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Comment by montalbano | Hacker News Reader

Music production software is the only thing keeping me from going 100% Linux. Unfortunately this guide doesn't help me much with the key issues

I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't) and the DAW that I use (Reaper) only has experimental Linux support. I would guess the Linux compatibility of other DAWs is worse. Audacity can only get you so far.

I would guess many of the audio plug-ins I rely on within Reaper would also have issues running on Linux.

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> I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't)

Most of the RME HDSP/HDSPe PCI/PCIe cards work on Linux using the ALSA snd-hdsp or snd-hdspm drivers. The ADI-2 can use the generic Linux USB audio driver AFAIK.

Interesting I will look into this more now. Given the other comment suggesting that Reaper is stable it looks like two of my main impediments to using Linux may be voided. Plug-in stability and cross-compatibility is my last unknown then.

If you have 3rdparty professional-grade plugins from NI (Massive, FM8), Xferrecords (Serum), Fabfilter (some of their amazing data vis use win/mac native graphics libraries), Arturia, etc, then you still aren't going to be able to use Linux as they don't build plugins for that platform.

> you still aren't going to be able to use Linux as they don't build plugins for that platform.

You can still use Linux, but you won't be able to use those plugins.

Many studios use USB interfaces these days and the majority of them work on Linux. I'm the lead developer of Ardour and for the last couple of years I've been using a MOTU UltraLite AVB, which works out of the box (24 channels of I/O, and a totally web-based configuration utility).

Many, many production-grade devices (another example: the Behringer (Midas) X32) work right of the box. The fact that the iPad did not allow drivers forced almost all audio interface manufacturers to clean up their act and get fully compliant with the USB audio specification. The side effect of this is that they Just Work (TM) with Linux too.

(*) the one issue is that this particular device requires a specific version of the firmware to avoid a bug that only shows up on Linux. This is not true in general.

Hi Paul, I just wanted to thank you for all the effort that legends like you, Rui Nuno Capela, Nasca Octavian Paul, and others have put into getting the Linux music ecosystem to where it is. Thanks for helping us play music (when we're not programming)!

Fyi, been using Reaper on Linux for over a year now and it has been incredibly stable.

Good to hear, what sound card are you using? Also what plug-in formats? If more than stereo in/out number of connections, do you have access to them all within Reaper?

Most of my plugins are VST but many are home-brewed and only just about stable on my windows machine.

I use a Lexcion Alpha + Line 6 Helix. A total of 10in/10out, all accessible in Reaper.

I mostly use Reaper stock plugins but there are a number of vst3's compiled for linux and I've written a few of my own using vst3 which work well.

You could use a plugin host connected up with jack for others but I haven't tried that much.

> I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't)

hum strange, I've been using a multiface II on linux for almost 10 years without issue

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