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Re: wiki - list of free software for audio
I've tried pretty much every linux DAW over the past five years in the search for something that does what I want, and the hunt continues. Ardour is close, and QTractor is also up there amongst my personal favorites. I'd have to agree about rosegarden, LMMS and MuSe all looking and feeling dated, but that's mostly because they all use dated GUI toolkits. There's a new promising project called OpenOctvae. One of the components, open octave midi, is basically a fork of Rosegarden with the audio and score editing removed and the UI tweaked slightly to improve sequencing workflow. Until Ardour hits version 3 with full midi support, a combination of Ardour 2.8 with Open Octave Midi looks to be a very powerful DAW environment.
This brings me to one of the biggest hurdles I've found that some users face in learning to use Linux as an audio platform. The linux philosophy has traditionally been to shy away from large monolithic programs that do everything and towards smaller purpose built software that can interconnect easily and efficiently. Kind of like a modular synth at the operating system and application level. Once I accepted that, I stopped being so hung up on the concept of a single DAW application. It has in fact opened up a very efficient use of processors for me as well - with quad core processors and JACK2, you can essentially run a number of applications processing an audio feed in parallel and share the processor load. In this way I've been able to have time-stretched 32 channels of sooperlooper running loops of up to 3 or 4 minutes in length and still have processor available to run JACK based effects. Of course this was just a stress test to see what the system could do, but it gives an idea of the advantages of a modular and parallel processing approach.
Maybe Windows or OSX or OpenBSD or AmigaOS or name your OS can do all this. All I know is that I find the time invested in learning linux audio to be well worth it. That of course is the cost of "free" - you have spend the time to learn how to use it well in order to get any benefit from using it at all.
-michael
