Hi everyone,
Just moving from Win > macOS > Arch (in the form of endeavour, it’s amazing, I love it so far!!)
Addressed to those who love making music, what is your favorite / most functional DAW for music creation and production? Thank you so much for your time and contributions.
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LMMS is an option that does the trick for for simple projects.
Thank you!!
Ardour if you want a fully open source option. REAPER if you want a free to evaluate, cheap to buy DAW. I’ve been having a lot of fun with REAPER and it works well in the Linux ecosystem.
A lot of people recommend Bitwig for a step up beyond those two, but I haven’t tried it personally. I also think it’s Wayland only?
I would start with Ardour and see if it fulfills your needs.
Thank you!
I actually recently just did research on this for my own purposes.
- Ardour isn’t really for MIDI. It technically supports it, and people do use it with some success, but the implementation is buggy and somewhat limited compared to other DAWs. If you’re primarily doing recording and working with audio clips, though, Ardour works great.
- LMMS only does MIDI, and basically doesn’t handle recording audio at all. The interface is known to be a bit archaic. I don’t know exactly how it compares feature-wise to other DAWs. It might be great if MIDI/synthesizers is all you want to do.
- zrhythm looks really good, but unless you wanna pay for an installer, building it from source is a wee bit of a pain due to dependency version issues. There is an AUR package, but it failed to build for me.
Those are the FLOSS options that I know about. There may be others, I didn’t really look at them. They would be even less popular than the ones that I’ve listed above.
In the end, I chose REAPER. It’s not free, but the trial period is effectively indefinite (the software does not cripple itself after the 60 day period officially passes). The personal license is quite reasonably-priced ($60 USD), and the commercial one ($225 USD) is still not too bad if you want to use it professionally. It’s a one-time purchase. You don’t need new licenses for updates. It’s Linux-native, and it does all the things.
As far as plugins go, the FLOSS software has got you covered. Zynaddsubfx is kindof famous, and Cardinal is a really good modular synth (inspired by VCV rack, which is also free and available). Vital is also quite reputable. There’s a whole pile of things available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Multimedia#Audio_synthesis_environments
As far as installation goes, all of this is available from either extra or the AUR.
I’m using Bitwig but I’m really excited that PreSonus released a beta Linux build for Studio One. As a former Cubase user, Studio One makes a lot more sense for me.
Once I moved from macOS to Linux I had to stop making music, because Ardour didn’t really work with the switching between pulse audio and Jack all the time and Bitwig, while really cool, was way to expensive for a enthusiast like me.
woah, don’t mind my naivety but why expensive?
Back when I tried it there was only one version, the 399 EUR one. Today they have some more https://www.bitwig.com/buy/
Ardour works fine with Pipewire and Pipewire-jack, so you no longer need to keep switching between pulseaudio and jack now. It’s pretty seamless.
Haven’t made the full switch yet, all of my music production stuff is on windows.
That being said, I’ve been a fan of Reaper for quite some time. I use it Windows. I have installed it on my Arch install on my laptop, and that should work well enough for me, if I can get my VSTs and other plugins working.
