party ASIO drivers.

If a USB MIDI controller gets unplugged during a set on Windows, I need to restart Ableton. On Mac, you just plug it back in and it picks up immediately, even the audio interface will do that.

> The issue is really only significant for recording audio and not as much when doing live audio.

What? Latency is a non-issue for recording audio, and A HUGE ISSUE for live usage. Any half-decent DAW supports latency compensation on non-realtime tracks. You can record a vocal track when every other instrument has 10s of seconds of latency, as long as your monitoring for the vocals has none. When playing live, every single track cannot have latency.

Edit, hell many of the best audio interfaces don't even support Windows as a platform.

Well we will disagree 100% I don't think we are talking the same thing. BUT latency (aka delay) in audio recording is a HUGE deal. When someone is playing to a click track and previous recorded pieces and have that person perform with that delay makes it even worse. It's impact on the ability for the drummer to perform has made it default to record drums first. The difference between on beat, before beat or after beat is very significant.

Give this a read - https://www.presonus.com/community/Learn/The-Truth-About-Dig...

Live audio if you have above the human perception of latency you are in the realm of 20 or 30 ms.

> Edit, hell many of the best audio interfaces don't even support Windows as a platform.

What can I say marketing works and this perceived Mac superior creative types tool is believed by most people. In actual Professional world there are plenty of Windows based studios that won Emmy's, Oscars and Grammys.

> BUT latency (aka delay) in audio recording is a HUGE deal. When someone is playing to a click track and previous recorded pieces and have that person perform with that delay makes it even worse.

Please dude, look up latency compensation. You have zero idea what you're talking about and it's obvious.

> In actual Professional world there are plenty of Windows based studios that won Emmy's, Oscars and Grammys.

I don't believe I ever said otherwise. But to say Mac never outperforms Windows for audio is wrong. And to say Mac requires just as much setup work as Windows is a flat out lie.

I think they have a fair idea of what they're talking about, but you've both rushed to reply without thoroughly reading. Seems they missed where you talked about it being okay as long as you can monitor realtime and you've missed that they missed that.

You are wrong about the need for proprietary ASIO drivers for all devices, or that many of the best audio interfaces don't support Windows.. One manufacturer is not "many" and while they are high range, it's definitely arguable whether they're the best.

Anyway, in my experience it's rarely the hardware itself that requires the majority of setup, and either way it's a once-off. Unless you're the kind of person who uses the same template for every recording session, in which case you have bigger problems than setup.

I owned my own Recording Studio and still do work for time to time as a sub-contrator. If you in your smug dialog think that adding a delay to different tracks and syncing them down to the bits is the issue I am sorry but you miss 100% of the point and you didn't read the link that I tried to show what I am talking about.

> I don't believe I ever said otherwise. But to say Mac never outperforms Windows for audio is wrong. And to say Mac requires just as much setup work as Windows is a flat out lie.

Nope. Its actually a huge pain BUT most people don't really care or need to actually dig that deep.

https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/210...

https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207546515-Op...

Then you have the issue with your i/o in Macs with all your Desktop options that isn't a problem but all the laptops its a HUGE problem. I have no idea how people do audio with the i/o issues that Apple throw at you all the time. Thunderbolt anyone?

The part I don't understand:

If you have a known constant output lag, a known constant input lag, but no lag in the monitor for just the track you're recording, it seems like the software has everything it needs to put back the performance exactly the way you recorded it (and to adjust the offset for the click).

Am I missing something?

You are not.

Okay you have reverb or chorus or anything else you must have the mix wet. If you don't you are throwing everything off. Once again if you are not recording multi-track it really doesn't matter that much. If you throwing multiple of tracks and multiple of recordings its a HUGE issue that just manually or automatically delaying tracks won't fix. If "any modern DAW" could fix with a latency compensation then no one would be writing and working on latency for 20 years.

My point latency doesn't really matter for most people recording. BUT if you get in that realm where you need to worry about it then its a PAIN no matter what your OS is. Apple isn't "superior" in audio recording just like it isn't in video and image manipulation. OS is more about people's feeling and attachment to their OS's company's marketing.

I think Apple has been dishonest and hostile to people so I don't like them as a company. You can't trust them not to throw the rug out from under your feet (Thunderbolt cost studios thousands and thousands of dollars). Lack of a new Mac Pro also is a HUGE issue for most video shops now. Their OS drives me nuts and really unreliable for me. Other people love it and I am fine with your opinion until they think everything else is garbage.

Monitoring. To monitor sound wet (as opposed to dry direct monitoring) you need very low latencies. This becomes important if you apply non-trivial effects.

I find bout of your claims hard to believe as OSX has a sound architecture similar to PulseAudio.

Are the 3ms measured or is it just what OSX tells you ?

A buffer of 3ms at 48kHz holds 144 samples. That means shoveling 144 fresh samples (per channel, ofc) ~333 times a second and sending them to the sound card immediately. That may be possible if your sound card supports resampling (and minor magic) and only without a sound server (OSX uses one). Either that or you have an impressive cpu. Feel free to correct me at any point.

edit: PS This is only the program->sound_card part. Programs themselves add a ton of latency and sound cards add to it as well. In reality even 10ms is beyond perfect conditions.

The problem isn't the CPU, the problem is the OS going out for lunch, and then designs that assume the OS will go our for lunch (i.e. deep buffers everywhere)... The CPU can move data between devices with sub-microsecond latencies...

I thought I'd try and measure this at some resolution (since my phone can capture at 120 FPS, I should be able to see 8 millisecond increments in a video).

Stepping frame by frame through the video I took (https://youtu.be/IHmC-q_iPiE) at the point where I press the key to sound a note, there's a 4 to 5 frame latency until I can visually see the speaker membrane move, so that's about 33 to 41 milliseconds.

Bitwig is set to 64 samples (1.45 ms) latency.

I then question your need for low latency? OS X and MacOS requires just as much work to get to the lowest latency and your handicapped if your have an Apple laptop. Your latency will be about the same as PusleAudio on Linux if you use default OS X MacOS settings. In most real world settings Windows will get a lower latency mostly due to better hardware on a Professional setup compared to the less then top end audio of Apple. Apple machine require a lot of engineering in the software to achieve low latency.

Here is the focusrite help page dealing with latency and what you must turn off for recording. https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207546515-Op...

Those links are either out of date or completely incorrect. None of this has ever been necessary for me on a Mac.

Focusrite doesn't even offer Mac drivers for most of their products, as the support is built in, for example[0], so I don't know why it's advising you to update your drivers.

[0] https://us.focusrite.com/downloads?product=Scarlett+2i4

Seriously. A friend brought over his 2i4 for a project and my Mac was able to plug-and-play with it at 5ms latency.

That page is "dissuade people from calling tech support", not the reality of how audio actually works on OS X.

There is no way you have 5ms latency with a USB port. Your measuring it wrong. USB audio devices have built in buffers that add to your 5ms latency.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-audio-inter...

yes its 2009 but it is still sound science.

On Linux Mint - install, configure your inputs, select your soundcard/device, done. It will work fine with Alsa.

It will also support JACK but for quickly getting up and running it's about the simplest DAW I've setup on Linux configuration wise.

Not open source but I give them lots of kudos for supporting Linux from the start.

Slightly off-topic, but does Bitwig have a restrictive licensing scheme that makes reinstallation cumbersome? I love FL Studio because it doesn't have a limit on number of installations. As a geek, I change my main machine often, and it's so convenient to install FL Studio if I get an itch to bang something out, and not to worry about how many activations I've used up.

Ableton is a turn-off for this reason. They're actually pretty cool about adding activations if you let them know you're moving machines, but it offends me to ask permission to use something I've already paid for.

If Bitwig (1) works well on Linux, (2) works well as a DAW, and (3) doesn't dick around with activation rules, then I'd be delighted both to support them and to switch my (current) hobby workstation from Windows to Linux.

There are restrictions, but they're quite flexible. I have a main PC and a couple laptops I switch between, and have no issues.

You can activate 2 systems permanently, which is managed simply from the web UI. (revoke activations) Other systems can be activated temporarily with your email/id + pass on startup.

FWIW, the small team has been fantastic and responsive since the beginning. (I've been on the betas and helped develop some of the early controller scripts. check the community pages to see what we've done)

I got a NFR license for helping out early on, and ran into the activation limit initially. (testing on all platforms, etc...) I emailed them a few times to deactivate my current systems initially, then they added the option to their account management page.

If its a deal breaker, I suggest emailing them and seeing what they say. It wouldn't surprise me if they upped the limit or did something to help you out. They're an awesome group who really want to work with the community and users.

Not affiliated besides what I mentioned above, just a happy user. Best of luck, if you have any questions PM me or reply here if you think relevant to others :)

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. The self-service activation manager sounds like a step up from Ableton. Still not as great as FL Studio's free-wheelin' attitude, but better.

I haven't used Hydrogen yet but it seems to be much more than just a drum synth/simulator, such as the ones you referenced as comparison (Studio Drummer, EZDrummer, etc).

Drum machines can mix and compose a variety to samples and synth sounds, these samples can be drum kit sounds but it's not necessary. So you likely only sampled a limited portion of the functionality.

You could also always purchase high quality drum samples and use it with this OSS programs if the built in library sucks. From experience, you could accomplish quite a bit with relatively simple drum machines.

The synth products on the other hand were the thing that was complex and needs to be high quality. Which is likely what you were looking for a drum simulation.

EZDrummer, and the other examples are a different beast. Those are sample based drum plugins. They are made to sound like real acoustic drums. They are great and wonderful.

This is a pastern based drum machine for non-acoustic sounding drums (Usually). So you are comparing two different tools.

EZDrummer actually is a pattern+sample based drum machine like Hydrogen, while Studio Drummer uses pre-recorded audio patterns which could be wonderful to listen to but are very limiting in my opinion, even if played by world class drummers.

> This is a pastern based drum machine for non-acoustic sounding drums (Usually).

The only difference is the set of samples used. Hydrogens sample section, like soft-ROMplers such as NI Battery, has a multi layering method of arranging samples for each instruments according to the played velocity. Actually it offers even more layers than Battery so with the right set of samples it could even sound more realistic.

The only problem is the lack of free real sounding acoustic drum samples as most people don't want to use them in favor of distorted sounds with ton of effects. This is so wrong; a decent sound engineer can get the "industrial" sound out of a jazz acoustic set, but no mixing console god in the world can do the other way around. Never ever ever ever sample drums with effects, always record the samples dry and add effects afterwards when needed.

>> ..only reason I have Windows installed on my private computer

When you say Reaper, you lose me. I have used it for a long time and it's really the most basic of all the DAW alternatives.

Having used both REAPER and Pro Tools professionally, my opinion is that REAPER is not basic at all -- it has every feature I have needed in a DAW, it's easy to use (for me, at least) and performs better than Pro Tools, at a far lower cost. It is one of my favorite pieces of commercial software.

Cost is low but 3rd party ecosystem including plugins is weak. It s like notepad++ of programming editors or winamp of music players. Effective, cheap, non innovative Yet OK.

I've only used Ableton, FL and Reason, so there could be something I'm missing, but doesn't Reaper support vsts? How could the ecosystem for plugins possibly be weak?

VST/3/AU/DX, and it supports scripting your own in JS as well. Unless they're upset about not having LADSPA or Nyquist, I can't imagine what else they'd be referring to that isn't proprietary AVID garbage.

REAPER's feature set is huge, it's also one of the most customizable DAWs I've used. I know this kind of thing is pretty subjective, but even then, there is no way I could possibly call it "basic" compared to the most popular DAWs out there.

It's effective, cheap but non innovative and a me too product. I bet it won't exist in 10 years in DAW business. It's feature set is a "me too" set of everything which exists with minimal innovative features on top.

please don't misunderstand. I have no horse in this race. I like Reaper as much as I liked WinZip , winamp or Notepad++. But I wouldn't say it's enough to keep Windows installed on a private computer.

> I bet it won't exist in 10 years in DAW business.

It's already 11 years old... [0]

> It's feature set is a "me too" set of everything which exists with minimal innovative features on top.

I don't even feel like getting into this, but it looks like the troll is winning: Parameter Modulation, unlimited nesting/grouping/takes. Dynamically create and split audio channels on one track. Mixing of MIDI and Audio in one track. Video editing support. Surround Sound and (more multichannel) mixing. Scriptable with LUA. Includes it's own DSP scripting language (Jesusonic) with hundreds of included (and source available) tools made with it. Great support for odd or rapidly changing time signatures. Rock solid latency compensation (looking at you, Ableton). Ability to undo even after saving (looking at you again, Ableton). Completely theme-able.

Reaper isn't a perfect DAW, none of them are. But it's up there with the rest and has some features others can only dream of.

> But I wouldn't say it's enough to keep Windows installed on a private computer.

Reaper is officially supported on OSX and unofficially supported on Linux. Many VSTs run fine under Wine.

[0] http://www.reaper.fm/download-old.php?ver=0x&skip=100

I m referring to GP comment saying he keeps Windows just for Reaper and you validate my point. And I m talking about the next 10 years obviously. Reaper is a clean, neat, easy to use DAW with many features for beginner and intermediate user. It s a very well written piece of software with a fair price.

Are you really using it for professional work or have seen anyone use it? And what are some features other DAWs can dream of; the ones you counted above?

>Are you really using it for professional work or have seen anyone use it?

Checking in. My side-gig and paid hobby is live production, and Reaper has more than earned it's place in my toolbelt. I've recorded shows produced for sxsw showcases (not to mention two years touring as a FOH guy, and producing for a major political event on the east coast-guess what? I used Reaper for all of them) and made master mixes that ended up on CD's sold by national, headlining bands with Reaper.

I think you are horrendously mischaracterizing and underestimating the tool-and from reading your other comments to people providing you with substantial and verifiable feedback as to the capabilities of the software, extensibility, platform support, feature sets compared to more expensive DAWs, it appears you're doing so deliberately.

> I have used it for a long time and it's really the most basic of all the DAW alternatives.

You clearly haven't. The only possible way there's a shred of truth to this sentence is if you're referring to the included sample-sets/virtual instruments compared to other DAWs, which Reaper doesn't include many of.

you are wrong. I have.

Well that clears that up then doesn't it.

It comes with hundreds of effects, supports scripting, and has a huge library of user add-ons: http://stash.reaper.fm/

You must have a different definition of basic. I've never felt limited by Reaper.

Maybe You have never asked anything beyond basic DAW features. It lacks a live ecosystem and community too.

What do you mean by "live ecosystem?"

Also, have you seen https://www.reddit.com/r/Reaper/

After hearing some oldschool electronica my 9-year old asked me about drum machines. Is there a good kid-friendly one you can recommend for win or android?

How about one in the browser? There are a lot out there, this is just the first one that came up in Google.

http://www.html5drummachine.com/

I played with this one a bit and enjoyed it, as a novice: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mikrosonic... I also got G-Stomper during an Amazon sale although I haven't really played with it at all.

If you search the app store for "808" you'll find a lot of apps. The benefit is the original "real" 808 was relatively simple to use.

Try Figure (originally by Propellerhead). It's not strictly a drum machine but it's fun to explore both from a musical and an user-interface aspect. Available for iOS and Windows.

Caustic is great, a full DAW, cheap iOS, Android, windows (free), macos(free).

This is a browser-based drum machine with two TB-303-like units:

http://errozero.co.uk/acid-machine/

Complete with HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13004621

Check out the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators [0], so much fun to play with. I enjoy messing around with chiptunes on my PO-20 Arcade far more than I ever did in software.

The PO-12 [1] and PO-32 [2] (if you can find one) are the two drum machines in that line up.

[0] https://teenage.engineering/products/po

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzEvGGINE20 (this guy has videos for most of the PO series)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMk8x9fsUQE

cheap hardware (you'll probably want velocity sensitive pads) Teenage Eng Rhythm, Korg KR mini and Volca Beats, the Alesis sr 16/18, Akai makes seemingly dozens of beat makers/sequencer/samplers, others from Arturia, boss, the Roland tr09 recreation, etc.

Also DAW builtins: Ableton live DM's, garage band/Logic Pro drummers, I'm pretty sure FL studio, cubase, bitwig, reaper all have something similar

Adding to the suggestions here, there's another benefit to playing with hardware.

If they start plugging in basic effects pedals, they'll learn about signal flow and signal chains that are relevant to all styles.

There's no fundamental difference between a microphone, a guitar or a drum machine plugging in to a delay pedal. Learning the basics of EQ (bass, mid, low) gets them on the path to studio mastering if they're interested in that side later. If they decide they don't like the creative side, they have the basics to learn live sound tech or sound engineering.

Good luck and have fun :)

> I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, even though I had one of the few soundcards that had drivers for Linux (Edirol FA-101).

I don't know anything about your area, but it sounds like a pre-built Linux image with realtime kernel and maybe some custom driver setup would be useful here. I use LinuxCNC [1] and they provide a super-convenient Linux image that take only a few minutes to get setup and controlling real CNC machines / robots.

[1] http://linuxcnc.org/

There are a number of these targeted at Linux audio production: http://linux-sound.org/distro.html

In fact, any modern PREEMPT enabled Linux can do realtime audio if you enable threadirqs=1 option, as I found out.

Check out LMMS (Let's Make Music). It's like Ableton for Linux and already has VST's like Hydrogen, etc. built into the software itself: https://lmms.io/

LMMS is great for easy EDM composition, but lacks a lot of things essential for a serious workflow.

I'd recommend Ardour for more studio-oriented work: http://ardour.org/

Also, Ardour works with Alsa as backend.

It's actually like FL Studio for Linux as it is pretty much a carbon copy. If you want to draw a direct comparison of "Ableton for Linux" then the logical choice is Bitwig, which is quite frankly "Ableton for Linux" since all of the original Ableton developers left to start Bitwig and the interface is a 100% copy of the original.

Do you know anything on the story of Bitwig vs Ableton? (Google gives me lots of feature comparisons, but not the story.)

edit: http://djtechtools.com/2012/01/12/bitwig-studio-announced-ab...

Ahh, when I last tried it, it was called Linux MultiMedia Studio :)

I like LMMS but the funny thing about it is that some of the essential features (such as extrrnal VSTs) don't work on Linux (unless you set it up on wine, which has it's own issues).

I used LMMS for Windows in Wine for ages. Now using on Ubuntu 16.04 compiled from source linking to libwine. Works fine, I'm not at all clear on what bit of Linux use is supposed to be hard.

Here's an album I made exclusively with LMMS and it's default setup of sounds and plugins:

https://kruhft.bandcamp.com/album/listener

It's a pretty good piece of software.

I'm a happy LMMS user of many years, but "It's like Ableton" is somewhere between wrong and not-even-wrong. It doesn't have anything like the feature set nor the basic paradigm of Ableton, and anyone trying LMMS on this basis will be seriously disappointed.

The actual comparison is FL Studio - because LMMS started as a cheap-and-cheerful open source clone of FruityLoops, to the point where many FL Studio how-tos (particularly for the 3x Oscillator, sorry Triple Oscillator) also work for LMMS.

LMMS also imports pretty well from Hydrogen, apparently.

LMMS plus points: it costs $0, and it's open source! Minus point: it has only volunteer developers, who come and go; there's no support organisation.

LMMS is very easy to get started on and it's lots of fun. The Woolworths guitar of disco; cheap, cheerful, inadequate and readily available.

[The Woolworths guitar was cheap and helped punk rock along greatly; Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks had one that he'd basically beaten to a plank.]

For anyone interested in checking the state of Linux and Free/OS software for music making I strongly recommend checking out: http://libremusicproduction.com/

There have been great improvements on the latest years in regard to plugin availability and support for professional workflows/devices that might be overlooked.

It's great on the pi3 runs well in arm. It's nice this isn't abandonware a lot of the open source projects for Linux audio became abandonware.

Yeah, the number of single developer projects combined with developer attrition has certainly orphaned a ton of linux-audio projects.

It would be nice if Ubuntu pruned dead / barely working products from their repos. There's an astonishing number of frustratingly bad audio apps in their main repo.

I'd say that's part of their issue, the other side is that they don't seem to track the development of projects all that well. In some cases this simply is shipping old versions with known and long fixed bugs and in other cases they miss the evolution of various projects as maintainers change over. The latter case includes some abandoned/nearly-abandoned standalone tools getting converted to plugins (generally LV2) and receiving more active development.

More active package repositories such as kxstudio seem to resolve at least some of this friction.

I think this has to with community. The Arch community moves pretty fast and forces users to go look up packages online and comment/vote on their state which results in packages being both promoted to default repos and getting thrown out of the default repos.

Do you happen to have a good reference on using the Pi3 for audio? I spent a lot of Saturday trying to make mine do some stuff, and while a lot of the technical snafus were the usual sort, I did end up burning a lot of time googling around until I finally found someone who suggested turning off CPU performance scaling. Which was a forehead slap moment for me after that, but, still, it'd be nice if there was somewhere I could go that had that stuff more laid out.

(As implied, I've googled already. A lot.)

(The Pi3 seems to have more than enough CPU power for it to do what I want but I was having trouble just routing audio in a USB mic straight out to the speakers without dropouts and failures two or three times a second, even though the CPU is barely at 10%. I think turning off the scaling seemed to fix that, though I ran out of time just as I tried that to be sure.)

You may want to check out some of the posts at https://autostatic.com/ and the forums for zynthian https://discourse.zynthian.org/ . If memory serves both sites focused on some of the version 2 revisions of the Pi, but they may also help with your board as well.

Thank you. Using those with site: in Google has produced some interesting hints.

I used Hydrogen a few years ago to build a tutorial of [doumbek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_drum) patterns. It was too difficult to get it to sound like a human was drumming, but for teaching the basic patterns and getting the timing exactly right, it was pretty good.

For full av more fully featured Linux sequencer I'd recommend Renoise. It's a tracker (and is not floss), but is super impressive.

Renoise is great, especially for breakbeat/jungle drum programming. Just load up your break of choice, put in some slice markers (or play it with offset commands like on old trackers), and you're set.

I do find the pattern-based workflow a bit of a productivity killer though (I usually get stuck on perfecting the same 8/16 bar loop).

Here's an example of an album I made with ReNoise and it's default sounds/plugin set:

http://kruhft.bandcamp.com/album/macro-2

All of it is mixed, played and recorded'live' with the pre-programmed tracks being mixed using an offboard midi controller.

Just to add a bit to this:

Renoise is really rock solid, fast, light-weight, powerful, Lua-scriptable, and really cheap compared to your typical commercial DAW, like Bitwig. I think I paid less than $80 for Renoise, compared to about $400 for Bitwig.

The tracker paradigm is very different to the piano-roll paradigm that most other DAWs use. If you can get used to the tracker way of doing things, which is very keyboard-centric (kind of like vim and emacs), then you could be very productive, if not you might be better off with a traditional DAW.

Finally, trackers are usually used for making electronic music, and might not be the best fit for other types of music, or for making or editing long recordings. You might be better off with something like Ardour or Bitwig for that.

The interface reminds me a lot of FL Studio (which I currently use on Ubuntu via Wine, works great). Hydrogen looks interesting, but I think most DAWs simply have almost all of these features and far more. That being said, this looks to be FOSS, which I really admire. I'll have to check this out after work.

Most DAWS might have drum machines but most serious users end up using a third party product. The built-in ones are undeniably good but thinks like Kontact/EZDrummer etc. are on another level.

Never used Kontact or EZ Drummer, but seems like it would be hard to beat Ableton Live Suite's combo of drumracks and stacking effects per drum sample... Do you have experience with both? Any reason I should look into the former when I've invested in the latter?

edit: Nevermind, after looking at Native's offering (Kontact), I can see it has a lot of advantages for a certain kind of music, but that isn't the music I'm writing...

Kontakt is pretty cool, not just for drum machines but any samples. For example, the NI orchestra samples are absolutely amazing. For drums it's just another sampler, you're probably better off sticking with Drum Rack unless you want the specific samples offer d by Kontakt.

I use Ableton and Logic and their built-in drum software often. They're both very good. When you want to program super real sounding drums EZDrummer and especially Kontact are unbeatable (and as another comment mentioned Kontact has libraries for much more than just drums). For me the reason I like contact is that the mixing interface for each element in the kit is really easy to use and tweak. Besides that the samples are phenomenal. Another option that may be more relevant to you is NI Battery [0]. Personally I just like to experiment with different options as I find that the simple fact of working in a different UI will result in different creative output.

[0] https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/drum...

Thanks for the comment- I was hoping to hear about why you prefer using a 3rd party drum machine in a DAW. For the time being, I record or find all of my samples so I'm not particularly attracted to the kits. The interface looks great however. I probably won't use it anytime soon, but it does appear to be quite powerful.

Battery would be a closer competitor to Ableton's Drum Rack. It also included gigs of samples from 808, 909 to heavily processed sounds and percussion. The included samples are about equal in quality to Ableton's, but Battery includes built-in FX and routing for each sample. So you no longer need to add a compressor to each sample, and an EQ, etc. It's already there, as well as effects like emulations of older sampler hardware. The downside to Battery being that it's more cumbersome to add effects which aren't already included (you need to route them to a separate output, and depending on your DAW process it on a new track).

Geist2 and Nerve are some other closer commercial quality alternatives, though I don't have firsthand experience with them. Ableton's Drum Rack is really fantastic though, and also pro quality.

Kontakt is a different beast. It includes it's own scripting engine and can easily create multi-sample instruments with different randomly chosen samples or samples chosen based on velocity or note (or both). You would use Kontakt to create a realistic sounding drum kit, or piano, etc. Things that you don't want to sound sampled. EZDrummer / Superior Drummer are similar, but specific to drumkits and you can only play with the included packs/sounds.

Been using this for a couple of years, synchronized with Ardour DAW through the JACK sound server.

Works great.

Only I hear cracking sound at the end of every beat? Removing pulseaudio helps to shorten it but not completely eliminates.

Pulse/alsa/jack shenanigans make audio production the only thing I still use MacOS for.

^ This.

Pulseaudio should not even be involved, as the program do not require it. But then it keeps inserting itself into the "conversation" by hijacking any connection to and from Alsa...

If it's doing that, you might want to check your ~/.asoundrc, which might be specifying pulse as the default ALSA device.

Do you use an audio interface? What have you found is supported well by Linux? Saffire Pro 24 + Addictive Drums + Logic is what is really keeping me tied to macOS at home.

Define "removing". Pulseaudio is a hard beast to put down.

apt remove pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils then reboot, not really that hard.

That's fine until you install anything, then it gets pulled back in.

Tame the beast with Cadence: http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Applications:Cadence

This control panel app includes support for a PulseAudio-to-JACK bridge, which makes (if I remember correctly) PulseAudio a wireable source and sink in the connection graph while the server is running.

This brings me way back. I used to play drums, and I used Hydrogen to help with drums patterns practice. I translated the manual and tutorial in French back in 2004, and 13 years later my name is still there in the changelog :)

Beta versions work on Windows too, although they're a little buggy.

This has pretty much been the standard-issue software for composing and distributing drum patterns for Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Society drum crews for years - amused to see it crop up here :)

I've made a bunch of stuff with Hydrogen. I really like it and it's more stable (as in, does not crash all the time) than it used to be. It has its limitations, but in general I am easily able to create the sounds I want with it.

If you like this, then take a look at https://www.dyne.org/software/dynebolic/ (probably a bit old now) or the Ubuntu Studio distro https://ubuntustudio.org/ that have a lot of Linux based DAW and multimedia creation applications.

I have heard a lot of good stuff about DrumGizmo[0] lately, it has a very active development as well. Havent had the oppurtunity to try it out yet. But I have recently heard people moving from Hydrogen to DrumGizmo.

[0]: http://www.drumgizmo.org/wiki/

I've checked out Hydrogen a few times, but have been turned off by clunkiness in the UI each time. I'd rather use an web based one for quick one offs or just boot up my DAW for something more in depth.

That said, it's a nice little tool if you're not willing to shell out for a DAW.

The typical workflow for Hydrogen is to turn a whole desktop session into your DAW, building it from the ground up with your own selection of tools.

I've dreamed of doing something like that for awhile, but at the end of the day it's almost always easier to just reach for a self-contained DAW.

That's the idea of Non: http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?page=Non%20DAW

Separating each part of the composition process with specific applications.

Does anyone know if it Hydrogen can be controlled via api/commandline? I would like to try generating patterns with machine learning.

It's not precisely your desire/use-case, but that sounds vaguely like you might like some of the programmatic sound generation systems out there:

Overtone - http://overtone.github.io/ Tidal - https://tidalcycles.org/

Perhaps those might be hooked into something you're already building?

Thanks! I'm aware of super collider and it is cool. However i'm not interested in real-time. I have been generating midi patterns and rendering audio server-side over many hours. I've started hand rolling a system to play drum samples from generated patterns. It would be nice if i could find something already built.

Maybe a music-oriented programming language like Chuck, Supercollider, or Pd?

I would recommend looking at Pd (Pure Data), which, imho, is the open source version of Max/MSP, a very popular graphical programming language used for music composition as well as the creation of audio applications.

All kinds of sound-generating software you can control using midi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

Agreed. The hard part for me is finding software that runs serverside on linux. I have been using https://github.com/teragonaudio/MrsWatson which is really good

Good stuff here, and nice to see an OSS GUI application with a good UI/UX for a change.

Works perfectly in macOS Sierra

Landing page == news feed -> nope

everyone on Instagram puts music tracks to their videos. they could be ironing their clothes but they will attack a hip-hop track our country music tune and get 10000 views quickly

why is this on HN? Hydrogen has been around for ages no?

bump for Tidal if you're looking for interesting ways to arrange sample playback: https://tidalcycles.org/

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