Complaints and a little hope

DISCLAIMER: This post is an exaggerated rant fueled by fatigue, disappointment and a little bit of jealousy, not really an objective description of the state of affairs in Linux audio.


Whenever my good friend Rikard comes around with his laptop, I get both inspired and a bit put off. Why? Well, Rikard is an Apple user, and frankly, seeing him operating software like Ableton Live and VDMX almost makes me regret all those hours I've spent setting up JACK and Ardour. There is simply no software to match that stuff for Linux. Not in simplicity, nor stability, nor GUI design - simply put, in all-round awesomeness. For music making in Linux, there are a few decent options depending on what you want to do, but most of it feels quite old fashioned, especially considering all the command line tinkering it (still) takes to make it all work. As for VJing software, I haven't seen anything that looks even remotely up-to-date.

Don't get me wrong. I'm quite proud of what the FLOSS community has done, even though I haven't contributed a lot to it myself. Having witnessed the distros get more user friendly (whithout sacrificing robustness and freedom) and also the evolution of Hydrogen, Ardour et al has been a thrill. I'm very happy with Linux in everyday use (surfing the web, listening to music, editing documents, managing photos and so on) and as a working environment (for web development). I prefer its openness, its community-based development and the philosophy behind it to any proprietary system.

But whereas nowadays most of the system works quite painlessly out of the box, JACK and his friends still need more expertise, or at least a lot of time and patience (as in my case), to set up: sifting through countless forum threads and HOWTO:s, waiting around for answers in chatrooms, learning ever more BASH commands takes time. Yes, the community support is quite remarkable but its reach is still limited. It can't eliminate all the effort needed to get a working music making environment.

Rikard fires up Ableton Live and it just works, even when he uses it with his integrated sound card. After having changed permissions to /dev/raw1394, started the JACK daemon with the appropriate parameters and fired up Ardour, I might demonstrate to him that it doesn't even crash so often nowadays! And my latest finding, the more light-weight audio sequencer Qtractor, can handle an audio sample library, but it habitually crashes upon opening its own project files. I probably couldn't convince him to switch systems.

Yes, I'm aware that I might be doing something wrong. Maybe I could make JACK, Ardour and Hydrogen work like a happy family. But then I haven't yet touched upon issues of functionality, intuitiveness or GUI:s. Ardour and Hydrogen are pretty good in this field, even though they don't fill all my needs, but many other applications are either unfinished, unfit for my purposes or just a pure mess. And the hands-on creativity of Live (or even Sony Acid, which was a favorite of mine when I still used Windows) is nowhere to be found.

So where am I going with this? I would like to support those who work hard on making music and audio apps for Linux better. It just feels like I spend a lot more time setting up the system than actually making music. Maybe in five, ten or fifteen years things will have changed. But what to do until then? I constantly feel I am missing out on actual creativity.

I have decided to give music making with Linux a fair chance - I will try to set aside some time after summer just to tweak JACK and try out more programs. I will try to enlist the help of more Linux savvy friends and really get into it. And if I am still dissatisfied after that, I will consider the options.