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.