Bitwig looks really promising. But how is the VST landscape? Is it even supported?
EDIT: sorry, my question was about whether Linux supports VST. I would assume that Bitwig did at v0.1 :-)
EDIT: sorry, my question was about whether Linux supports VST. I would assume that Bitwig did at v0.1 :-)
Bitwig is quite similar to Ableton in terms of capabilities, I never tried this myself, but there seems to be a way (assuming you want Windows VSTs on Linux) https://answers.bitwig.com/questions/624/vst-windows-on-linu...
I am perfectly happy with the built-in stuff however. Because of bitwigs extremely strong modulation engine the standard effects are probably the most powerful and expressive ones out there.
The software itself works well, it's really great, but with VSTs it's quite tricky. I got a couple to work that explicitly support linux, but for example Serum I couldn't get to work properly.
Recently I decided that it's not work all the hassle, and setup a windows computer again. I want as little friction as possible, because the process of making electronic music is already hard enough by itself.
I found it a pain to set up in the first place, and it's hit-and-miss which plugins work in it, but once up and running it actually works smoothly enough, in my experience. (Larger, more complicated VSTs seem correspondingly less likely to work. Of ones that don't immediately work, some can be massaged into working with some tweaking of your wine setup. There's a webpage somewhere with a list of what plugins are known to work and what you need to do to get them to work.)
There are other ways of running windows-based VSTs, but that's the one I'm familiar with.
You can absolutely make VSTs for Linux, but I imagine that very few people do.