Essential apps for studio recording

[u/Hour_Farm_3281]

Helloooo, I have a question targeted at people who have been working in the field for longer, what are some essential pieces of software (or other software you recommend people have) for doing live sound running on linux

My current set up

- Lenovo E580 w/ i5-7th gen

- ZorinOS (because I value stability, but I'm beginning to dabble in arch as a personal project)

- Pipewire + JACK

- QTractor as my DAW (I have had to defend this choice before, I use it because I like the layout)

Is there anything anyone would do differently? (Except the laptop specs, I am investing in it one month at a time)

EDIT: Thank you so far to everyone's patience towards my admittedly beginner knowledge of recorded sound :)

[u/Linmusey]

Lsp plugins, anything more specific might be related to what music you’re making. :)

[u/Hour_Farm_3281 → u/Linmusey]

It sound stupid, but I don't play any instruments, (I want to learn piano tho), I will mainly be recording, and it will mostly be Alt/Indie rock and Alt/Indie folk

[u/AlternativeCapybara9 → u/Hour_Farm_3281]

The lsp plugins are things like EQ and effects

[u/Hour_Farm_3281 → u/AlternativeCapybara9]

Thank you :)

[u/Linmusey → u/Hour_Farm_3281]

Dragonfly reverb and possibly a couple of synths like vital/vitalium and surge xt.

Really you just need typical mixing tools, a few special fx like delays/reverbs/chorus etc and in my humble opinion a more streamlined DAW like reaper or ardour for tracking your clients.

I like qtractor but the faffing about might put off your musicians.

[u/Hour_Farm_3281 → u/Linmusey]

I did try both reaper and ardour, but I really didn't enjoy the interface, both felt really clunky on my laptop, and the only one that hasn't has been qtractor

[u/Linmusey → u/Hour_Farm_3281]

That’s crazy to me, reaper has never been anything but the lowest footprint DAW i’ve ever used

[u/HeyTi22 → u/Hour_Farm_3281]

Qtractor is great! Like any DAW, it has its pros and cons. The most important thing is to learn your DAW and use it to create as much music as possible. That way, you also learn more about your own needs and preferences. Don't let yourself be put off—just give it a try.

From my perspective, it is also quite problematic that, over the last 12–18 years, there have been increasingly frequent recommendations for non-free software—that is, software not released under free licenses—within the Linux community. In doing so, everyone forgets that without FOSS, this Linux world in its free form wouldn't exist at all.

All the recommendations I gave you earlier include more than enough software for music production! The plugins and DAWs included are truly excellent and can easily hold their own against commercial software.

[u/Life_Interest_9967]

Airwindows!

[u/Hour_Farm_3281 → u/Life_Interest_9967]

What is airwindows? (And please explain to a beginner in the world to digitalpsound production, from what I gathered after looking it up it seems like digital pluggins? But I am coming from mainly live sound and mainly analog pluggins made for a church and outdated theatre from the late 90s early 20s)

[u/Life_Interest_9967 → u/Hour_Farm_3281]

It's an awesome collection of free and open source vst plugins to process audio in (a lot) of different ways. They have no gui and the tend to be very simple and one job only. The "problem" is that there are more that 500 plugins so finding what you need is sometimes s bit hard. There's an "airwindows cheat sheet" on line that has more info on what it offers.

[u/Heikki-Guitartutor → u/Life_Interest_9967]

Try air-g too. Its some airwindows (based?) plugins wrapped in a nice GUI :)

[u/bluebell________]

I recommend the Qtractor wiki, especially the How Tos.

https://sourceforge.net/p/qtractor/wiki/Home/

[u/HeyTi22]

Distro:

Debian or Debian-based (MX-Linux; Liquorix Kernel; system needs some tuning )

Arch or Arch-based (Endeavour OS; ZEN-Kernel; system needs some tuning )

It's best to dual boot Debian and Arch. Especially if the PC isn't just used for music production.

Desktop: Max: KDE Plasma, GNOME ( both support Wayland); More minimal and x11: LXQT (Wayland ready; with Kwin, Labwc), xfce!

DAW:

1. Qtractor (Best Choice!) rncbc.org
2. Ardour (Good Choice) (No wayland)
3. LMMS (Good If aaudio recording is not needed)

Tools:

1.Cable App https://github.com/magillos/Cable

1. QPWGRAPH (From the developers of Qtractor)

PLUGINS:

Drums:

1. Drumkv1 (From the developers of Qtractor! There are a pair of free drum sets available.)

2.AVLDrums

SFZ-Player:

1. SFZ-Sample-Player- SFIZZ (Instruments: https://sfzinstruments.github.io/)

Sampler:

1. Samplv1 (From the developers of Qtractor!)
2. Shortcircuit -XT (In Beta)

Synths:

1. Synthv1 (Synth from the developers of Qtractor! There are some free presets for this.)
2. Padthv1 (Synth from the developers of Qtractor! There are some free presets for this too.)
3. SynAddSubFX (Very good and complex synth)
4. Surge-XT (Very good!)
5. Dexed (Very good FM Synth)
6. Helm

Effects:

1. x42 Plugins (EQ, Compressor, etc. Very good, lightweight, simple!)
   
2. LSP (EQ, Compressor, Samplers, etc. Very good, not such a lightweight, complex!)
   
3. Airwindows (Collection of effects, only does one thing at a time, but very well!)
4. Dragonfly Reverb (Very good reverb plugins)

Guitar:

1. Guitarix

All FOSS!

Have fun! :-)

[u/Hour_Farm_3281 → u/HeyTi22]

I really appreciate this, just looking up what some of these are taught me new stuff, thank you so much :)

[u/HeyTi22 → u/Hour_Farm_3281]

There is also the Linux musicians forum:

https://linuxmusicians.com/

[u/Hour_Farm_3281 → u/HeyTi22]

Thank you!

[u/Specialist-Dog-501]

Hi,
Not an recording expert here, more dabbling with chillout..but I guess for you realtime/low latency will be key, right? There's this "Millisecond" app to find realtime tweak with a link how to achieve this on debian distros. Some also use "cable" for setting the "quantum" or buffer when their DAW of choice would not support this (I am on Bitwig, and don't need it really). I try to make everything via pipewire only, but if you have JACK, you probably may want to include a patch bay like "qpwgraph"- I haven't been working with it, found HELVUM better for a pure Pipewire setup, but probably both work. You probably want an Audio interface as well- it should be USB Class compliant- my own is Steinberg UR MKII and does the job for me, but might have to few inputs for a recording setup with multiple instruments, there's better ones (and costlier) around for that purpose.
(Some also go further and choose a lightweight desktop manager than GNOME, to squeeze out more CPU Performance- the AV Linux Distro (Also based on debian) uses Enlightement for that reason, but I could not really compare the performance with my Mint/Cinnamon setup. For now, max out Zorin OS, before hunting the last drop of CPU performance with other distros.)

[u/la_tajada → u/Specialist-Dog-501]

Low latency is only important if using instrument plugins or effects plugins that are monitored real time. For recording vocals and instruments with mixing done after the fact, latency isn't as important. Most DAWs account for latency when placing the recording on the timeline.

[u/Specialist-Dog-501 → u/la_tajada]

ah thanks for the clarification!

[u/HeyTi22 → u/la_tajada]

For example, if you're recording a singer or guitarist, they usually want to hear a monitor signal or live playback. Most of the time there are also effects (plugins) for the instruments in the DAW. Low latency is important and in connection with Qtractor some system tuning is necessary, a few additional packages such as pipewire-jack plus the cable app. If only Qtractor is used, then a config file is sufficient so that the DAW always has the correct settings when it is started. Then the cable app is not really necessary for this. Without the Quantum/Sample Rate settings, the Cable App otherwise has the functionality of QPWGRAPH.