I’ve been considering running Ubuntu because I’ve gotten tired of/ fed up with Windown and OSX. I want to try the Linux route. From anybody who’s tried it. How is it?
I am! Seems to be running all nicely though I can’t work out how to get anything real time priority atm which is a pain. Not that it actually matters… Just might be nice.
Running on ubuntu with xfce. Only real issue is that I don’t seem to get any mouse-over tooltips… Not sure what’s going on there.
I’ve got Renoise running on my Ubuntu Linux laptop.
Well before that used it on a Ubuntu PC. A that time I had a soundblaster live! card, so I used it nearly in real time with JACK.
No, since I only have an internal soundcard on my notebook, I use ALSA. Don’t know if it’s real-time or anything, but it suits me for recording notes from my MIDI keyboard and for line-in recording.
The bad thing is that you have to follow the tutorials on how to use VST/VSTi on Linux.
But as for me, I can live without 'em. Having such tools makes you really lazy, and uncreative.
I had a dozen of VSTi when I ran Renoise on Windows 7. But it was rather boring for me. You have to master one particular VSTi, so you can make what you want from it, and not just using a bunch of cool presets.
Running renoise under Ubuntu here, pretty stable and cool. though, there are few VSTs but I think it’s not a big limit (except if you want to do “special” things like Orchestra or something else, but you could probably run some Orchestral VST under wine (it enables you to run a lot of w$ndows VSTs)
For what I do (hobby music) I’m pretty happy about renoise.
Another linux user here. I’ve used renoise on both linux and windows - when I was using windows I just used to get VST meltdown, but I don’t have that problem on linux! Loomer, LinuxDSP and Calf plugins are pretty sweet. Plus I can sample my hardware and other native linux instruments (using Jack).
Also, if I need to grab a sound from a windows VST I just load REAPER (using wine) and record the sound from there. Having said that, I don’t really do that too often any more.
I’ve run renoise on Linux Mint 8, Crunchbang and Arch (which is my favoured distro), using XFCE, Kernel 3.0 (realtime kernel 3.0 is still in testing I think) and JACK. I like lightweight desktop environments.
I’ve probably been more productive on renoise in linux than in windows, but that’s just how my crazy mind is wired.
one thing which disturbes me a lot when using Renoise under Linux is the lack of PulseAudio support: lots of times my PC completely froze because I opened a website with a Flash animation which tried to steal audio from ALSA, which Renoise was using
Oh, that’s a thing that sometimes really gets on my nerves too 
Flash is evil! 
i thought that ALSA dmix could solve this, by allowing multiple applications to use the audio stream… haven’t tried it out yet though, music on Linux is still unexplored territory for me.
consider using JACK. You can easily route pulseaudio to JACK and the problem is gone
This works very well, and is a very convenient way for grabbing samples from youtube etc.
I have tried routing PA through JACK in the past. Honestly, I don’t remember if I actually made it work, but I remember that something still annoyed me (maybe the need for some motivation killing procedure in order to start the configuration?). Maybe now it is a simpler task to perform
There’s a pulseaudio to JACK module, but on some realtime kernels it can cause pulseaudio to crash intermittently. Here’s the fix for it:
create a file ~/.pulse/daemon.conf
Add the following line to the file:
rlimit-rttime=-1
Runs extremely well over here under Fedora 14 with a rt kernel from Planet CCRMA and JACK.
JACK is the key actually. I can run most of my Native Instruments “player” VSTs (using vsthost) and route the output into Renoise. JACK is so good, there’s even a Windows version.
arch linux user here. been using renoise on linux exclusively since the first betas.
non-rt kernel, NI audio4dj interface (want a komplete audio 6), 5ms latency with jack. dwm for the window management.
pulseaudio routes to and from jack. never had a problem, even skype (!!) works properly.
jack is the best thing ever. pulseaudio is awful.
I’m running Arch too, with kernel-ck 3.0. I used to run pulseaudio on mint, but I’ve never bothered to install it since I moved over.
oh, con’s got BFS done for 3.0! i’mma get up on that.
I use linux for work (I’m a developer), and also for audio – I agree that is not always easy to setup a good system, but works for me with my
firewire interface etc
Windows, Mac? nah, not for me sorry (no flames intended)
@Tehnik: from my own experience, i tend to agree with you. however, i can give you 3 reasons why people choose to do audio-production on Linux:
- their main OS is Linux
- it actually works for them
- they enjoy a challenge
I was a linux user before getting into messing with audio. My experiences with audio on linux have been pretty straightforward.
I’ve used windows too, including Windows 7. I didn’t pay for it though, because I have an Microsoft Developer Network account (paid for by my employer), and I can get Microsoft operating systems from there (I also have access to the full version of Visual Studio). I first had a stint with Windows 7 back when it was a beta.
Using Linux is my personal preference, partly because it looks different to what I have at work! But I like the Linux scene in general too, and I’d still be using it regardless of whether I was into audio or not.
Would I recommend a Windows user moving to Linux just for audio? Absolutely not! But I would say if any current linux users want to have a go at doing music on linux, then go ahead, there’s plenty of advice and discussion around to support them.
well put 
Routing pulseaudio through jackd was pretty straight forward on elementaryOS jupiter. This probably applies to all ubuntu based distributions after maveric. I thought there was a thread specifically for pulseaudio but I could only find this thred so I post this here.
All I had to do was install pulseaudio jack modules (pulseaudio-module-jack in ubuntu and such) and add following to /etc/pulse/default.pa
### JACK modules ###
load-module module-jack-sink channels=2 channel_map=front-left,front-right
load-module module-jack-source channels=2 channel_map=front-left,front-right
I also had to edit /etc/asound.conf as described here to make alsa applications like flash work