I have literally zero experience with creating audio, but I want to try something new for me.

I know most people who are “properly” into music production are just using a Mac, because it just works and where a lot of the software is available.

Thing is, I have zero expectations.
I don’t need a lot of features, plug-ins, and whatever. Most stuff will probably just be fine for me.

Heck, I don’t even know what I need in the first place to get a full “stack” of audio production software.

For the start, I’d prefer something simple. Mostly just something where I can arrange a few recorded audio tracks onto each other and maybe edit them a bit. Something where I can record the tracks with my microphone (and some time later maybe an input device like a piano keyboard, e-guitar, etc.) and listen them at the same time, preferably in the same program.

What are your experiences with making music on Linux?
What software would you recommend?

  • Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca
    7·
    1 day ago

    I’m a voice actor and musician, and moved to Linux about a month and a half ago with Ubuntu Studio. I went from using Adobe Audition and Cubase to Reaper and Bitwig, and highly recommend both. Reaper is WAY more powerful than I realized. For FOSS you could try Ardour, I’ve heard good things. Personally I hated it haha, but that may just be because I tried Ardour first after switching to Linux and had the learning curve of both a new OS/audio setup and a new DAW at the same time with a project due day-of.

    The biggest issues I had was just getting audio to work properly. I was stuck using ALSA for a few weeks, which worked but only allows one program to use audio at once. I very much recommend looking into using JACK and setting up pipewire.

    You can absolutely start just recording via mic and editing from there. If you want to hook up instruments, check out midi controllers. Some plugins are extremely helpful for creating a more polished sound like eq, compressors, limiters, etc. If the space you’re recording in doesn’t have the best sound treatment, Reaper has a great noise reduction plugin called ReaFIR. It’s a little more aggressive than I like but works really well (feel free to ask me how to use it if you’re having problems).

    My recommendation is to start with Reaper (it’s got a free trial that you can keep using beyond the end date) and get your hardware working. After that, record a few tracks, throw them together into your DAW of choice, and play around with them.