I just want to share my status going from a illegal OS, VST, etc. Into the world of the free (and allmost free, i bought renoise offcourse).
Jack, Ardour, Calf, these are a few from the many plugins which are used in this distro. The apps are good looking stable and well developed. The latency is minimal using the low latency kernel itś like using Asio on a whole different level. Well i need to go to bed now but meanwhile i uploaded a video on youtube which i edited in ubuntu studio to show a quick overview how i set things up. I use dropbox to keep the instrument and source folder synced with my laptop. So when finished on the desktop i can start on my laptop where i left off. Ok really need to go to bed now (my time to do things like this for myself are sooo irritating limited). Enjoy
I tried that one a few months but for me personally Ubuntu Studio is much more stable and faster. And it just has everything i need. It runs well better then KX on both my desktop and laptop. laptop specs i7 8 gb mem ssd. So it could be hardware specific so for me studio is the best choice… offcourse the appearance options are limited in kx u can click “get more” which is not possible in studio. Also i think kx has a bit more apps embedded.
Kxstudio’s main strength and focus is the repo it provides. The dev is very active in both porting things to linux, as well as patching and recompiling when there is a problem he can fix. You would have a lot more vst plugins to use inside renoise if you used the repo.
I second this about the kxstudio repos. It can bring you a bunch of free plugins and interesting tools to a normal ubuntu installation, no need to install the whole kx. It usually has more recent versions of standard tools than the official ubuntu repos. You can also decide yourself which versions (ubuntu vs kxstudio) of a software to use, its a bit of manual work for each package though.
I use “normal ubuntu” plus kxstudio plus when I need really low latencies a handmade hard rt kernel (was easier to make than it first looks like, you just need a good config tuned by someone who knows how to do it to start with, it allows way better operation than the lowlatency kernels on my system).
The linux way is ok when you restrict yourself to tools available for linux, and pure renoise is such a tool. But you might miss some win/mac vst plugins. Some success to be able to use windows plugins can be made with the airwave win vst wrapper, but I find stuff is not always running stable (depends on the plugin), and is prone to make dropouts in realtime audio on certain actions.
Enjoy being free from ms bloatware & use your slim system for the win!
I’d need time to get used to renoise being split on 1 1/3 monitors.
Don’t forget there’s linux native vsts - the distrho ports (or from kxstudio) like obxd and tal noisemaker, or oxe synth, or commercial stuff like the u-he plugins. Linux is slowly rising in pro audio, very slowly, but with an upward trend.
I had Renoise on Crunshbang linux (now Bunsenlabs Linux) on my quadcore intel machine. I have updated some drivers on my Soundblaster Xi-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty. Renoise and editing was very stable. Now I am using Windows 7 for tracking. Some VSTis eats less cpu power in Windows… But on other hand that Linux was running like on 256mb from my 8GB memory.
I wish that there will be also FreeBSD version in future or support for dual/quad G5 MAC (my fav machine so far).
