SunVox is a really cool piece of software. Tidalcycles and Strudel seem pretty goddam dope as well.
I've been running fl studio thru wine for the past couple years and it works pretty much the exact same. If you already own a copy i'd recommend trying it before buying some different software. Your biggest issue might be running vst's, I was using only stock plugins until last week when I got yabridge set up and am using vital a bit now.
Stick with native apps, audio drivers and passthrough is a pita as is, why further complicate it?
Reaper is my go-to but I come from an Ableton background and it just clicked for me so ymmv.
The nice thing is you can choose, Reaper was not the first software I chose but it's the one I stuck with. I like to do lots of live recordings with some programmed drums, vst plugins, etc. It checks all those boxes really reliably.
I use a Focusrite Solo interface passthrough using AsioForAll (iirc) setup as the driver for it. I can connect my peripherals no problem, using the mic for Teams calls during the workday and headphone jack for daily use when docked. Guitar, other XLR jacks, 1/4" jacks, register fine. I also connect a couple Akai controllers and misc keyboards fine after setting them up.
Additionally, I'm running Arch (btw), Thinkpad lappy docked on a USB c type 110 watt dock. The whole architecture needs to be considered when setting up your machine for the studio. Good luck!!! Ask any questions you can think of if it's helpful.
I'm weird that I use carla as my routing and vst host.
Orca as my sequencer Usb midi to hardware synths
Reaper is the DAW for audio-engineers that is well supported on GNU/Linux.
FL Studio can works well with Wine or VM but its plugins are another story.
A few WebApps worth knowing (might not suit heavy usage):
There is also LMMS but this is more for small hobbyst rather than serious work.
You might wanna try running in a VM or WinBoat and maybe it's worth asking on the CrossOver forum to see how well things run with CO.
To expand upon the point of running Windows VSTs in Linux in FL via WINE, teh initial setup is very, very tedious, as you have ot install all the essential windows dependencies/bloat in order to make all of them run. off the top of my head i can think of .net framework and visual c++ (yes, you will need to install most.all of them, takes quite a while you cna imagine). and enve after that, once you have all your VSTs working (or most of them), one odd WINE update can either cause the GUI of a plugin to not render, leaving you to either go in blind or control the plugin by browsing its parameters (which pray the dev has made them automatable), or less likely but more devastating it just won't work anymore, either by instafreezing your daw, or straight up crashing it. had that happen with Spectral Compressor, it will forever be missed. Lucily subsequent WINE updates can fix the UI break issue, but it'll feel like forever until that update lmao
TLDR if you can deal with maybe a few of your plugins breaking, hopefully getting ifxed after a WINE update, and a chance that one or two plugins just don't run (classic WINE jank), it's pretty much smooth sailing cause FL actually runs pretty damn good in WINE, i'd say shockingly close to native. Only things that don't work for me are the WebView rendered stuff (like diagnostics and gophr but i don't use gophr. A friend of mine got diagnostics to work by installing dotnet and webview2, i already had them installed and it didn't work). WINE can vary from system to system.
Bitwig is the best native software I could find for myself - it's similar to ableton in some ways, but different enough to be unique.
You can also use yabridge to run most windows plugins (including kontakt)
There are two official installation methods for Bitwig: the DEB file (which is used for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu/Mint) and Flatpak (which is used for basically every other Linux distribution).
While you can install Bitwig on Fedora via Flatpak, Yabridge will not work that way (unless things have changed in recent years). You will be able to install Yabridge and any Windows VSTs, but Bitwig will just not actually see them. There is some issue with how Flatpak sandboxes its applications that makes it so they are not able to access VSTs that are installed in the system through Yabridge. You can tinker around with permissions and whatnot using Flatseal and often resolve issues like this, but I did not have any luck doing that to fix my Bitwig/Yabridge problems.
This repo below has a tool that helps in creating a Bitwig installer for Fedora. It converts the official DEB file into an RPM file and installs the necessary prerequisite packages. If you install Bitwig this way, using this RPM file, Bitwig is able to see and use the VSTs that you install using Yabridge.
Reaper works great on linux.
I would suggest giving native DAWs a solid try, if you find something that clicks staying on the native Pipewire/JACK system is so much nicer than window's, on top of the inevitable emulation/translation jankiness. Bitwig and REAPER are the big ones, but depending on your workflow/focus you can find other alternatives. There's also a bunch of native "digital audio gear" that is pretty sweet - check out Cardinal!
Windows VSTs can be tricky, always check if there is a native Linux release, otherwise you will have to run it through some compatibility layer and pray your divinity of choice, although you should have a good number of guides available. I suggest checking out some of the native alternatives here too, for example I use LSP plugins for compressors, EQs, and adjacent things
Reaper is a popular one
Oh boy
reaper is excellent for "regular" music recording, etc. but it lacks a bit if you're into making beats, edm, electro,... then you might wanna look into bitwig, which is basically ableton-like but different and it runs natively on linux (and win & mac). there's also ardour and a few others that are open source or at least free.
Yeah I am making beats, recording only refers to recording vocals. And I never enjoyed Ableton, really
As someone who is a pretty solidly in the open source territory.....
Reaper is great and I have absolutely purchased a license. I'm not often recording music these days, but I will say that anyone I know who is recording music still either uses reaper or is so apple obsessed they use logic pro and won't glance in the direction of anything that isn't an Apple product.
Mostly live production recordings for them, though a few do studio recordings as well.
I think Bitwig Studio and LMMS both support VST2 plugins. Don't know about VST3. I kinda like the LMMS interface.
The liste of what DAW you can try :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_digital_audio_editors
The one I tryed is LMMS, and it's compatible with nearly all vst plugins I used.
I've tried getting FL Studio to work multiple times but keep running into little issues. Tried Bitwig but can't get the workflow down since it's too different from FL. Unfortunately the best way for me is to dual boot since I don't want to spend time fixing broken settings when I want to produce. Sadly it's the only thing keeping Windows on my PC.
I'm considering running FL on windows inside QEMU KVM. But I'm not sure if QEMU supports booting windows...
I've heard of performance problems trying to produce in a VM so haven't tried that, but if you try it and it works let me know because I'd love to stop dual booting.
FL studio runs well in wine. VSTs are hit-or-miss whether they work but you'll be fine with it on wine it runs great.
Are there any performance issues with FL on wine?
Not that I've encountered. It used to be pretty janky but these days runs as well as on Windows.
I've never used FL but I've seen people mention they're had success with it on Linux.
This guide looks legit.
https://linuxvox.com/blog/flstudio-linux/
When I first started with audio production it was with Audacity. When I realized it wasn't the best way to record an album I switched to Ardour. It was compared to Pro Tools a lot at the time and I don't know how similar they are but I loved using it. When I started working with some new people I switched to their preferred DAW, Reaper. Now I basically only use Reaper because it's easier for some of the people newer to production. Ardour is still amazing and I think you should try them both and see which you like more. Maybe you can get FL working well but I think it's better to use something that runs native so you can support the orgs that are producing software for Linux and so eliminate some headaches.
I use native plugins as much as possible but sometimes a collaborator will use something meant for Windows and Mac only. What I do is install the plugin with WINE, using default paths, de-selecting any bullshit I don't care for, and then run a command to sync the plugins, yabridgectl sync. Sometimes plugins don't work perfectly because of missing fonts or whatever but there's a lot of advice on the project page for individual plugins. I've had pretty good luck so far but currently there's a rendering issue I'm waiting for an update on. Mouse clicks are offset for some reason. It's probably fixed by now in the stable version. It's been a month or two since I've checked on it since there are plenty of native and built-in plugins within Reaper.
fl should run fine with wine, but theres also bitwig or reaper and windows plugins work well in carla
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