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August 15, 2012This article was contributedby Dave Phillips

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The Linux digital audio workstation - Part2

This is part 2 of my tour through Linux digital audio workstations (DAWs). Take apeek at part 1 for some background and the rst ve DAWs. These are good timesfor Linux as a platform for audio production, and great work is going on in Linuxaudio development. Let's look at some more of that work.

MusE

In its original design, MusE included the standard suite of tools for recording and editingaudio and MIDI data. MusE's MIDI capabilities included piano-roll and event-list editors,along with a page for note entry and editing in standard music notation. Eventually thenotation editor was removed, the program's original author moved on to other projects,and MusE development continued as a team project.

On June 30, 2012 the team announced the public availability of MusE version 2.0 (shown above). This release canbe considered a big milestone for MusEthe GUI toolkit has advanced to Qt4, the music notation editor hasreturned, all viable plugin formats are supported, a Python interface has been added for scripted automationcontrol, and so on. Clearly its developers want a MusE for the 21st century.

I tested MusE 2.0, built locally from its SVN sources. I encountered no problems compiling or con guring theprogram, and as you might expect from a 2.0 release MusE appears to have no stability issues. Some

The Linux digital audio workstation - Part 2 [LWN.net] https://lwn.net/Articles/510046/?format=printable

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demonstration les are available for study purposes, but they're not very exciting. I loaded a MIDI le of anorchestral piece, invoked MusE's FluidSynth plugin, set the track outputs to the synth, and MusE was rocking toBartok. Despite my questionable taste in soundfonts, MusE performed like a champion, with no audio glitches orxruns (bu ff er under or over-runs) reported by JACK.

Two notable projects have been derived from the MusE project. Werner Schweer's MuseScore is a ne standalonemusic notation program with a UI similar to those of the well-known notation editors for other platforms. OpenOctave MIDI is a signi cant fork of the MusE sequencer, a MIDI-only version with many features added speci callyfor composers working with the large-scale MIDI resources required for orchestral pieces and full-length moviesoundtracks.

The Non DAW

Developer Jonathan Moore Liles was evidently unhappy with the state of the Linux DAWand much else in theLinux audio worldso he created his Non* software, a set of programs for recording, mixing, and editing audio andMIDI data. The Non DAW is the audio recorder in the set.

The developer has speci ed what he wants from a DAW: "non-linear, non-destructivearrangement of portions of audio clips [and] tempo and time signature mapping, withediting operations being closely aligned to this map". By design, the Non DAW is atrack-based audio recorder/arranger that outsources its signal routing, mixing, and pluginsupport to JACK and JACK-aware applications designed for those purposes, such as theother members of the Non* family (the group includes a MIDI sequencer, a mixer, and asession manager). The family's few dependencies include FLTK for its GUI components,libsnd le for audio le I/O, and liblo for OSC messaging support. All dependencies for the Non* programs arecommonly found in the software repositories of the mainstream Linux distributions.

Incidentally, JACK is absolutely required, as there is no support for any other audio or MIDI system. Direct ALSA will not work with the Non* suite, though of course the ALSA system is needed by JACK.

Since the Non DAW is available only in source code, I built and installed it on a laptop running AVLinux 5.0.1. Irecorded a few tracks, tested playback control (from the Non DAW and from QJackCtl), and got a super cial view of


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the program. I must emphasize "super cial"there's much more to the Non* software than meets the eye. The NonDAW is light on system resources, but it certainly isn't a lightweight. Again, by design, the program haslimitationsno sound le import, no MIDI tracks, and no plugin support. The Non DAW resembles the hard-disk recorder systems of the early 1990s that focused on a single task. The Non DAW and its modular approach may notsuit everyone's work ow, but I found it fast and exible.

Qtractor

Developer Rui Nuno Capela's Qtractor was originally planned to function as a replacement for the handy 4-track tape machines popular with home recordists during the MIDI revolution. The Fostex and Tascam companiespioneered the small-scale portable studio, but by the late 1990s little demand remained for such devices.Nevertheless, it seems that Rui missed the 4-track recorder enough to compel him to create a software alternative.The result of this compulsion is Qtractor, Rui's contribution to the Linux DAW line-up.

The screen shot at right illustrates Qtractor's main display with the familiartrack-based view and arrangement of recorded material, but in many respects the

display is truly its own creature. Qtractor's user interface is based on the mostlikable features of the portable studio hardwareeasy access to controls andoperations, presented in a direct uncomplicated interface. Simplicity remains a keyconcept behind Qtractor's development, but, as is the nature of such things, whatbegan as a limited design has expanded into a richly-featured DAW that comparesfavorably to any other tool in this article.

Among its many strengths, Qtractor supports every plugin format that can be supported under Linux, including VST/VSTi plugins in native-Windows and native-Linux formats. Of course it also likes LADSPA, LV2, and even DSSIplugins, making it perhaps the most comprehensive Linux host for audio and MIDI plugins.

Rui is an apparently tireless developer. His Q* family of software includes a soundfont synthesizer, a MIDI network control GUI, two LV2 plugins, an editor for the Yamaha XG sound devices, a front-end for the LinuxSampler , and a

very popular GUI for controlling JACK. You can check out news and information on the whole Q-crew on Rui's siteat rncbc.org .


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Renoise

Renoise might be best described as a nuclear-powered tracker . If you're familiar withthe MOD music trackers of the late 80s and early 90s then you'll see some familiarsights in Renoise, such as the old-school tracker interface and its divisions. However,Renoise is in another category altogether. It is, in fact, one of the most sophisticatedmusic-making environments available for Linux or any other platform.

Like Mixbus, Renoise is a cross-platform commercial o ff ering with a reasonable priceschedule and a boatload of features. The program retains the historic tracker UI,

including its division into Pattern Editor, Song Editor, and Sample Editor. Graphic editors are available for manytasks, and Renoise provides extensive support for external plugins as well as o ff ering its own excellent internalplugins.

If you need to be convinced about Renoise's capabilities, I'll direct you to the music of Modlys , Atte Andre Jensen'sproject featuring the wonderful singing of Britt Dencker Jensen. If Modlys doesn't do it for you, check out some of the other artists' o ff erings on the Renoise Web site. The program is very popular, and for years its users have beensteadily pumping out music made with Renoise.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden began its long life as a MIDI sequencer with a standard music notationinterface, a rare thing for systems running X11 in 1993. Today it is a fully capable DAW,complete with all the expected audio and MIDI features, and it still provides a very goodmusic notation interface. Rosegarden provides multiple data viewsalong with thenotation editor, we nd the expected track/arranger waveform display, a piano-roll MIDIsequencer, a rhythm/drum pattern composer, and a MIDI event list editor. All viewsupdate one another, so you can switch between the views whenever you like. Alas,Rosegarden has no integrated sound le editor, but you can con gure it to summon your favorite (mine is set to usemhWaveEdit ).

Rosegarden includes some nice higher-level features built-in for the composer's assistance. For example, the top


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menu bar includes the typical headings for File, Edit, View, and so forth. However, the menu bar also includesheadings for Composition and Studio menus. The Composition menu manages aspects of time and tempo in yourpiece, including some cool tempo-setting and beat- tting operations. The Studio menu provides selections foraccessing the audio and MIDI mixers, con guring your audio and MIDI devices (real and virtual), managing yoursynthesizer plugins, and setting other global MIDI parameters. Unique studio con gurations can be saved andreloaded, and you can select your current setup as the default studio. General MIDI support is excellent, andRosegarden comes prepared with device pro les for a variety of other synthesizer layouts. If your devices aren'talready on the list, you can easily add custom pro les for your gear.

Developers may be interested to note that Rosegarden's Changelog re ects the many changes in Linux on thelarger scale. The program started out as an X11-based project using the Xaw graphics toolkit. Attempts have beenmade to move the program's GUI elements to Motif, Tcl/Tk, and gtkmm, but eventually the toolkit selection settledon Qt, where it remains to this day. Over the years its language basis has undergone signi cant changes. Thedevelopers have coded Rosegarden in C, ObjectiveC, and C++ with CORBA. Eventually the CORBA componentswere eliminated, and Rosegarden is now a pure C++ project with a very handsome Qt4 GUI.

Alas, space is dear here, and Rosegarden has so many features worth describing. I'll leave it by mentioning one of its more unusual attractions: its ability to export your work in Csound score format. Csound has many front-ends,but none with a notation interface for event entry. Like its notation capability, the Csound export facility has been afeature since Rosegarden's earliest releases.

Traverso

Its Web site claims that with its interface innovations Traverso will let you do "twicethe work in half the time". While the statement may not be literally true, speed isde nitely the watchword for Traverso. Keyboard and mouse are used separately andtogether in clever ways that do contribute to faster execution of many operationscommon to DAWs.

I didn't expect Traverso to be fully production-ready, since I built version 0.49 fromGit sources. Some aspects of the program are already polishedthe track display

GUI seen at left is very coolwhile others simply don't work at all. For example, plugin support is a mixed bag at


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this point in Traverso's development. The program supports only the LV2 formatno LADSPA or VST hereand itssupport is incomplete. Plugins without GUIs loaded and worked without problems, while any plugin with its ownGUI crashed the program. Perhaps it simply needs a more complete implementation of the current LV2 stack, butalas, development of Traverso seems to have halted or slowed to the point of apparent immobility. I hope I'm wrongabout that, because there's much to like about Traverso and I'd like to see it evolve.

Bitwig Studio

I've placed Bitwig Studio out of order for the simple reason that I haven't used it yet. That's because, as far as Iknow, it hasn't been released in any version for Linux. Preliminary reports seem to indicate that the tested versionis running only on OS X, but the company has indicated that a proprietary version for Linux is a release target.

So why the big noise over Bitwig? Its designers have come from the development team at Ableton, the companyresponsible for the popular Ableton Live DAW. Ableton Live rede ned the DAW for a new generation of computer-based music makers, and to date there has been nothing like it available for Linux. Bitwig may changethat situation.

Ableton Live has been described as a front-end for a huge granular synthesis engine capable of realtime time andpitch compression/expansion. Audio and MIDI material recorded or retrieved into the program can be instantlymodi ed to match the composition's tempo and pitch levels. This ability to perfectly match any material has evolvedinto a powerful method of realtime composition. From what I've seen so far, Bitwig appears to include at least thecentral characteristics of Ableton Live, and if it can live up to its advertising Bitwig will surely attract more users toLinux for their sound and music work.

By the way, I've included no screenshot of Bitwig becausesurpriseI haven't used it yet. As a matter of personalpolicy I don't add screenshots of anything I don't run here at Studio DLP.

Outro

I hope you've enjoyed this little tour of Linux DAWs. and I'd be most pleased if you gave some of these programs atrial run or two. I'd be ecstatic if you made some music with one of the DAWs presented here, so let us know if youcome up with something we should hear. Finally, I must note that Linux users have other choices beyond the DAWs


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presented in this article. See the apps Wiki at linuxaudio.org for pointers to more Linux DAWs.

[For further reading, I recommend: Leider, C. (2004). Digital Audio Workstation . McGraw-Hill. and Roads, C.(1996). Computer Music Tutorial . MIT Press.]

(Log in to post comments)

Demo Recoding Suggestions?Posted Aug 15, 2012 20:09 UTC (Wed) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [ Link ]

Thanks for the info! I didn't realize there were so many DAWs available for Linux.

I've got an ongoing project to create a set of simple demo CDs. Two tracks at its most basic, perhaps 6-8 at themost. These would be very homebrew-ish things.

I've tried Ardour but it seems like overkill for this project. Does anyone have suggestions for Linux software toeasily record and mix multiple tracks and arrange various recordings into a CD? Mastering would be nice too butnot critical.

Demo Recoding Suggestions?Posted Aug 16, 2012 11:30 UTC (Thu) by phedders (subscriber, #14685) [ Link ]

Sounds like you want Ardour.... you can use it in a simple setup - or massively complex one. It works brilliantly.Suggest to use Ardour 3 beta 5 (A2 has known and un xable bugs - which you may not hit... but you might, and

A3 is better in soooo many ways.)

Try Audacity

Posted Aug 16, 2012 14:47 UTC (Thu) by hannada (subscriber, #4633) [ Link ]Not to take anything away from Ardour, but what you describe is well within the capabilities of Audacity insofaras preparation of audio tracks in the form of separate les is concerned. I give Audacity high marks for ease of use and intuitive GUI. It excels at using multiple tracks as input to produce stereo mixed tracks as output.


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This leaves mastering as a separate question, but ALL mastering applications are happy to take audio tracks inthe form of separate les as input. IMHO that is the best approach, because you need accept no compromises oneither the audio editing side or on the CD mastering side.

Author's reply Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:48 UTC (Thu) by StudioDave (subscriber, #84346) [ Link ]

I agree, Audacity is a good t for relatively uncomplicated recordings. It is widely used in preparing podcasts,and it is very easy to learn.

Best,

dp

Author's reply Posted Aug 22, 2012 15:25 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [ Link ]

Audacity is great, but it can only do destructive editing: once a lter is applied the original sample is lost(unless the operation is undone). This limitation is not important for trivial projects, but it is felt more andmore as the mix becomes more complex. Some years ago I did a project with Audacity, and at the end I wasregretting that I had not used something like Ardour, which applies lters in real time. There is a space foreach kind of editor; be sure to pick the right one!

Author's reply Posted Aug 23, 2012 13:47 UTC (Thu) by StudioDave (subscriber, #84346) [ Link ]

Greetings,

Very good point re: destructive editing. If a user thinks he will be working with numerous edits and addedeff ects he may well prefer one of the DAWs presented here to avoid the problems you encountered.

Audacity is a powerful sound le editor, no doubt, but it may not always be a recommendable substitute fora full-featured DAW. As you wrote, there's a place for each kind of program. Choose carefully. Or as the


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rastas have it, "Measure twice, cut once." :)

Best,

dp

QtPosted Aug 16, 2012 16:07 UTC (Thu) by johnny (subscriber, #10110) [ Link ]

Slightly OT, but I'm happy to see that so many of the projects use Qt. I wonder if there's any particular reason whyQt seems particularly strongly represented in audio software.

(The reason it makes me happy is that I nd Qt to be of very high quality, both API and documentation-wise, and itdeserves to be more widely used than it is).

Author's reply Posted Aug 18, 2012 12:17 UTC (Sat) by StudioDave (subscriber, #84346) [ Link ]

Then you'll also be pleased to learn that the SuperCollider3 project has switched to Qt for its cross-platformGUI. SC3's other GUI possibilities remain - Cocoa on the Mac, SwingOSC for cross-platform - but the developershave made the change. Incidentally, SC3 began as a decidedly Mac-centric application but I think all its primarydevelopers are Linux-based now.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCollider for more information about SC3.

Best,

dp

Any quick recommendation ....Posted Aug 23, 2012 16:13 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [ Link ]

... for which of these programs, or some other, would be the easiest to get started with for very simple music


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editing? I want to produce a few simple tunes for the background of a mostly spoken video. My music experienceis not much - some high school choir and a bit of theory. I just want something that's easy to start playing withwithout spending a lot of time learning. :)

Any quick recommendation ....Posted Aug 23, 2012 20:54 UTC (Thu) by StudioDave (subscriber, #84346) [ Link ]

Do you need music notation ? If not, perhaps LMMS might be a best solution, it's a wee bit like Apple'sGarageBand but I'm not sure that's what you need. If you need notation I suggest MuseScore (aka Mscore), youcan look at it at http://musescore.org/ . LMMS is still located at http://lmms.sourceforge.net/ . :)

Best,

dp

Copyright 2012, Eklektix, Inc.

Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds


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