Go-On-A-Steam-Train

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 19th, 2023

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  • Thanks for sharing this! :)

    I got a kick out of seeing helm on your list, as I was using the developer’s Unity engine integration for a game when I started coding :) Fantastic synth.

    I could also recommend hydrogen as a drum machine - it plays nicely with lmms, which is cool! :) There’s also tuxguitar which I use as a guitar sketchpad when I just want to jot down a thing I’m playing, or learn a complicated song. :)


  • Oh wow, I’m glad it wasn’t just a fever dream! Nobody I know was witness to it, so my friends look at me blankly if the pear ever comes up! :) People speedrunning getting banned from the pit via lolwut was always funny. 😂

    It truly was, just a bunch of people with a common interest being mostly pretty cool to each other… Damn that was a good forum. :) This is the nearest thing I’ve seen to the vibe of it, but still not with all the comedy and characters (yet!)



  • Okay, imagine I can see windows in all its inefficient, telemetry riddled candy crush glory… in a better of minutes I can start making music with my hardware, with absolutely no setup besides plugging in some cables and downloading my program.

    I spent months trying to convince JACK that my PC had a line-out even with the help of some lovely people over at JACK and Ubuntu forums, the answer we all came to was to try using Windows 7, which grudgingly got on with it, no issue at all.

    I really, really wanted to ditch Windows for good, and did so proudly for almost five years, I have no loyalty to companies because that’s daft. But part of maturing is knowing that someone tried a thing, it didn’t work for them, and what works for you may vary. My build on my computer has been rock solid for performances, live recording, making entire games… I can’t fault the damn thing try as I do!

    I think it does the amazing work of the FOSS world a disservice to go after people exercising their choice to use whatever they want. It also makes these people feel unwelcome, and less likely to want to touch Linux with a ten-foot-pole.

    I had various distros, and would to this day run LXLE proudly if I didn’t have a need to use the music software I do. I still rock FOSS projects as much as possible (an old Audacity build gets much of what I need to do with game audio done, I take great glee in never touching Adobe products).

    That said, in my subjective use case, I can’t in any way say that the ethics of Linux made me make better music, but it did make me interested in technology, and that’s also good. Arguing with Ardour and Jack to get Audio out was tedious, and I lost months of productivity through trying to will things to work.

    I hope that’s a constructive and helpful way to expand on this. :)



  • The only way I could level up is to go back to university and get a PhD in music… I studied it for 6 years and am happy with the level of my musical process.

    I would definitely argue that Linux has good music software… But better? By what metric? I love what I’m using, it doesn’t get in the way and lets me explore ideas at will, it performs perfectly, its very stable.

    Now, for me, the perks to Linux are freedom and privacy. This is excellent, and in this specific use-case, I find this within what I’m using on Windows. Even during using Ubuntu Studio as my daily os, I had to keep a copy of XP available in case I wanted to use a particular bit of software, a plugin, or a technique.

    I agree that the solution would be for software vendors to target Linux… But they don’t, and not having the choice to use these tools would mean an interior result. Linux can’t and shouldn’t be the answer to every issue, It only serves to mislead if it isn’t true.


  • These are good programs, however, I would argue that Pure Data is the only one that offers the same or better functionality.

    Don’t get me wrong, I used to use Ardour and LMMS for everything, Ardour is fantastic for tracking and composing linear stuff.

    But Ableton’s compositional abilities and creative live performance put it in its own category in comparison - Ardour would be more of a Logic, Cubase, ProTools alternative in my mind. The ability to perform almost collaboratively with internal logic, the simplicity of connecting seemingly any device to a session via an M4L patch- it’s just so different.

    As I said, I was studying electronic music, and my lecturer was teaching us Ableton, assessing us based on a final recording and the project itself. There’s no way I could have abstained from that without a big old zero on my grade- and missing out on some truly great experiences, performances and knowledge picked up on the way.

    Sometimes ideology isn’t a simple thing, I use FOSS projects as much as possible, even contribute when possible, but I need to work and live on the way.

    I would also like to add that Jack circa 2014 was an utter mess, I’m sure it’s come on leaps since, but that was always something I felt I fought to get working rather than used. Making the same audio connection in Windows would be automatic, and Jack felt more like a seance.

    Anyway, my point is that there’s a lot of details and thoughts to people’s choices in these things, and if there was one OS and audio workstation for music, it would be a very, very bland thing. :) Anywho, have an excellent night :)