Comment by exikyut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exikyut | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Naive, under-researched :) question: what Linux-native program lets me import a bunch of audio tracks, arrange them in a timeline with subsample-level resolution, apply nondestructive edits such as crossfades...

...with a fast, simple UI? :)

So far I've poked at Ardour, but

a) I was pretty sure it was absolute overkill for my simple purposes,

b) The program felt kinda clunky, like if I moved wrong it would crash, and

c) I wasn't sure the program was subsample-accurate.

--

I've pretty much never pursued playing around with audio or music because all the software out there is either undiscoverably obscure, or firmly out of my price range (which is $0, since I a) have no idea if audio editing will even be interesting, and b) don't know what program would be the most appropriate).

After throwing my hands up in the air for the 20th time at Audacity's remarkable sluggishness I stumbled on ReZound (http://rezound.sourceforge.net/ss.shtml) a few years ago and discovered a refreshingly fast tool with VUs that would happily run at 60fps on the ~20 year old machine I was using at the time. (2014 was interesting. I was using an 800MHz AMD Duron with 320MB RAM. And to reiterate, ReZound was completely usable on that machine.)

Sadly, while the most-recent SVN of ReZound does compile on modern Linux, project saving has been broken since the paleolithic era so you have to (re-)export as FLAC to save... and sometimes the edit process subtly injects single-sample gaps of silence which sound like clicks/pops (!), making the program unusable. Not to mention it uses the destructive edit model.

Wish it was in better shape, it's a fairly excellent program.

It's not open source but for your purposes of figuring out if audio editing is for you Reaper could be a nice introduction. It runs on Linux and works pretty similar to most commercial DAWs. You can run its evaluation mode for free indefinitely with a nag screen at startup. I started with that and then graduated to Cubase when I decided I wanted to pursue further.

REAPER runs really very well on Linux, it has to be stated, and is one of the easier DAW's to learn thanks to things like "The REAPER Blog" and "RAPER MANIA" channels on Youtube that really make REAPER great. It is one of the best values for money in the DAW world as well. VERY, very powerful software, great price.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/user/audiogeekzine

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq297H7Ca98HlB5mVFHGSsQ

> Ardour felt kinda clunky, like if I moved wrong it would crash

I'd say Ardour is one of the more mature(re: stable) open-source solutions on linux and has a fair bit of development effort behind it.

Personally usability wise I never quite figured it out, although it seems fairly feature packed (if you can figure it out)

Apparently Qtractor also supports non-destructive audio editing but I haven't really tried it yet.

Aside from that I know this is a thread on open-source, but I will point out Reaper has experimental native Linux builds which I've found to work quite well and Reaper (not $0, but minor nag screen) is also non-destructive.

"I've pretty much never pursued playing around with audio or music because all the software out there is either undiscoverably obscure, or firmly out of my price range (which is $0, since I a) have no idea if audio editing will even be interesting, and b) don't know what program would be the most appropriate)."

Not to be a dick, but it doesn't sound like you have a need to play around with audio or music. People who really want that make it happen, no matter how few tools they have at their disposal.

I totally understand where you're coming from, and to an extent I agree.

I didn't adequately clarify the sentiment I was getting at.

There are a million things I want to do with technology: machine learning, advanced robotics, data science, UI/UX research, networking/homelab experimentation, music/drawing/animation, photography, programming.

Sometimes significant events happen in life that throw you very far away from the path that you'd logically gravitate towards. Sometimes those events make sense; sometimes they don't. One of those happened for me in 1998, when my family realized the only viable resolution to the concerns they'd raised regarding the public school I was attending, would be to home-school. (The school was quick to clarify that it was not legal to transfer between schools.)

In any world, if I did things over I would absolutely have ticked the "[x] sound education" box. I don't understand math. I don't understand electronics. I don't understand a lot of things. I feel very much undone. It took 15 years to finally learn I had high-functioning autism and ADHD, figure out why the public school I'd attended had been so oppressive and condemning, and make sense of why my poor mother's best efforts never seemed to make a dent in my understanding. I'm now trying my best to make up for lost time, albeit without adequate resources.

I've learned that under-resourcedness is generally counterbalanced by having connections, and that a social network - a real, functional, practical one, not the all-thumbs kind you see on interactive TV - is one of the critical components of success in life, especially when (multiple) circumstances beyond your control make you stick out like a sore thumb and make sustenance of equilibrium orders of magnitude harder than the statistical average. But when those very circumstances make socialization and communication difficult, things can become very depressing. I guess the GP was a bit of a rant.

TL;DR, I have a VERY long list of "hey that could be a thing I could be really good at". It's huge. I've carried it for 20 years. I have no idea what I'm concretely good at. And I currently have no way to find out. It's a bit of a catch-22.

(Yes, I really was using a machine with 320MB of RAM in 2014.)

If you're simply working with audio files, then I'd say Audacity is a really good option. A full-fledged DAW is useful if you're working with external plugins and MIDI files. But for basic audio work, Audacity will do well enough.

It's also one of the best supported and mature audio programs around, so stability won't be an issue at all

Audacity works well for that purpose. But not all things are intuitive and the interface looks quite dated to be honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com