note: migrated over from my website at https://yellows.ink/linux_audio_prod

The state of digital music production on Linux

The setup

Distro	EndeavourOS rolling
Linux Kernel	linux-zen 5.15.6-zen2-1-zen
ALSA versions	alsa-card-profiles 1:0.3.40-1 alsa-firmware 1.2.4-2 alsa-lib 1.2.5.1-3 alsa-plugins 1:1.2.5-2 alsa-topology-conf 1.2.5.1-1 alsa-ucm-conf 1.2.5.1-1 alsa-utils 1.2.5.1-1 lib32-alsa-lib 1.2.5.1-1 lib32-alsa-plugins 1.2.5-1
Pipewire versions	gst-plugin-pipewire 1:0.3.40-1 pipewire 1:0.3.40-1 pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.40-1 pipewire-jack 1:0.3.40-1 pipewire-pulse 1:0.3.40-1 wireplumber 0.4.5-2
Wine versions	wine-gecko 2.47.2-2 wine-mono 7.0.0-1 wine-staging 6.22-1

Setting up audio apps - The natives

There are two native Linux audio applications I decided to try. The first of these was LMMS, which is honestly too unusable for me, but otherwise fine

The second of these was REAPER. This integrated perfectly fine with Pipewire through ALSA, JACK, and PulseAudio. REAPER works beautifully, is nice and fast, and pretty light. It also happens to be pretty much the most powerful DAW available - have you ever seen a REAPER power-user???

REAPER had one drawback for me though - aside from me personally not finding it as “musical” as some others like FL or Reason - it failed to find any of my VST plugins.

Had I got some Linux VSTs, this would work absolutely fine - indeed REAPER has the widest plugin format support of any other software I tested, however Windows VSTs under Wine did not display (reasonably).

Also to note is that LMMS theoretically can load Windows VSTs - the VeSTige plugin should be able to load a Windows VST given the path to the dll, however it didn’t work for me, and last time I’d tried it, the UI had been very very buggy anyway.

Setting up audio apps - The Windows DAWs

Every DAW I tried installed and launched out of the box on Wine, which was a nice surprise. In addition I encountered no issues with audio playback quality - No xruns whatsoever. In addition, both Reason and FL were capable of loading and using VSTs fine.

iZotope RX 8 installed, however insta-crashes on launch. This also causes the RX VSTs to fail to load in other hosts.

REAPER on Wine

REAPER runs fine under Wine, and only has one minor graphical issue (the scrollbars cant decide if they should look REAPER-ey or Windows-ey, and settle on glitching between the two).

Audio playback works, and performance is good. VST plugins, however crashed it. Hence I did not test further. Anyway, if you’re using REAPER, you should probably just use the Linux build and wrestle with a bridge such as LinVST.

Reason 12

I have long had a soft spot for Reason, since I started using it a few years back (on Reason 10 Lite). So I was excited to find that the latest version installs fine on Wine and loads up too.

There are a few issues, though: first, you cannot click the menu bar. This can be worked around, though, by pressing alt once, then down once. You can now use the arrows to navigate the menu, and the mouse mostly works too.

More annoyingly, lots of text in the UI is white on a white background. The best you can do to partially fix this is enable either the Blue or Dark theme.

I encountered no issues with VST support, however (presumably due to the DRM encrypting project files (maybe? - dont quote me on this!)), not only could I not save projects, I could not save presets either.

Importing MIDI worked, but each track took a very long time to import, before showing an error box that an assertion failed (that could thankfully be safely ignored).

The HD makeover new in version 12 still looks just as stunning under Linux, though with some details like the spinning fan on the back of the Redrum lagging performance a little.

I wondered if I could get around the issues with the Reason DAW and still make use of its rack in other DAWs, but the VST3 Reason Rack Plugin crashes instantly.

FL Studio 20

FL Studio is a frightfully popular DAW with a nice UI, an unconventional pattern-based workflow, a nice light engine, and quite the dedicated community. Oh, and it can drive Razer Chroma devices too so your keyboard can vibe out to your tunes.

FL Studio works pretty much perfectly, if a little heavier. When you boot it up for the first time, you are dropped straight into the demo project (created with only built in plugins) and it works great. The mixer is responsive, animations are oh so fluid, and the playlist snaps satisfyingly along at 60fps as the playhead advances.

There is only one single issue that stops the FL experience being literally identical to on Windows - the main window’s handling of mouse events. While FL can be resized fully under Windows, on Linux, it doesn’t seem to grasp the idea that it can be smaller than your entire screen.

UPDATE: I went back into FL to do some testing while writing this, and it turns out that FL just thinks its maximised. Hit the titlebar button to make it windowed and it works literally flawlessly - identical to on Windows. You may wish to use a WM not a DE to make it automatically nice and big despite being windowed.

Ableton Live

I didn’t try Live. According to Wine appdb it works fine, if much heavier like FL and minor glitches. So yeah.

Conclusion

In conclusion, audio production on Linux is painfully close to being really really great, but for that to happen I think we need one of the following three to happen:

• (Most likely) Some effort from the team at Cockos: working windows VST bridging in REAPER would make using it a very viable choice, and running natively on Linux means it will outperform DAWs on any other OS 90% of the time, plus it can take full advantage of Pipewire (likely indirectly via JACK), for fun routing and low latency.

• (Pretty unlikely) Some effort from the Wine team: somehow make FL and Ableton use the full extent of your CPU - reduce DSP overhead somehow

• (Comically unlikely) A huge effort from the KVM/QEMU devs and Linux Kernel contributors, and possibly Microsoft: make Windows KVMs have usable performance. Yeah that’s not happening.