Audio, MIDI Workflow Stories?

I love playing with software synthesizers and making music. I’m always drawn to Qtractor, but occasionally use Ardour or LMMS.

And there are so many options for generating cool sounds. Some of my favorites are amsynth, synthv1, and Surge XT.

I’m posting this topic in hopes of learning from others who use Linux audio. What do you use? How do you set it up? What do you make with all of this amazing software?

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Thanks for starting this discussion, and sharing the software you use. I have long wanted to lurk in such a discussion, so here is an encouragement for others to jump in and talk shop. :slight_smile:

Haha that is hilarious. I was starting to fear no one wanted to play. Or even lurk.

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Pipewire… Yay! Whohoo! Cartwheels!..

I was able to create a nice workflow in both KDE and Gnome. Which one do I prefer? KDE or Gnome? … the answer is Yes. Fedora’s default is Gnome and I don’t like to fiddle too much so that’s that.
Ardour/Mixbus is amazing for any kind of live Audio performance or recording. The XT, AVA, x42 with open source plugins create a truly professional environment and sound.
I’ve tried Reaper. Another professional Digital Audio Workstation. It works well on Linux. It now supports LV2 Instruments and effect plug-ins. It has a great online community and great resources. I’ve seen it recording a live show off of the Mixing console. Impressive.
I’ve played around in Muse a bit. My impression is this one is a Dark Horse Contender.
I am well aware of Qtractor but am choked for time.
The problem…Option Shock.
Surge. VCV Rack, Cardinal for Synthesis, (sheesh!). Dexed, Helm… you get the idea.
Oh wait ! did I mention YaBridge with Wine. These facilitate the integration of Windows VST instruments and effects into a Linux environment.
Option Shock… and then relax… I wonder. :nerd_face:
I currently use Ardour for Voice, Guitar and Percussion.
My time is focused in learning Bitwig studio. The Flatpak version in Fedora. It works well. The midi capablilties, internal instruments and devices are awesome.

pipewire… sigh… so grateful.

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Well, my story is that I am struggling to get Audacity working on Fedora 35 for recording podcast with Zoom H1 as a USB mic. F35 (and 36) comes with Audacity 3.0.2. Does the spin ships with the same version as Fedora?

3.0.2 that ships with Fedora didn’t work with default recording and playback devices, so I had to select pipewire explicitly. Then it crashed after 3 minutes, and I had to install the latest 3.1.3 from the website. So far it worked to record without crashing, but exported WAV pitch is higher than original voices. Does anybody has the same experience with Audacity?

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Hi - good to hear from you. I haven’t had that experience - but it sure sounds frustrating. Sorry! Any luck since you posted last? Also, I wonder what kind of computer is it - something unusual, by chance? Or something very new?

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It is Lenovo x250. Nothing unusual. Except maybe unstalled PipeWire. I’d like to tell more about the differences between clean install, but I don’t know how to find that diff.

What is new you generally get from the Releases/35/ChangeSet - Fedora Project Wiki
You can just change the version nr. in URL to navigate to different releases.

I need to find the differences between my installation and clean install including the differences in configuration that I’ve made while trying to troubleshoot different issues.

in reference to the jam lab? Or just some audio settings?

The audio settings have a default config in /usr/share/

With pipe-wire for example you can put the configuration in ~/.config/pipewire … (read header of *.conf file).

Testing you could with two different users. With one you let the config in /usr/share (untouched), with the other one you make changes in ~/.config/… switching users would show you the different config ?!

I don’t know if this would help?

Haven’t noticed the jam tag. I am running plain Fedora (36 now), and given that I would like to see first how Jam Lab is different from plain Fedora 36 install, and then how my system is different from both of these. I would be interested to explore the differences in whole, and then inspect only audio part.

Creating another user in virtual machine can be an option, but I thought that inspecting a config drift should be a solved problem.