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Comment by xriddle | Hacker News Reader

Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.

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If you want a DAW that is similar to Ableton and works on Linux, you should go with Bitwig, which is in some ways better and more modern than Ableton, but has a smaller user base.

Reaper is also worth checking out too - but it doesn't have clips/scenes, which Bitwig does. Bitwig is well thought through, though they have some improvements to be made around the ergonomics of integrating with hardware instruments.

I have actually found the clip/scene feature in Bitwig to be better than the equivalent feature in Ableton. In Bitwig I can set the DAW to record a set number of bars for each clip and then start looping immediately after recording finishes, which is my perfect workflow for building a track. With Ableton I was not able to do this, and instead I would be required to hit 'stop' and then manually crop the clip by changing its length.

I'm pretty sure that you can do this with a Push using a fixed length clip. https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/how-to-capture-the-p...

Can you not do it without the Push?

This is one of the huge blind areas of Ableton, and one that they chose not to address in 11. You do have to use the Push to launch clips of a specified length in live performance. There have been very complicated workarounds built by third parties (BinkLooper). I have wondered if this is all a ploy to force people to buy the expensive Push. At any rate, it has definitely kept me from buying Ableton. It is regarded as a live performance tool by many but the lack of this feature, which they could easily add, makes that regard incorrect.

I sort of agree with you, but Push is awesome and totally worth the cost in my opinion.

Even with a Push, there are a couple of WTF omissions that I would have thought would be easy to add, but I assume every DAW will have a few of those.

Lots of people use it Live, mostly negating your argument that the lack of this specific feature makes Ableton unusable live. Actually, is there an alternative DAW that is used live more than Ableton? I would guess the answer to that is "no".

What does “modern” mean?

There is nothing remotely close in the OSS world. You might find you prefer a different DAW, workflow-wise, but Ableton is A+ at what it does.

The free software DAW is ardour. https://www.ardour.org/ Unfa has made some youtube videos about (and with) it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYKj_peyESIMDp5LtHlH2A It does not offer the same possibilities of workflow though, as far as I can see.

It's works well for arranging, but doesn't have a scene/clip/looping workflow (yet).

I think it would be more accurate to say "it offers a different workflow".

Ardour is modelled on "traditional" "linear" DAWs, rather than the live "play this thing when i hit this" flow that Live has enabled so wonderfully. Not sure you'd want to use Live for large scale multi-tracking, movie post-production. Both will work for smaller scale "traditional" record-edit-mix workflows.

Heeey, glad you asked!

I'm not full-time on this, but I'm trying to build an OSS DAW. Here is a first tiny demo: https://timdaub.github.io/wasm-synth/

I also wrote about it: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/02/19/wasm-synth/

I'm not sure what you think a DAW is, but typically it tends to involve the possibility of dealing with large numbers of tracks and vast amounts of audio. How do you propose to do this in a browser context?

At this point I don't propose any design. But I'm confident it can be done.

You seem to know the challenges ahead. Mind sharing?

https://ardour.org/

Just had a lot of fun playing this! Thanks for sharing. I've been working on a wavetable synth VST, but also have been looking at web APIs to do something similar to this. Thanks for the write up.

Hey thanks! I was actually experimenting with web GL to build a similar instrument as Ableton's wave table! But I'm not full time, so it's taking forever...

I know how that goes, best of luck!

Radium is worth a try: http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/index.php

Nah, FOSS DAWs don’t even come close. Your friends are exactly right.

Depending on your use-case there are a lot of options to consider before investing in a professional solution like Ableton Live.

- LMMS[1]: The go-to cross-platform FOSS DAW solution, with VST support and a healthy community.

- Ardour[2]: Much like LLMS, it's a classic Open Source project that runs cross-platform and is quite fully-featured.

- VCVRack[3]: A brilliant FOSS EuroRack Simulator. It has a built-in package manager with an enormous selection of officially supported and community submitted plugins, complete with VST and Linux support.

- Waveform Free[4]: By Tracktion, Waveform is a robust DAW with VST sandboxing and great built-in FX.

- Audio Tool[5]: A great web-based DAW, featuring online collaboration. Last I checked, there was no VST support.

- Bandlab[6]: Another web-based DAW by the folks behind Cakewalk. While it lacks VST support, it offers online collaboration and straight-forward defaults.

If you like scripting, Reaper[7] offers a personal license for $60 and supports Lua, Python, EEL2/JSFX, and it's own ReaScript[8]. Reaper offers a highly customizable, robust solution for power-users. While the above projects are some of the more complete projects, there are many more scattered around Github. If you're interested in the more niche/experimental ones, let me know and I'll reply with my more comprehensive list.

That being said, I've been an Ableton Live user for over a decade and I recommend it for anyone who wants to invest into a more serious music project. These days, I tend to reach for Studio One[9] by Presonus for more involved projects. While it lacks the focus on live performance, it is more feature-complete DAW than Ableton. Studio One doesn't have the same friction-less workflow that Ableton is famous for, but it's an absolute powerhouse when mastered. It's very well funded and one of the youngest, so Presonus had the opportunity to adopt the best features of more dated solutions like Cubase, Logic, Pro-Tools, and Ableton, while stripping away a lot of the bloat.

[1] https://lmms.io/ [2] https://ardour.org/ [3] https://vcvrack.com/ [4] https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free [5] https://www.audiotool.com [6] https://www.bandlab.com/ [7] https://www.reaper.fm [8] https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/reascript/reascript.php [9] https://www.presonus.com/products/studio-one/

Do you have a recommendation for someone on Linux interested in producing EDM/House that has zero prior experience/equipment?

I have Reaper and Ardour, but a friend suggested Bitwig.

It's not really about the musical style, but about your desired workflow.

For example, Ardour really isn't designed around the sort of workflows that many people use for EDM/House production, yet it still has a reasonable number of prolific users who use it for precisely that style. Needless to say, the way they work is fairly different than someone using Bitwig or Live.

If you buy hardware they usually throw in software for free. I bought a usb-c audio interface and it came with cubase, and my midi controller came with ableton. They are light versions but they get the job done. It's enough that you can at least compare DAWs.

It's not free but I like to plug renoise whenever I can. It's more of a tracker than a traditional DAW, scriptable in lua. If you are a programmer you might like trackers.

Try Ardour. Open source and works great on Linux

https://ardour.org/

Neither Bitwig nor Reaper is open-source.

"worthy open-sourced competitor to Ableton" is a very tall order, but if we're just looking at open source DAWs, a friend pointed out this one to me recently. https://lmms.io/

DAWs, especially ones like ableton, are one of those types of software where they aren't that difficult on paper but the entropy of one is high enough you need a team of people to get going in the first place

What makes them not difficult? I have coded a small synthesizer with midi input some time ago and I thougt the real time audio processing was pretty challenging. There needs to be almost no latency.

An entire DAW will be much more complex.

That's not the history of Ardour, really. You do need a team of people, however, if you want to make reasonable progress.

Also, I think any "on paper" description of a DAW that makes it appear that they "aren't that difficult" can just be ignored.

And do any of them have hidpi support? When I tried, it ended up being impossible to use for example lmms on an 200 dpi screen

free but not opensource:

Cakewalk, MPC Beats, Tracktion Waveform,...

Usually Live Lite the free edition (8 tracks) is bundled with $50 MIDI keyboards, and is sufficient to get started with music production, recording and adding a few virtual instruments at least.

Have you tried the Lite version? I don't have keys right now but they come with hardware all the time and I already have a Suite licence. On the Ableton subreddit sometimes there's giveaways.

It's kind of like a gateway drug, because you can do a lot of stuff on the Lite version but all the "fun" things like all the bundled instruments and effects that let you use it like a modular synth or the scripting and automation goodness come only on the more expensive version.

> Not to thread-jack

Not thread-jacking at all. I ALWAYS want a sub-thread on open-sourced competitors to any product.

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