Hacker News Reader

Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

Yes but readers may be reading and think that Linux isn’t capable. It is. There’s plenty of DAWs available. You can also use WINE with proton to run FL Studio on Linux. My suggestion is just that, a suggestion to explore the possible.

If we just learn one thing and never change then we wind up being left behind. While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.

View on HN

> While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.

As I just managed to get VR working with HP Reverb G2 in my Linux environment, quite literally the only reason I have Windows still installed on my computer is because of Ableton, and not being able to run that properly on even workstation hardware.

How exactly do I get Ableton running with an external USB soundcard and everything running exactly like it runs on Linux? I'm quite literally ready to give you money if you manage to give me an answer that actually leads to me being able to run Ableton on Arch Linux, because for years I have tried, and waited for the moment it's possible. So please do tell, how do I get it running?

Windows VM with USB passthrough. I haven't had any issues with USB devices this way.

I've tried to passthrough Behringer audio interface, as well as HX Stomp (to, of course, avoid dual-boot) and it stuttered like crazy. Maybe there is a way to make it more "realtime" but it's not the default, at least in VirtualBox.

Yeah passing through usb devices to a VM for audio seems to be a dark art like working with a bunch of analog equipment. Everything has to be tuned. I do understand why a bare metal windows and/or mac computer is always in a studio, one can skip the head ache. Even if main DAW is Linux.

VirtualBox is the worst VM software.

QEMU on Linux with kvm is gold.

> Windows VM

That's not wine, and I'd rather keep dual booting that running Windows VMs that barely can keep up. Have you tried doing music production inside a Windows VM before?

Yes Ableton, VST and usb. I have used the Coreweave windows VM with Nvidia to run everything audio and video, though haven't routed USB devices to it.

Cognitively it's easier to just buy a second PC for windows. But threadripper pro etc have so many cores and pcie lanes it's easy to run multiple OS VMs with dedicated GPUs at close to native speed in one box.

https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux

https://hanez.org/document/ableton-live-linux-wine/

https://github.com/wineasio/wineasio

The biggest thing with any Linux and Wine mix for DAWs is using JACK and WineASIO for low latency

This doesn't work like everyone makes it out to. The first problem is overcoming the plethora of build errors. Then if you're lucky enough to actually get Ableton launched and working, you'll run into weird issues like Ableton crashing as soon as you attempt to add a MIDI track. When you find a work-around for that, you then run into random crashing in the middle of playback with absolutely atrocious latency despite the claims of "low latency". It's not worth it. I gave up

It does work and no you don’t need to fiddle with build errors and crap unless you have some weird hardware.

It works for me plug n play with my scarlett devices. Many tracks.

Core i9, RTX 3080, Fedora w/ Proton on Vulkan. USB-C Scarlett.

I think your issue might be that you aren’t using an ALSA device.

Thanks, I've seen that repository before, but when I last saw it it boiled down to basically "create a prefix with these winecfg values" and not much more, but it seems a lot more fleshed out now, will give it another go.

Would be great if we'd eventually get some PipeWireASIO thing, sounds like a missing piece of the puzzle still, although not strictly required I suppose.

You can't, I've tried. The "passthrough" is bullshit, it doesn't fucking work and I wish people would stop recommending this time wasting "advice". That's not even the main issue as 90% of your VSTs will probably not work either and latency will be through the roof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com