Linux DAW's and software? [x-post between MMM and tuning]

Hi all, and 'scuse the cross-posting, but as both of these lists have
been slightly on the inactive side recently, I wanted to make sure at
least -someone- saw this... :)

I've been discussing with Keenan on IRC how the Linux/free software
community might be significantly better for making microtonal music
than the commercial community, since they're more likely to include
experimental features like MTS and custom accidental support and such.
However, as far as I know, nobody's laid out any sort of integrated
workflow that demonstrates how to make microtonal music using Linux -
whether it's all in one DAW (like Ardour or something) vs split
between a few programs or what have you.

So I wanted to ask, does anyone have experience with making microtonal
music on Linux? What programs do you use? Does anyone have a decent
workflow set up?

I was thinking of compiling a list of different Linux DAWs and seeing
how they compare with the following features

AUDIO
1) has audio support
2) has VST and/or AU and/or RTAS support
3) can export to or import from other commercial DAWs

MIDI
1) has MIDI sequencing support
2) has MIDI realtime recording support
3) has some way to route MIDI output to custom softsynths
4) has MTS support
5) has OSC support
6) has some sort of notation editing capabilities
6a) notation has custom accidental support

I doubt there's any single program on the planet which has all of
these things, but there may be a few linux programs which have a good
amount of them, letting you come up with a good workflow that way.
Anyone have any insight? I was gonna spend some time comparing Ardour,
LMMS, Rosegarden, and whatever else is out there with these things
later.

-Mike

Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> So I wanted to ask, does anyone have experience with
> making microtonal music on Linux? What programs do you
> use? Does anyone have a decent workflow set up?

I've used Rosegarden with ZynAddSubFX and Audacity. It
worked reasonably well, but I didn't like Rosegarden's
interface as much as Cubasis Audio. I wish I could find
something like Cubasis Audio on Linux. I don't think I got
Rosegarden's audio functionality to work. At least, I
didn't use it, I only wanted a MIDI sequencer. ZynAddSubFX
can record its audio directly.

These days, I've stopped using Rosegarden because I
upgraded to a version that doesn't run comfortably on my
machine. If you have something more powerful to run it on
it should still work for you. I can see it would be an
advantage to write music in Lilypond, then bounce it into
Rosegarden to edit and clean up the performance, and maybe
bounce it back into Lilypond for printing. I haven't
looked into hacking Rosegarden to work with different
notations.

> I was thinking of compiling a list of different Linux
> DAWs and seeing how they compare with the following
> features

I'm still not sure what a DAW is. I did look for a
sequencer a few years ago.

> AUDIO
> 1) has audio support
> 2) has VST and/or AU and/or RTAS support
> 3) can export to or import from other commercial DAWs

I remember certain applications not explicitly supporting
VST for legal reasons. But it's possible to run a LADSPA
to VST bridge. I see there's been movement on this front:

http://linux-sound.org/plugins.html

DSSI was an unimaginative format that duplicated the MIDI
pitch model. That's fine if you're working with MIDI, of
course, all you do is lie about what the pitches mean and
tune at the synth level. But what would be really nice is
to have a synth format that took flexible pitches and so
that you could do the tuning at a higher level.

> MIDI
> 1) has MIDI sequencing support
> 2) has MIDI realtime recording support

I remember Rosegarden being the only thing I could find to
do these adequately. Maybe that's changed now. Let me
know what you find.

> 6) has some sort of notation editing capabilities
> 6a) notation has custom accidental support

Once you have something free that you think is good, we can
look at adding (6a).

Graham

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Tobias Schlemmer
<Tobias.Schlemmer@tu-dresden.de> wrote:
>
> I've some experience, but maybe not in the sense you have in mind: I'm the current developer of Mutabor http://www.math.tu-dresden.de/~mutabor/. Packages for certain distributions are availlable (just ask for them). Though it is not originally a Unix program it fits more or less into the Unix philosophy: Do one thing and do it well. Our aim is retuning music including mutable tunings.

Thanks, looks very interesting! Are there any screenshots of it? I
can't download it until my Mint install is up and running again,
unfortunately.

> As I already said: The unix philosophy is different. So you are propably right. But the problem can be solved in another way: JACK is an audio framework that routes audio and MIDI data. Clients can be Sequencers, ports, audio players/recorders and many more. One feature is that certain plugins can ask other clients to provide there session settings and to store them. There exist such programs that store and restore your session, but I haven't used them so I don't know much about the real challenges with them. (BTW. Jack is availlable for other OSs too).

So is the idea that it enables multiple applications to communicate
with one another? Does this actually work, in practice, to have a MIDI
sequencer routing its output to a standalone softsynth which then goes
into an audio-only DAW, or something?

I'm really curious how possible it is to use Linux to make
high-quality, professional audio - which I don't think should be hard.
As long as there's some way to run VST plugins and get audio and MIDI
all working together, whether it's in one program or multiple
programs, it should be possible to do professional work.

-Mike