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Comment by fuball63 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a musician and Linux user, so I have to lean on open source for recording and production. I use Kdenlive to do basic video creation; background music to a picture. It works really well for my purposes, in fact, I've had much fewer problems with kdenlive than with Audacity or Inkscape. Inkscape locks up my entire machine (AMD card most likely to blame) and I can't get through a recording project without Audacity crashing (been using it for years with different machines/configs, never had good luck).

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If you're working on recording projects on linux, why the heck are you using Audacity? Seriously, save yourself a lot of headaches with Ardour.

Ardour++

life changing when I started using that for multitrack recordings..

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.

Reaper is also available on Linux now! It's my go to. Not free, but has an unlimited trial. If you decide to buy it, the $60 license is practically a steal.

Reaper is amazing. Take your projects with on win/Mac/nix for $60

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try.

I've tried using Ardour, but I've never been able to get it to work with my USB Snowball mic. It starts with audio out, but once I configure my mic, it's input only and I have to restart the program to hear anything I've done. No other program I've used has ever behaved like this. I'm sure it has terrific features, but it'd be great if they could nail the simple out-of-the-box configuration.

If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word.

Ardour works fine with an Audio Technica AT2100 USB (I tried it and can verify that it uses the standard USB host drivers without complaint) for both I/O and works out-of-the-box with most of my audio interfaces and an XLR mic.

> If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word.

My 2¢: Based on my experience with podcasters, I wouldn't recommend a Snowball for beginners doing spoken-word recordings. This is a "worse is better" scenario where a cheap dynamic will give you better out-of-the-box results than a condenser mic like the Snowball, in part because it forces speakers to get closer to the mic (increasing the ratio of signal to ambient noise), and in part because dynamics usually can't record anything over ~15 kHz (spoken word tops out around 8 kHz).

A Snowball is fine for folks savvy enough to use an EQ to roll off everything over, say, 10 kHz during production.

I wouldn't recommend one either, to be clear. ;) My recommendation for a podcaster is either the AT2005USB or ATR2100USB, which are both decent-quality cheap dynamic microphones that have a USB sound card inside of them for easier real-time monitoring (but can both be used as XLR mics later if you expand). What I meant was that Blue is positioning it as that entry level podcast microphone. Which is, in its way, weird; it's a really strange microphone to try to work with and it just looks silly.

I alternate between an sE V7 dynamic, a Blue Encore 200 "active dynamic", and an AT2035 at my desk for recordings. The Blue is something I'm just testing but the other two microphones are great for different things. (Anyone who hasn't checked out a sE V7 should; for my money it's the best thing in the "SM58 range" of dynamics, with a really clear sound for a dynamic. And the damned thing won't roll off your desk if you have it handheld...)

That's because the device is input only. By default Ardour uses the same device for capture and monitoring. The reason is that different audio devices have their own internal clocks, and using more than one devices introduces clock drift.

You get around this be setting JACK to use the snowball device for capture only (and by doing so you are using its clock) and then attach whatever device you are using for monitoring as a JACK client using zita_j2a from the zita-ajbridge tools package.

That makes a lot of sense. Speaking for the "hobbyists" out there, it'd be great to have that as an option in Ardour itself and not have to fiddle with setting up client/server/bridges just to plug in a microphone (which seems like a really common use-case!). FWIW I don't even need live monitoring where latency matters -- I just want to record, then stop recording, then play it back and edit it.

I do know that programs like Adobe Audition on Windows offer that in a plug-and-play way.

The only way to handle JACK I've found which wasn't PITA is by using Cadence and Catarina from KXStudio which are nice GUIs to manage JACK server. However, there is "but": because I use Debian, it was a lot of tinkering with apt-pinning and getting one very old lib (can't remember which one though) which is used in Ubuntu since 12.04 to build Ardour with.

They didn't give enough details on their musical process. I'm an Ardour user, but sometimes audacity is the right tool for the job. Depends on what you need.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.

i personally highly recommend using bitwig studio or renoise if you can get your hands on either. they run wonderfully well on Linux and are extremely powerful environments for music production. renoise is a tracker more so than a traditional daw and as such requires a bit of a shift in how you approach it but otherwise it's quite lovely and not super expensive. bitwig on the other hand is a more fully featured daw and as such carries a price tag to match but it's definitely worth checking out.

if price is a problem there are several other environments on Linux for composing and producing. even something as simple as lmms can be made very powerful. you can also build drum patterns with hydrogen. you can use stuff like openmuse to score music, you can download some decent soundfonts (fatboy is good, timbres of heaven is amazing) to get more juice out of your midi, etc. then if you're into generative music there's stuff like supercollider and puredata, or dsl's like sonic pi for ruby and overtone for clojure that can drive the supercollider synth. or there's even languages like chuck, all sorts of interesting possibilities for audio.

anyway i guess my thesis point is there is always a way to get it done, as long as you keep at it (which it seems like you indeed have been doing so ^5)

Renoise is absolutely wonderful. I've bought it, use it all the time, and can heartily recommend it.

But it's not an Ardour replacement. Some of their features overlap, but you can't do things like record long clips of audio in Renoise, while that's a core feature in Ardour.

Also, the workflow for Renoise is just not something most people are used to or will want to spend the time adjusting to -- though I certainly encourage them to give it a chance, as it's great alternative to the mouse-oriented piano roll workflow in traditional DAWs.

So I think for most Linux users, Ardour is going to probably be the DAW that they're most used to and the one most appropriate for recording and manipulating audio for screencasts and videos, with Renoise unfortunately relegated just to music production by tracker fans.

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