this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Back to linux! (lemmy.one)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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For like a month or two I decided, screw it, I am going to use all the programs I cannot use on Linux. This was mostly games and music making software.

I guess it was fun for a bit, tries different DAWs, did not play a single game because no time.

Basically, it was not worth it. The only thing I enjoyed was OneDrive, because having your files available anywhere is dope, but I also hate it because it wants to delete your local files. I think that was on me.

Anyways, I am back. Looking at Nextcloud. Looking at Ardour. I am fine paying for software, but morally I got to support and learn the tools that are available to me and respect FOSS. (Also less expensive... spent a lot on my experiment).

Anyone done this? Abondoned their principles thinking the grass would be greener, but only to look at their feet coverered in crap (ads, intrusive news, just bad UI).

I don't know. I don't necesarily regret it, but I won't be doing it again. What I spent is a sunk cost, but some has linux support, and VSTs for download. So, I shall see.

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[–] donuts@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.

Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.

As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.

Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.

Bitwig isn't open source, but it's fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They've also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.

I've found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I've thrown at it, but it's a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you're new to the concept.

And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.

So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it's worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Studio1 is now running on Linux (using Distrobox at least). Ambisonics and Binaural stuff are what I am mostly interested in, the IME Ambisonic toolkit poorly is not available as a Flatpak, otherwise Ardour would be awesome!

[–] donuts@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've heard good things about Studio1, but I haven't tried it myself.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox...

I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to ~~export~~ save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It's really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don't have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol

*It doesn't work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice, how do you export Distroboxes? I am on Kinoite, funny seems to be quite common in the Lemmy Community.

[–] donuts@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore

I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).

It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again... (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)

Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice! Wait you have Wine in a Distrobox making Windows VSTs work as a module for a Linux DAW? Thats crazy.

Meanwhile I would already be happy flatpakking the IEM ambisonit toolkit, to be a runtime and run with Ardour. I would love to do Ambisonic music, its such an old invention and never used, which is so weird?

[–] donuts@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Uh, yeah... So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:

  1. Its own $HOME, specified using the --home parameter when making a distrobox container.
  2. Wine-staging
  3. Yabridge
  4. Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
  5. A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so's symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
  6. A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container's $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
  7. I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can't remember if that's necessary or not.

Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.

So it's kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it's really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I'd like but it's not too bad), and just make music. :)

[–] DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!

[–] donuts@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah! Don't sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)

The basic yabrigde workflow is:

  1. Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
  2. Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that's probably not fully necessary). If you don't know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that's another story.
  3. Then you run yabridgectl add where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).
  4. And then when you run yabridgectl sync yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into ~/.vst3 or whatever.
  5. Finally you point your DAW of choice to ~/.vst3 or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).

Sadly there's no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it's pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you've got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.

But yeah, I've got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I'm able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.

[–] Teppichbrand@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Or use this video to turn your vanilla distribution into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency, incredible!

[–] DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

I am finally getting around to doing this! I will admit, I had Windows on all of my machines... I first rehabilitated my laptop, and I finally brought back my main desktop from hell.

Running the script. Let's see what my computer becomes!

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Wow, thank you for the guide. I will try it out as soon as I can.

[–] itsralC@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Be sure to check out the README if you're having problems with certain plugins (Kontakt for instance).

[–] DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I know loading VSTs are possible, I just need to figure out how.

[–] SatyrSack@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Check out Zrythm (currently in beta) as a FOSS Bitwig alternative.

https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html

[–] DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Nice!! Linux has so many options for DAWs I never realized.