But whenever someone new comes along who doesn't care what they use to track vocals or backing tracks of whatever, I put them in front of the Ubuntu Studio DAW, leave them alone for a few hours to get their tracking done, and always find its very productive. It holds its own against the other DAW's that are in production as well (MacBooks with REAPER).
The thing that has to be understood is that Ubuntu Studio is designed for 'out of the box' production - you have everything installed that is needed to get started, and if you have good audio hardware (for this system we standardised on PRESONUS, as it is very well supported under Linux) - you can compete with Pro Tools systems, easily. The latency is among the best of the DAW's in the studio, and while its fair to say that the software packages available are not as polished as the commercial offerings, its still an amazing system full of tools to explore and use - thousands of plugins, soft synths and instruments, tons of unique apps that, once you get involved, will give you great capabilities, e.g., seq24, hydrogen, zynaddsubfx = instant jam party, once you get it configured with aconnectgui/Carla, of course..)
Its really worth taking a weekend, installing Ubuntu Studio somewhere, and going through the packages that have been included. They are deep, powerful, and most of all - free and open source. I can't tell you how great it was to have a reverb plugin open and in use, get asked a simple "how does reverb code work?", then bust out the sources and have a look for ourselves .. can't do that with any other DAW, and yet Ubuntu Studio is packed with apps that really work. Having the sources for everything is just astonishing in terms of what it offers the competent producer or engineer in understanding what's going on.
I've used it to slice up tons of live recordings, mix multitrack audio, clean up, remove background noise, dub aging tape reels to digital, add some post-production effects to music tracks, and teach my dad how to use free software to do some of the same stuff. Some of the work was for broadcast and digital retail.
My most frequent use in the past couple years has been to time stretch a random track once in awhile and listen to it in a completely different light e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZJyxQjdib0
"Complete garbage" seems harsh to me!
Audacity has the dubious distinction of being the only software that, to my knowledge, has directly caused me physical pain and harm. You see, unlike every other application on the planet, the volume slider in Audacity does not control Audacity’s playback volume. Instead, it controls the system volume (why?). Normally I keep my system playback volume at a safe level but Audacity has, on a few occasions, sabotaged my efforts and hurt my ears in the process.
Then there’s the weird way in with Audacity is designed. It seems like it can’t decide whether it’s supposed to be a DAW or an audio editor, and it ends up being terrible at both. Audacity treats audio files as “projects”. If you are just doing some simple editing, then you probably don’t want to save your work as an Audacity project, you probably want to open a PCM file and save your work as PCM files. Audacity steps in your way at every moment, asking you what format you want to convert to, asking you to add tags, converting your file to 32-bit float without asking (even though Audacity supports 16-bit and 24-bit tracks), and then after you save your work, it asks you if you want to lose your work (because Audacity doesn’t think you’ve saved your work unless you save the project).
A normal task I might have for audio editing is to open up a file, do some basic processing, cut it up, and save the pieces. Audacity lacks basic commands like “copy as new file” or “paste as new file”.
So Audacity has taken a simple task which I may need to do over and over again for an hour at a time, and it adds extra steps which are completely ridiculous and unnecessary.
Another simple task is recording a clip of audio. For various reasons, I often record at 48kHz. In Audacity, you can’t change the rate before you record, because the track doesn’t exist yet. So you start recording audio, stop, change the rate through a fiddly little drop-down menu two layers deep. If you want to record from the second input, you CAN’T DO THAT AT ALL, you have to record from both inputs and then delete one of the channels afterwards (why??????????)
There are also a ton of other minor problems floating around—Audacity freezes while you hit “preview” in a filter until the sound is done playing. This is a real double whammy, a real one-two punch, if you remember that Audacity may have decided to usurp control of the system playback volume from the user (again, why? other apps don’t do this).
Then there’s all that effort that Audacity makes to try and be a DAW, but it doesn’t work very well, and it mostly gets in the way of whatever real work you want to be doing. It seems to have the user interface of a non-destructive editor but without actually providing non-destructive editing.
As a final note, Audacity is prone to crashing. A lot. I opened the latest version of Audacity when writing this comment, and in that short time, Audacity has crashed. This matches my memories of it from 10-15 years ago, because Audacity crashed back then, too.
God, I really fucking hate Audacity.
Perhaps the slider works differently on Linux with its sound subsystem, or maybe this was an issue with older versions of Audacity. Googlign does suggest that the Audio host option on the toolbar, if the "wrong" one is selected, could result in the system volume being directly modified by the slider (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/device_toolbar.html)
Anyways, maybe just look into that. In my experience people prefer to whine and whinge rather than solve their problems. Take that as an insult if you want (not intended), but if it helps resolve this issue for you then I don't mind.
Honestly, Audacity is just such an all-around nightmare that I don’t think fixing one or two problems would make a difference anyway.
However, sometimes I am stuck doing audio work on Linux or Windows, or on a system which is not my own.
Does this statement include your assessment of Bitwig (https://www.bitwig.com/en/home.html)? The company was founded by former Ableton employees and the software is supposed to run on Linux machines...
iZotope RX is meant more for audio restoration (and is the industry standard there), but you can also use it for many audio editing tasks.
I've personally switched to Acustica by Acon Digital. The GUI isn't perfect, but it's very fast, and has an impressive audio separation tool based on Spleeter.
All those tools seem to have taken some influence from that Cool Edit Pro GUI.
I used to love that program for its simplicity. I will cast my vote for ocenaudio as the fastest, most intuitive audio editor for basic tasks (and it does a great job with batch jobs, too, like running the same noise reduction on 10 clips at the same time).
Anyways, since you seem to know PD, which Radium has embedded as they write, maybe you want to try it?
ocenaudio is probably the direct competitor to Audacity, since they’re both free.