#269

Totally forgot about tracktion! It’s a really cool DAW actually!
I tried it on ubuntu x86 and never got MIDI to work in linux, but that’s maybe just my incompetence. Never tried the rPI version.

#270

I just learned of it this week. I’ve got it working with midi and Jack. The workflow feels weird and takes a little getting used to but I did do some very satisfying sound mangling after a while. There’s a lot of creative potential.

#271

If you’re mainly focused on MIDI you could try Qtractor. It’s not the best for audio manipulation, but it does support it and it’s relatively lightweight despite using Qt as a toolkit.
Alternatively you could have a look a Renoise (it’s a tracker, not sure if that’s what you’re looking for) or even Reaper (which has a Linux version, although it’s marked as experimental. Also FYI @papernoise).

And finally you can do the “Linuxy” thing :stuck_out_tongue: of making your OS your DAW by using whichever program is “best” for the different purposes you have and wiring them together with JACK + either some scripts or session management. I still use Ladish and Claudia to manage this but Non Session Manager (NSM) has kind of become the defacto standard for session management. The non products are all pretty lightweight as well. I tend to use sequencer64 as MIDI sequencer, don’t do much audio based work so can’t really recommend anything there.

2 Likes
#272

I tried to compile sequencer64 a while back and ran into some issues. I’ve enjoyed some aspects of seq24 so I’d like to try it. I’ll give it another go.

#273

Apart from some things on iOS devices, I’m completely Linux for music making. Although my journey to it is maybe a bit different, as I didn’t really have an established Windows workflow I had to “replace”.

I use Ardour as my DAW for recording – have considered switching to Bitwig, but hesitant to make the investment and take the learning curve hit.

For live performance, using JACK/Patchage for signal flow management, a handful of synths (Yoshimi, Calf’s Fluidsynth host for sample-based stuff, just got Helm and like the look of it but haven’t really integrated it yet. Oh! and VCVRack), Rakarrack and some of the Calf plugins for effects, Sooperlooper for live looping, alongside lots of external instruments.

1 Like
#274

This looks pretty great, I need to give this a try.

1 Like
#275

I’m not aware of any compilation problems with recent sequencer64 versions, although have experienced some issues the past, most of them were runtime though, no issues with compilation. And all of them were quickly fixed after I reported them.
Which distro are you using and which version of sequencer64 are you trying to compile?

#276

I saw this! Haven’t had time to mess with it yet.

#277

Thinking back I was trying to compile on a 32 bit netbook running Lubuntu. I’ll try again over the weekend and let you know how it goes.

#279

Ardour with JACK is kinda cool, thanks
can put a synth on separate midi/audio chans
(don’t forget to enable midi routing shift+alt+M)
record an audio track, and export a .wav

ORCA, Helm, Podolski, Zebralette
Ardour (QjackCtl)

3 Likes
#280

Reaper works fine on Linux, there’s a native version that’s listed as experimental, but it works perfectly, been running it for about a year!

4 Likes
#281

I’ve always ignored it because it’s marked “experimental”… might check it out!
Thanks for the heads up!

I should add that Surge also works on linux! It’s got a few oddities, but it’s a solid softsynth.

2 Likes
#282

I have a 5 year old Mac Mini, would love to set it up as a Piano sound. What version of Linux do people suggest for running VST’s?

I’ll be setting it up to run headless, no mouse etc, run a file on boot. Basically a piano sound box.

#283

Yeah it’s a bit weird that it’s marked as “experimental” given it work so well. Maybe it’s just a way of saying “no guarantees”, but the changelog lists fixes for the Linux version all the time, so they are actively working on it…

#284

Reaper / Linux is one of the DAWs I use when testing surge on Linux. Seems to work great! The team is also responsive on the couple of occasions we ran into oddities (there was a sizing issue with VST3 Linux for instance that they fixed right away).

4 Likes
#285

Personally speaking, 2020 will be the year of Linux on my laptop. Is there a crowd favorite tool for automatic backups? The more automatic and low-friction the better, I think. I use Backblaze on my Mac, and I see that Duplicity can be configured to back up to their B2 storage system, so there’s some appeal there, but I’m curious what other people are using that they like.

6 Likes
#286

i use Timeshift, which is so transparent once configured, that once forgot i had it set up to automatically backup /home on a certain usb drive, that i hadn’t plugged in for a while and was wondering what process was hogging my CPU and forbbiding me to eject said drive.

For “daily backups” I tend to prefer scripts with a few rsync lines, consciously backing up work in progress directories as a ritual at the end of a session.

5 Likes
#287

I have a daily Timeshift for the /home folder, and use LuckyBackup for audio, documents, etc etc.

1 Like
#288

I second the rsync vote–for me this is usually textbooks, pictures, and other non-code-related items. Since most of what I work on are text files, everything generally ends up in a git repository at the end of a session.
My configuration files for window managers and services are also in git, so in the event of a stolen computer or other catastrophe I can rebuild my system from scratch quickly.

3 Likes
#289

I have a slightly elaborate setup:

  1. A central always-on server which is the center of a star-configuration with unison. It’s super smooth, instant sync from all nodes, kind of like dropbox, but free, and data are always in my on hands.
  2. Every night a rasberry pi located in a friends closet pulls (with rsync) everything from the central server.
  3. I recently replaced my desktop with a pi4, and one problem is that dropbox (that I depend on for reasons out of my control) doesn’t run on the arm processor. But since dropbox runs on the central server, I sync all files in my dropbox on the server with the pi, actually in a folder called ~/Dropbox, meaning it feels exactly like dropbox is running on the pi.

NB: If you’re not familiar with unison let me say that a) it’s very stable and b) it needs same version of unison on both ends, which I solved by compiling unison from source (git), only dependency is ocaml… And finally (obviously) c) if you wanna play with it, make yourself familiar with it on throw-away data, so a pilot error won’t make you lose all your data :sunglasses:

3 Likes