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Comment by temporallobe | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who is serious about audio would not seriously consider the *nix environment, except, of course for macOS. I have read many blog posts about people who have successfully gotten Ardour to work on Ubuntu (and variants) but this was after an unreasonable amount of patching and troubleshooting. I’m a busy professional with very little time for my music and audio production hobbies, and I want to spend zero time on diagnosing issues. Inspiration is a harsh mistress and does not wait around for me to finish installing some obscure library, or worse, compiling it from source.

The biggest hurdle is with hardware. If you need low-latency, high-performance interfaces, you absolutely a need tightly integrated hardware/software stack - think something like Universal Audio’s Luna system. You simply cannot make that kind of tight integration work outside of macOS.

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Ubuntu Studio just works, and it’s way more stable for my workloads than windows. Debugging windows broken and slow midi support was just too painful.

It really depends on what someone is doing. Ubuntu went off the rails years ago, and I would default to recommending OSX, but as someone who uses all three, Linux has been the least painful for me.

I think the Linux-audio naysayers just don't have the experience with professional audio that they think they do.

Once you get UbuntuStudio installed, out of the box - it just plain works, and is bundled with SO MANY GREAT THINGS. I once installed UbuntuStudio alongside a friend of mine in the pro studio, who had just gotten a new Mac.

I was up and running and working on projects within 20 minutes from a fresh install - he was still hassling with UAD licenses and dongles, a week later.

Seriously people, if you think you are an audio professional, and haven't yet had a dive into kxStudio or UbuntuStudio on a spare machine, you are missing one of the greatest parties in the audio world right now.

And then, if you want to get REALLY sophisticated, as an audio professional, you NEED to dig into - and most important of all, understand - what is going on with the Zynthian folks.

http://zynthian.org/

This is the future of audio - not just for DAW's, but embedded audio devices, too. When you grok what Zynthian is, and how it works, and what it is doing, you will change your mind about everything you think you know about audio on Linux.

(Hint: it takes the extremely powerful Linux Audio/DAW software ecosystem, wraps it in a functional and simple UI, and exposes EVERYTHING in the Linux Audio world to the musician .. from synths to FX units to MIDI processing and generators and beyond. Simply a massive leap forward for audio professionals...)

I think this is a filter bubble thing. Considering the difference in the time of the posts, I'd say the user base that was previously commenting was mainly from the USA where Apple is king and has its own bubble. Around the world it might be different.

A lot of it has to do with the perceived elite nature of the MacOS platform for Audio/Video in comparison with other systems.. and its true, Apple have prioritized audio/video on their devices for decades - see for example, iOS versus Android audio thread priorities, which until recently were very much in Apples favour.

The trouble is, most "audio pro's" don't really have the technical chops to understand why this is the case with MacOS, nor why Linux represents a parallel advance in audio processing technology. You can do things with Linux audio that are impossible with MacOS, due to its general-purpose nature - but MacOS still provides great value to the consumer, not just professionals.

The great thing about Linux audio is that the devs pushing it forward don't have any of the constraints that the MacOS/iOS folks have to work under. This gets mis-underestimated by audio pro's, imho.

But with things like kxStudio and UbuntuStudio and Zynthian out there, this is going to change radically. I think the audio world is in for some very big upheavals in terms of Linux adoption over the next few years .. but I have all of these systems operational in my pro studio, and have poked these beasts multiple times. Linux rules for audio, and hardly anyone knows .. thats another kind of elite realm left to be explored by the curious and adventurous.

Great points, thanks for the insights.

I am actually somewhat aware of UbuntuStudio and its related technologies, and one of these days I will take a week or so to set up a spare machine. My original point was more about hardware than anything else. I do not think (please prove me wrong) that there is any DAW/hardware solution that actually offers true zero-latency monitoring (and I don’t mean direct hardware monitoring, which has been around for decades, I mean true analog-like near-zero latency monitoring of your input channels with effects, synced with your playback tracks) other than UA’s Luna system which was just released last year. I don’t mean to sound like a UA shill, but this (ARM - Accelerated Realtime Monitoring) is a brand new unprecedented technology that has and will revolutionize audio production. The caveat is that it only works with macOS - even though the Luna system is available with Windows, ARM is not and likely never will be. This can only work because of the extremely tight hardware/software integration and thunderbolt connectivity. Does UbuntuStudio or or anything in the *nix realm offer anything like this? I’m not just being oppositional - I am just truly unaware of an equivalent.

you are clearly very passionate about this subject. breathlessness aside ("if you think you are an audio professional...", "you _NEED_ to dig...", and implying that the massive amount of audio professionals who don't use linux are somehow out of touch with their actual level of experience (your first sentence - not sure if that's what you meant to imply)) -

zynthian has a nice website. it seems like a cool idea and I'm sure it has some great use cases. it's still a kit which strikes me as not pro-level.

more concerning is that it appears to have what I would call completely unusable issues regarding latency and jitter (5-20ms of latency is unusable for realtime audio), can you comment on this? how about jitter? what is your experience with it (and if you have any, what are your use cases?)

searching the internet for solutions here seems to show a lot of unresolved issues. I see the developers asking users to file GitHub issues as recently as a couple of months ago. I know very few audio professionals who are going to want to use something with this degree of maintenance / instability / unreliability.

how would you describe the ease with which you can interface the tools you describe with outboard gear using USB or MIDI e.g. audio interfaces, mixers, synthesizers, etc, compared to the apple ecosystem? which tends to be quite plug & play. one reason why it is so widely used.

I think audio pro's who spend the time complaining about tools that are known, outside their sphere of influence, to work quite well - simply aren't professional enough to admit when they haven't learned enough to get similar results as others, who are .. and UbuntuStudio has had decades, literally, to become that kind of tool. It is used by pro's all over the world to supplant what would otherwise have been a significant financial investment.

It is free, after all, and yet out of the box comes replete with tons of stuff that you'd have to spend, literally, a week getting installed on MacOS/Windows, dealing with licenses, etc.

Zynthian: The latency is really not noticeable - I have a 12 track multi-timbral project running on it right now, it sounds just as rock solid and tight as the 3 rows of 19" rack synths/effects and the half-a-room full of other hardware synths in my studio. It is an extremely capable little box, and its built around existing Linux audio technology - so the point is, it serves as a pretty good reference for how good things can get. Jitter? Haven't noticed it.

Zynthian integrates with all the DAW's in my studio, including UA and MacOS systems, just fine. Its a dream to be able to set it up for remote control over rtpMIDI, for example, and not have to run any cables.

Github issues are a professional way to interact with developers. If I had 2c for every time I heard someone complain about the support they -didn't- receive from Apple because of bugs in Logic, or crashes that Steinberg/Yamaha refuse to fix, or updates to Ableton Live that resulted in unusable projects .. I'd have enough to afford a decent UAD system .. ;)

On the other hand, if you look at the closed issues in the Zynthian github, you'll see so many successful contributions from around the world, making the Zynthian a better product. This is the future.

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