[LAU] So what do you think sucks about Linux audio ?

[Aurélien Leblond]

My 2 cents of euro on the topic :)

To start and give a bit of background, I'm a software developer and a
"trained" musician. I have now been using only Linux for a little bit
more than 10 years and started to produce music as a hobby 4-5 years
ago (a bit of auto-promo, that's what I produced with Linux already
https://soundcloud.com/a-violent-whisper).

For my personal use, I setup a complete audio environment on 2
different laptops and every time had issues (sound card not
compatible, configuring jack, etc), BUT comparing my experience with a
friend of mine who went through the same experience on Windows, I
believe we shared the same pain to arrive to a stable environment.
In my case, even though it was painful to buy a new soundcard and find
out it wasn't working, it was a great experience to work with Daniel
Mack and get it to work (Daniel you are my savior! my FTU works
perfectly now).

Two years ago, because I'm a nerd and like to only play with the
latest cool stuff, I decided to ditch LADSPA and switch purely to LV2.
Did it take a while to have a setup comparable to AlsaModularSynth?
Yes... But thanks to all the effort of David Robillard on Ingen and
all is valuable help to get the ams module ported, I can enjoy it all
now.
I read on this forum a lot of complains about the LV2 format and I
just don't get why... I was/still am a noob in writing audio plugins
but I found coding with LV2/LVTK to be pretty simple and straight
forward.

The community involved on the LAD/LAU is just so great and it does
feel like a "special experience" to be part of this (although I really
wish sometimes we could simply use a forum instead of mailing list,
but that's my personal taste I guess).

Over the course of the past 5 years, things got so much better:
- Ingen is just brilliant - I wish David would release it "officially"
to get more people to use it!
- A few weeks ago, I asked here how I could get my loops composition
workflow to improve and thanks to the community discovered Giada which
helped a lot, and I'm gonna write soon here about my experience on
that (@Harry: very sorry but Luppp doesn't compile with the latest
version of LV2 - will write to you soon about it)
- I'm a trained drummer, and found Hydrogen just brilliant... People
complain about the quality of the samples - I simply bought packs (I
found the Wave Alchemy one to be good and cheap enough)...


Now, I never EVER worked with Mac or Windows to produce music, so I
really have nothing to compare. I have a friend who professionally
produce music with mac and asked me if he should switch to Linux and I
answered no for one simple reason: the guy is extremely used to his
workflow on mac os and is very VERY impatient. He would try it for 5
minutes and ditch it because it doesn't look like what he knows
already and it doesn't work as well as his current setup. He would
have the exact same problem switching to Windows (or from Linux to Mac
OS if it was what he was used to). I tried to use Cubase on a friend's
computer once and found it was crap because it didn't look like Ardour
:) :) :)



Do I wish all the music software on Linux would be 100% stable, and
Ardour 3 to be already released, and to Bitwig to already be there? I
sure do :) Do I wish the futur was already yesterday, I do too!

But strangely, I'm only bitching about the state of the music linux
world when I'm on a bad composition day :)
<sarcasm>My lack of insipiration cannot be my fault, it HAS to be my
machine! </sarcasm>