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The Linux digital audio workstation - Part 2

This is part 2 of my tour through Linux digital audio workstations (DAWs). Take a peek at part 1 for some background and the rst ve DAWs. These are good times for Linux as a platform for audio production, and great work is going on in Linux audio 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 editing audio 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 the notation 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 can be considered a big milestone for MusEthe GUI toolkit has advanced to Qt4, the music notation editor has returned, all viable plugin formats are supported, a Python interface has been added for scripted automation control, 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 conguring the program, and as you might expect from a 2.0 release MusE appears to have no stability issues. Some August 15, 2012 This article was contributed by Dave Phillips

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demonstration les are available for study purposes, but they're not very exciting. I loaded a MIDI le of an orchestral piece, invoked MusE's FluidSynth plugin, set the track outputs to the synth, and MusE was rocking to Bartok. Despite my questionable taste in soundfonts, MusE performed like a champion, with no audio glitches or xruns (buer under or over-runs) reported by JACK. Two notable projects have been derived from the MusE project. Werner Schweer's MuseScore is a ne standalone music notation program with a UI similar to those of the well-known notation editors for other platforms. Open Octave MIDI is a signicant fork of the MusE sequencer, a MIDI-only version with many features added specically for composers working with the large-scale MIDI resources required for orchestral pieces and full-length movie soundtracks. The Non DAW Developer Jonathan Moore Liles was evidently unhappy with the state of the Linux DAWand much else in the Linux audio worldso he created his Non* software, a set of programs for recording, mixing, and editing audio and MIDI data. The Non DAW is the audio recorder in the set. The developer has specied what he wants from a DAW: "non-linear, non-destructive arrangement of portions of audio clips [and] tempo and time signature mapping, with editing operations being closely aligned to this map". By design, the Non DAW is a track-based audio recorder/arranger that outsources its signal routing, mixing, and plugin support to JACK and JACK-aware applications designed for those purposes, such as the other members of the Non* family (the group includes a MIDI sequencer, a mixer, and a session manager). The family's few dependencies include FLTK for its GUI components, libsndle for audio le I/O, and liblo for OSC messaging support. All dependencies for the Non* programs are commonly 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. I recorded a few tracks, tested playback control (from the Non DAW and from QJackCtl), and got a supercial view of

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the program. I must emphasize "supercial"there's much more to the Non* software than meets the eye. The Non DAW is light on system resources, but it certainly isn't a lightweight. Again, by design, the program has limitationsno soundle 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 not suit everyone's workow, 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 companies pioneered 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 familiar track-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 most likable features of the portable studio hardwareeasy access to controls and operations, presented in a direct uncomplicated interface. Simplicity remains a key concept behind Qtractor's development, but, as is the nature of such things, what began as a limited design has expanded into a richly-featured DAW that compares favorably 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 DSSI plugins, 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 site at rncbc.org.

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Renoise Renoise might be best described as a nuclear-powered tracker. If you're familiar with the MOD music trackers of the late 80s and early 90s then you'll see some familiar sights 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 sophisticated music-making environments available for Linux or any other platform. Like Mixbus, Renoise is a cross-platform commercial oering with a reasonable price schedule 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 many tasks, and Renoise provides extensive support for external plugins as well as oering its own excellent internal plugins. If you need to be convinced about Renoise's capabilities, I'll direct you to the music of Modlys, Atte Andre Jensen's project featuring the wonderful singing of Britt Dencker Jensen. If Modlys doesn't do it for you, check out some of the other artists' oerings on the Renoise Web site. The program is very popular, and for years its users have been steadily pumping out music made with Renoise. Rosegarden Rosegarden began its long life as a MIDI sequencer with a standard music notation interface, 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 good music notation interface. Rosegarden provides multiple data viewsalong with the notation editor, we nd the expected track/arranger waveform display, a piano-roll MIDI sequencer, a rhythm/drum pattern composer, and a MIDI event list editor. All views update one another, so you can switch between the views whenever you like. Alas, Rosegarden has no integrated soundle editor, but you can congure it to summon your favorite (mine is set to use mhWaveEdit). 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 includes headings for Composition and Studio menus. The Composition menu manages aspects of time and tempo in your piece, including some cool tempo-setting and beat-tting operations. The Studio menu provides selections for accessing the audio and MIDI mixers, conguring your audio and MIDI devices (real and virtual), managing your synthesizer plugins, and setting other global MIDI parameters. Unique studio congurations can be saved and reloaded, and you can select your current setup as the default studio. General MIDI support is excellent, and Rosegarden comes prepared with device proles for a variety of other synthesizer layouts. If your devices aren't already on the list, you can easily add custom proles for your gear. Developers may be interested to note that Rosegarden's Changelog reects the many changes in Linux on the larger scale. The program started out as an X11-based project using the Xaw graphics toolkit. Attempts have been made to move the program's GUI elements to Motif, Tcl/Tk, and gtkmm, but eventually the toolkit selection settled on Qt, where it remains to this day. Over the years its language basis has undergone signicant changes. The developers have coded Rosegarden in C, ObjectiveC, and C++ with CORBA. Eventually the CORBA components were 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 a feature since Rosegarden's earliest releases. Traverso Its Web site claims that with its interface innovations Traverso will let you do "twice the work in half the time". While the statement may not be literally true, speed is denitely the watchword for Traverso. Keyboard and mouse are used separately and together in clever ways that do contribute to faster execution of many operations common to DAWs. I didn't expect Traverso to be fully production-ready, since I built version 0.49 from Git 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 its support is incomplete. Plugins without GUIs loaded and worked without problems, while any plugin with its own GUI crashed the program. Perhaps it simply needs a more complete implementation of the current LV2 stack, but alas, development of Traverso seems to have halted or slowed to the point of apparent immobility. I hope I'm wrong about 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 I know, it hasn't been released in any version for Linux. Preliminary reports seem to indicate that the tested version is 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 company responsible for the popular Ableton Live DAW. Ableton Live redened 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 change that situation. Ableton Live has been described as a front-end for a huge granular synthesis engine capable of realtime time and pitch compression/expansion. Audio and MIDI material recorded or retrieved into the program can be instantly modied to match the composition's tempo and pitch levels. This ability to perfectly match any material has evolved into a powerful method of realtime composition. From what I've seen so far, Bitwig appears to include at least the central characteristics of Ableton Live, and if it can live up to its advertising Bitwig will surely attract more users to Linux 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 personal policy 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 a trial run or two. I'd be ecstatic if you made some music with one of the DAWs presented here, so let us know if you come 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 the most. 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 to easily record and mix multiple tracks and arrange various recordings into a CD? Mastering would be nice too but not 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 unxable 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 insofar as 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 in the form of separate les as input. IMHO that is the best approach, because you need accept no compromises on either 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 and more as the mix becomes more complex. Some years ago I did a project with Audacity, and at the end I was regretting that I had not used something like Ardour, which applies lters in real time. There is a space for each 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 added eects he may well prefer one of the DAWs presented here to avoid the problems you encountered. Audacity is a powerful soundle editor, no doubt, but it may not always be a recommendable substitute for a 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 Qt Posted 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 why Qt 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 it deserves 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-platform GUI. SC3's other GUI possibilities remain - Cocoa on the Mac, SwingOSC for cross-platform - but the developers have made the change. Incidentally, SC3 began as a decidedly Mac-centric application but I think all its primary developers 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 experience is not much - some high school choir and a bit of theory. I just want something that's easy to start playing with without 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's GarageBand but I'm not sure that's what you need. If you need notation I suggest MuseScore (aka Mscore), you can 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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