03-21-2017, 01:49 PM
I'm not suggesting that anybody should switch to Linux, but as somebody who's already familiar with its ins and outs, I've been poking around with its audio utilities for a number of years now, and over the last few years it has finally gotten to the point that I feel like I can be productive. Ardour started supporting MIDI as of version 3 a few years back, and the support has become progressively better in versions 4 and 5. From what I can tell about Reaper, Ardour seems to finally have (roughly) feature parity. Also, it used to be that you had to run the JACK sound server to do any serious audio production on Linux, but now Ardour will work without it, which eliminates a serious barrier to entry.
As far as plugins go, for orchestral stuff I don't really want much more than a sampler, decent reverb, and stereo width/pan. LinuxSampler is the clear choice for the sampler and the width/panner is built in to Ardour. While I still prefer hibiki (which I can use with the carla-win64-bridge), a combination of TAP reverberator + Invada Early Reflection Reverb works when I want to use only native plugins. For other types of music, there are a number of fun Linux-native plugins an apps like guitarix, rakarrack, bristol, zynaddsubfx, etc.
Linux has also gotten progressively more user friendly over the last decade. While I don't think it's just that I've become more familiar, I will say that the ability to "look under the hood" has been highly valuable to me; when something goes wrong, I can usually figure out how to fix it. When I'm using a Windows computer, and to some extent even Mac, I don't know how to fix things when they're broken, other than reboot, maybe reinstall the app, and possibly even reinstall the OS.
So again, I don't think I'm going to convince anybody to switch to Linux, nor do I think it's a good idea for somebody who already has an established workflow, but I can offer encouragement and some mentoring to anybody who is interested in exploring audio production on Linux.
As far as plugins go, for orchestral stuff I don't really want much more than a sampler, decent reverb, and stereo width/pan. LinuxSampler is the clear choice for the sampler and the width/panner is built in to Ardour. While I still prefer hibiki (which I can use with the carla-win64-bridge), a combination of TAP reverberator + Invada Early Reflection Reverb works when I want to use only native plugins. For other types of music, there are a number of fun Linux-native plugins an apps like guitarix, rakarrack, bristol, zynaddsubfx, etc.
Linux has also gotten progressively more user friendly over the last decade. While I don't think it's just that I've become more familiar, I will say that the ability to "look under the hood" has been highly valuable to me; when something goes wrong, I can usually figure out how to fix it. When I'm using a Windows computer, and to some extent even Mac, I don't know how to fix things when they're broken, other than reboot, maybe reinstall the app, and possibly even reinstall the OS.
So again, I don't think I'm going to convince anybody to switch to Linux, nor do I think it's a good idea for somebody who already has an established workflow, but I can offer encouragement and some mentoring to anybody who is interested in exploring audio production on Linux.