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Pro audio apps and Linux.

Jan 28, 2009
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In the world of audio production, Native Instruments products are legendary. On Mac OSX, and Windows, their instruments work as standalone applications, or as VST/AudioUnit plugins.

Some of them are extremely processor intensive, especially as more and more voices get used. To mitigate this, some innovative people have decided to offload these, and other instruments to dedicated hardware.

The really awesome part, is that this hardware runs Linux. The hardware doesn’t seem to be anything too exotic. It’s basically just a decent spec PC in a rack-mount case, with an LCD and some knobs, and probably a decent sound card with a boatload of input/output connectors.

For example, Muse-Machine is built on top of Linux, the “industrial strength” operating system that is used by many of the world’s largest companies to run their servers, and the operating system that powers much of the Internet. Additional advantages that come from Linux include far more efficient memory usage, consuming as little as 5% of the available RAM compared with as much as 40% with other operating systems.

I’m not entirely sure how it all works. Maybe running them under wine? But it is pretty cool to see Linux penetrating a field almost completely dominated by Mac/Windows. I suspect there’s actually a lot more Linux in high end audio gear, but not all manufacturers are as smart as Muse and don’t think of marketing it as a feature.

All really neat stuff. Like most high-end pro-audio gear though, these things don’t come for cheap.Even the previous generation is over $2k.

A few days ago, Justin Forbes tipped me off that the 64studio people also got the NI apps working in Linux. Neat stuff. Still a lot of hoop jumping to get it all working, but a great step forwards for music production on Linux.

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  1. hollywoodb  •  Jan 28, 2009 @10:18

    64Studio really is a great effort. I’ve been running it on my DAW for some time with a decent m-audio ICE1712 card and am quite impressed. Ultimately I’d like to see the PlanetCCRMA packages integrated into Fedora proper with perhaps an external repository for the -rt kernel and utilities, but until that day I patiently run a single non-Fedora/RH system amongst several happy Fedora/RH machines ;)

  2. kev009  •  Jan 28, 2009 @19:37

    The way I understand it, the DAW or host just needs to have the VST ABI support. The compiled DLLs are just 32bit x86 code. Not totally unlike NDISwrapper.

    I currently use Ableton Live, my favorite program, on a Windows XP (T42, dual boots Fedora Rawhide). Since Live exists on both Windows and Mac, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to get it going on Linux. Linux seems great in theory with RT and such great efficiency. A lot of the puzzle pieces are in place with Qt, JACK, LV2, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon :-( . If the stupid proprietary ISVs would get their act together, Linux would easily become the modern BeOS/Irix and give OS X a run for its money. I love libre software, but for small niches like this commercial software is often the only real option. I suspect most companies and professionals would agree if given the change. It’s no secret that most movie studios use Linux for their pipeline, and Linux is almost exclusively used in the EDA field.

    Apple has really taken the lead with robust audio and midi functionality built into the OS. Logic is a great deal as well. If PulseAudio ever stops sucking, we may some day have something competitive to CoreAudio, but we still need better MIDI functionality.



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