Any Ubuntu Studio/Ardour Users here?

[DirtDog]

Longtime Logic user here. A buddy I've been collaborating with has convinced me to try Ubuntu Studio. I was able to re-purpose my half-dead MacBook Pro. With this platform, the ol MBP is quite zippy!

Still trying to wrap my head around Jack and other various apps and trying to link my MIDI over USB keyboard(s) and my interface so I can record something. Not as straightforward as it's been with Logic.

Ubuntu Studio/Ardour has lots of flexibility but needs a fairly substantial techie mindset to get up and running and use. My buddy is a former coder and a Linux whiz, so this is straightforward to him. Logic has coddled me all these years and made it simple.

I may just deploy Ardour on my iMac and see if that'll be good enough for collaboration.

Anyone else using Ubuntu Studio and/or Ardour?

 

[cornfarmer]

Tried eons ago on an old slow-assed PC, but it was more of a hassle to get everything to agree w/ each other and work versus just reinstalling Window$ and rolling with Reaper. Buddy of mine collaborated on the code for Ardour IIRC. I'm sure it's come a long way since then, so whenever I hit the wall with my current hardware I might give it another go, but at this point Reaper runs on anything semi-current hardware wise.

For breathing life into really old IBM Thinkpads for basic tasks, Linux/Ubuntu/etc. is the only way to go.

 

[Mcgiver69]

You can try KXStudio which uses Carla and Catia which use Jack but their development make's it easier to use. Plus the distro has been created for audio production.
I'm pretty sure you can get around things easier with KXstudio or even AVLinux.
Check this out for some good intro:
Ardour Basics - YouTube

 

[DirtDog]

Tried eons ago on an old slow-assed PC, but it was more of a hassle to get everything to agree w/ each other and work versus just reinstalling Window$ and rolling with Reaper. Buddy of mine collaborated on the code for Ardour IIRC. I'm sure it's come a long way since then, so whenever I hit the wall with my current hardware I might give it another go, but at this point Reaper runs on anything semi-current hardware wise.

For breathing life into really old IBM Thinkpads for basic tasks, Linux/Ubuntu/etc. is the only way to go.

yep - that's where I'm at: trying to get everything to agree with each other. Links in a chain as it were and I'm not sure which links go where...yet.

I'll check out that link that @Mcgiver69 listed.

 

[Mcgiver69]

You can always use Tracktion which works very well in Linux and Reaper, there's a great community in the Reaper Forums which can even help you setup some of your Windows plugins for use in Reaper and Tracktion.

I have both and use them very often.

Send me a private msg and I can help you in what I can.

BTW by using a distro exclusively setup for audio helps a lot, hence recommending KXStudio or AVLinux, they have taken the time to do the heavy lifting configuring the system so you don't have to.

 

[mikewalker]

Ubuntu studio 18 + Ardour 5 works fine, even on an older AMD A8 machine without a lot of horsepower. I originally had Ustudio 16 and mixbus 4 on it, but the upgrade to U18 KILLED Mixbus4, and a new install of mixbus 5 would subsequently crash on startup. None of the 'known fixes' would fix it, so the machine got Ardour 5 instead, and its been running fine for a couple years now. ( It's the resident pre-production DAW at my drummer/songwriter friend's place a couple of hours down the highway...)

 

[DirtDog]

You can always use Tracktion which works very well in Linux and Reaper, there's a great community in the Reaper Forums which can even help you setup some of your Windows plugins for use in Reaper and Tracktion.

I have both and use them very often.

Send me a private msg and I can help you in what I can.

BTW by using a distro exclusively setup for audio helps a lot, hence recommending KXStudio or AVLinux, they have taken the time to do the heavy lifting configuring the system so you don't have to.

I could...but...the idea is to be on the same platform, etc. so my buddy and I can swap project files seamlessly (more or less).

Since I'm fully bought into the Mac/Logic ecosystem, this Ubuntu/Ardour route would only satisfy the "seamless interoperability" requirement of this particular collaboration as he'll never go Mac/Logic. So far, I have an old HP laptop and my old MBP setup with Ubuntu Studio. Both run faster than they ever did but getting the gol-darned individual bits configured to work with each other (Jack, ALSA, Ardour, plug-ins) is confounding me right now. Ardour seems pretty easy to work with once it's configured. It's a DAW, there's only so many variations on a theme.

I'll probably get my buddy back over to my house some time to help with the final configuration now that the basic hardware and software is up and running.

 

[DirtDog]

Ubuntu studio 18 + Ardour 5 works fine, even on an older AMD A8 machine without a lot of horsepower. I originally had Ustudio 16 and mixbus 4 on it, but the upgrade to U18 KILLED Mixbus4, and a new install of mixbus 5 would subsequently crash on startup. None of the 'known fixes' would fix it, so the machine got Ardour 5 instead, and its been running fine for a couple years now. ( It's the resident pre-production DAW at my drummer/songwriter friend's place a couple of hours down the highway...)

Yeah, that's my arrangement right now. My main collaborator is fully into Ubuntu/Ardour, we don't live conveniently close to each other (an hour apart). At this point, it's not a technical problem, it's a user knowledge problem! I know, I know, RTFM!

 

[mikewalker]

... Both run faster than they ever did but getting the gol-darned individual bits configured to work with each other (Jack, ALSA, Ardour, plug-ins) is confounding me right now. Ardour seems pretty easy to work with once it's configured. It's a DAW, there's only so many variations on a theme....

I found it was simplest just to use ALSA, and didn't do jack with JACK. My drummer friend has caught on just fine with Ardour, the main issue we are having is his crappy crappy internet provider giving him massive grief uploading his stem exports to my FTP server in Kansas City. I'm heading down the highway in an hour to go and beat his garbage wifi router into submission with some CAT6 cables...

 

[DirtDog]

I found it was simplest just to use ALSA, and didn't do jack with JACK. My drummer friend has caught on just fine with Ardour, the main issue we are having is his crappy crappy internet provider giving him massive grief uploading his stem exports to my FTP server in Kansas City. I'm heading down the highway in an hour to go and beat his garbage wifi router into submission with some CAT6 cables...

Can ya swing by my place on your way back?

 

[Mcgiver69]

In all honesty the best way is for only one person to keep the main project and just receive a bounced stem with all the other instrument for you to record to and then send him/her your raw track or your processed track. Then the project holder can add that bounced track to the project. That way you can use any DAW you feel comfortable with.

No biggie.

 

[DirtDog]

In all honesty the best way is for only one person to keep the main project and just receive a bounced stem with all the other instrument for you to record to and then send him/her your raw track or your processed track. Then the project holder can add that bounced track to the project. That way you can use any DAW you feel comfortable with.

No biggie.

and....that's what we've decided to do!

Although I got Ardour up and running on my repurposed/half-dead MacBook Pro and my interface working in that environment, I find my creative workflow is best within the platform I know (Logic). We've been sharing stems and bounced tracks for the last couple of weeks.

 

[Mcgiver69]

and....that's what we've decided to do!

Although I got Ardour up and running on my repurposed/half-dead MacBook Pro and my interface working in that environment, I find my creative workflow is best within the platform I know (Logic). We've been sharing stems and bounced tracks for the last couple of weeks.

Yeah that's the way to go, remember the best DAW is the one you know. No good wasting your time fiddling with knobs, menus and options when you should be making music.

 

[Ulf_Hansson]

In all honesty the best way is for only one person to keep the main project and just receive a bounced stem with all the other instrument for you to record to and then send him/her your raw track or your processed track. Then the project holder can add that bounced track to the project. That way you can use any DAW you feel comfortable with.

No biggie.

That is what I found out is the best as well. Working on a shared project would be nice, but merging changes from different participants is not what (most) DAWs are designed to do. Plain wav files is the way to go!

This also allows me to stay in Tracktion (which I happen to prefer), even though most friends run Logic and the studios I work with use PT.