Waveform Free 2021​ Is Here!

[abacab]

1 hour ago, Jim Roseberry said:

FWIW, I really don't get the fascination with running a DAW under Linux.

I mostly agree. I once spent a weekend out of curiosity trying to get a DAW to work in Linux. And I had been using Linux for over 10 years for other things, so I wasn't a Linux newbie in general.

Then later after that effort I realized that I already had a good Windows box that ran all of the DAW software & virtual instruments very well. And that I I had already paid for.  So decided right then life was to short to migrate platforms.

But I do understand why some choose to toss Microsoft out. For freedom from Windows 10 and forced updates for one. And I really respect the developers that are totally going the full cross-platform route: OS X, Windows, and Linux. Like the Tracktion devs. You can even run their stuff on a Raspberry Pi system on a chip. Obviously not going to run a full production studio on that, but it's fine for experimental creativity!

 

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

grab a copy of AVLinux and run it as a live distro

AVLinux, hadn't heard of it. Is it better than Ubuntu Studio for things like Ardour and Waveform.

@Jim Roseberry, I use Windows, but I think the "fascination" for doing DAW work in Linux is that people trying it really prefer Linux (as I have long preferred Windows). Some people still say the same thing about doing DAW work in Windows. As you say, going back 20 years, remember how Mac users at best thought it was "cute" that people were actually trying to run Photoshop or any DAW or NLE in Windows? Linux people may be tired of dealing with Microsoft the way that I am tired of dealing with Apple, who have been shafting A/V software developers for years.

And we're not all pros. Some of us are home music hobbyists, some seldom record audio and work entirely "in the box." And part of the fun of the hobby is that I can be mixing in Cakewalk on something like my hand-me-down 10-year-old notebook. Recording with 16 inputs of Firewire interfaces whose drivers go back to Windows 7.

I get that in your line of work, or one of them, the customers for your (superbly, by reports) integrated systems just want it to work, flawlessly, with no trouble, no tinkering, and are willing to pay. I'm kind of the opposite, my system upgrades are when someone is giving away a computer, then I do the work of turning it into a usable DAW. I enjoy the tinkering part too.

[kitekrazy1]

3 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

FWIW, I really don't get the fascination with running a DAW under Linux.

It's literally like taking a 20+ year step back in  time.

We waited for decades to have the processing power, plugins, and virtual-instruments currently available under Windows.

 

A lot of developers look at it that way.

So many of the user base is delusional.  I guess their false sense of arrogance comes from by using Linux they are giving the middle finger to Apple and MS.  They sit in the pumpkin patch with Charlie Brown waiting for Linux to rise above the ashes from the great war between Apple and MS.  

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

AVLinux, hadn't heard of it. Is it better than Ubuntu Studio for things like Ardour and Waveform.

AVLinux is a custom Debian build with everything installed and already set up correctly. Realtime kernel tweaked for multimedia work and so on.

3 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

FWIW, I really don't get the fascination with running a DAW under Linux.

It's literally like taking a 20+ year step back in  time.

I don't see Windows offering any kernels specifically made for real time operation or something that comes even close to the flexibility and features JACK has.

REAPER, Waveform and Bitwig all have native Linux versions with VST3 support. Developers like u-he and Auburn Sounds also have native Linux versions of their plugins. Many audio interfaces, thanks to iOS devices and mobile are now class compliant and you don't even have to install drivers for them. You plug them in and the kernel already has drivers for them.

Do you have all the plugins you get in Windows and MacOS? No. In fact, Linux has the opposite problem. Not only you have plugins, you actually have too many plugins. A standard Ardour installation with the regular set of plugins you install from packages can have anything between 300 and 2000 plugins in total.

 

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

6 minutes ago, Paul Young said:

So many of the user base is delusional.  I guess their false sense of arrogance comes from by using Linux they are giving the middle finger to Apple and MS.  They sit in the pumpkin patch with Charlie Brown waiting for Linux to rise above the ashes from the great war between Apple and MS.

The vast majority of the user base is not r/unixporn.

I could say that the much of the Windows user base thinks Linux is the same operating system they heard about and saw in 1995. Or their base complaint about Linux and MacOS is that it's broken because it doesn't copy Windows' way of doing things.

OS are just tools. You can be a user of that tool or be used by that tool. Guess which category people that pick sides falls into.

Edited February 16, 2021 by Bruno de Souza Lino

[Maestro]

4 hours ago, Paul Young said:

A lot of developers look at it that way.

So many of the user base is delusional.  I guess their false sense of arrogance comes from by using Linux they are giving the middle finger to Apple and MS.  They sit in the pumpkin patch with Charlie Brown waiting for Linux to rise above the ashes from the great war between Apple and MS.  

Are you really any different than them given this response?

The only thing separating both camps are where they tend to hang out and what the general consensus at those places are.

F/OSS Fanatics and people who champion their choice DAW are no different.  That's why they call it "DAW Wars."  Not really any different than the "OS Wars" that have - frankly - largely died out over the past decade.  These days, I actually think the DAW fans are worse.  They're even insulting cross-discipline, now! ? 

-----

Waveform looks good, functionally, but I really can't stand looking at it.

Edited February 16, 2021 by Maestro

[Soundwise]

7 hours ago, Maestro said:

Waveform looks good, functionally, but I really can't stand looking at it.

Sunshine looks good, functionally, but I really can't stand looking at it, either.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

7 hours ago, Maestro said:

F/OSS Fanatics and people who champion their choice DAW are no different.  That's why they call it "DAW Wars."  Not really any different than the "OS Wars" that have - frankly - largely died out over the past decade.  These days, I actually think the DAW fans are worse.  They're even insulting cross-discipline, now! ? 

I believe we call those people "evangelists", as they literally champion that choice like it is a religion and walk around with that title as if it was something to be proud of.

[Starship Krupa]

Apple of course led the way by hiring a dude named "Guy" to be an evangelist, complete with that title.

I've just usually been too broke to afford Macs for the most part. My computer background was from building XT clones out of junk parts so that I could get on BBSes, not from going to a university that had a lab with donated Macs and then getting my own as a graduation present at student discount.

[abacab]

13 hours ago, Paul Young said:

A lot of developers look at it that way.

So many of the user base is delusional.  I guess their false sense of arrogance comes from by using Linux they are giving the middle finger to Apple and MS.  They sit in the pumpkin patch with Charlie Brown waiting for Linux to rise above the ashes from the great war between Apple and MS.  

They are not arrogant from using Linux. They most likely appear arrogant because they learned how to read manuals and search the net for knowledge, and problem solve. Although they may show some impatience for those that expect everything to be handed to them in perfect form.

[Jim Roseberry]

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

AVLinux, hadn't heard of it. Is it better than Ubuntu Studio for things like Ardour and Waveform.

@Jim Roseberry, I use Windows, but I think the "fascination" for doing DAW work in Linux is that people trying it really prefer Linux (as I have long preferred Windows). Some people still say the same thing about doing DAW work in Windows. As you say, going back 20 years, remember how Mac users at best thought it was "cute" that people were actually trying to run Photoshop or any DAW or NLE in Windows? Linux people may be tired of dealing with Microsoft the way that I am tired of dealing with Apple, who have been shafting A/V software developers for years.

And we're not all pros. Some of us are home music hobbyists, some seldom record audio and work entirely "in the box." And part of the fun of the hobby is that I can be mixing in Cakewalk on something like my hand-me-down 10-year-old notebook. Recording with 16 inputs of Firewire interfaces whose drivers go back to Windows 7.

I get that in your line of work, or one of them, the customers for your (superbly, by reports) integrated systems just want it to work, flawlessly, with no trouble, no tinkering, and are willing to pay. I'm kind of the opposite, my system upgrades are when someone is giving away a computer, then I do the work of turning it into a usable DAW. I enjoy the tinkering part too.

Can't disagree with anything you're saying...

I've done "Hackintosh" builds... for the fun of it (like solving a puzzle).

We have clients who are still running RME Fireface 400/800 audio interfaces... which are ~15 years old.

 

The issue most folks have with Windows 10 is that it's a "universal" (all encompassing) OS.

Supporting such a wide group of end-users, it's bloated and a bit "dumbed-down" (for less tech-savvy users).

Thus, (by default) we have Cortana, Automatic Updates, lots of applications running in the background, etc.

Of course, the flip side of being a more universal OS is that it drives prices down (OS, hardware, software, etc).

Microsoft grew into a massive company... with massive (over) exposure... generating massive revenue.

The "man with the big cigar" (in their realm)...

 

Regarding Linux:

If you take most of the profit away, you also take away competition and desire to develop.

Competition drives development.  (Look at the CPU progress were now encountering).

You've got wide-open potential... with little structure/oversight

A bit like the Wild West

 

 

 

[Jim Roseberry]

14 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I don't see Windows offering any kernels specifically made for real time operation or something that comes even close to the flexibility and features JACK has.

Do you have all the plugins you get in Windows and MacOS? No. In fact, Linux has the opposite problem. Not only you have plugins, you actually have too many plugins. A standard Ardour installation with the regular set of plugins you install from packages can have anything between 300 and 2000 plugins in total.

 

Can you run Helix Native under any Linux kernel at 96k using a 16-sample buffer size (sub 1ms total round-trip latency)?

The answer is, no.

 

You may have 2000 plugins... but you don't have anywhere close to the best plugins available.

Can you run Keyscape, Omnisphere, Kontakt with advanced/scripted libraries, Waves plugins, UAD plugins, SSL plugins, etc (all native)???

The answer is, no.

 

Without profit/competition, you're not going to see massive development.

Witness the recent CPU boom we're encountering.  Competition is bringing out the best in AMD and Intel.

[Soundwise]

Linux is great for software development. I also use it for my University studies, online classes and web-surfing. For audio recording or video making even remotely close to professional quality one should use Windows or MacOS based machines. Linux audio production, while not completely impossible, is a major PITA.  I gave up on this many years ago.

[Maestro]

4 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Supporting such a wide group of end-users, it's bloated and a bit "dumbed-down" (for less tech-savvy users).

1.  Windows isn't any more or less bloated than a typical Linux desktop system, especially if you're getting a user on something that installs a full system without them having to cherry pick which packages to install (half of them with horrible descriptions, and tons of -devel crap in the list).  Have you ever seen the amount of crap Fedora, OpenSUSE, and other Desktop Distros install onto a system?  Windows is lightweight compared to that.  Ubuntu does install a relatively compact system, but last time I tried it I had to go and install about 50 dependencies just to install actual software I wanted to use onto the system.

Windows also uses about as much RAM on a fresh boot as macOS and a Linux Distro.  Linux Graphical Desktop distros often use more, unless you start tweaking the system to "remove the bloat."  Same with disk space, and Microsoft has been decreasing that by quite a bit by getting rid of old code and optimizing other parts.  There was a Windows 10 release that literally gave users back gigabytes of disk space.  Windows is pretty efficient, especially now.

Keep in mind, Windows NT is not the same as the Windows 9x systems that Linux came onto the scene competing against.  Everything changed after XP [practically] obsoleted those old Windows releases.

2.  There's nothing dumbed-down about Windows.  If you want to script or use a more powerful command shell, it has that option.  PowerShell.  There is more than enough for a power user there.  The main difference between Windows and [especially earlier] Linux Desktop Distros is that it was designed to be highly intuitive and consistent.  Windows software general adheres to CUA standards, so common keyboard shortcuts are consistent across applications.  Menus are arranged relatively consistently across general purpose applications.  Iconography is more consistent.  All of this makes the system easier to use, and more productive to use, in fact.

The issue with earlier Linux Desktop Distros is that there were too many clashes when it came to competing UI Toolkits and Peripheral APIs.  You had distros installing tons of GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE, and even some Motif apps by default - never mind the other stuff.  These applications tended to use different iconography.  They tended to use different theming engines.  They tended to use different keyboard shortcut standards.  You even had different application using different Audio APIs, among other things.  The system ships with like 5 different shells, and different distros could default to a different shell.  Did you live through samba?  Lol.

Making a user think 10x as much just to use your system doesn't make the alternative dumbed-down.  It makes your offering a terrible user experience.  Not everyone wants to edit all of the config files necessary to level those disparities enough to not be an impediment.

The fact that most users can use a Windows or macOS system and probably never have to touch a Command Line or an Admin Utility is a triumph of UX design.  That is incredibly impressive.  I cannot say that Linux has [yet] gotten there, and it's been over two decades.  This isn't just due to familiarity, either.  New users hop onto Windows systems and never have to do this.

When I moved from Windows to macOS, having never used the OS before, I never needed a command line and I was up and running - and VERY productive - after like ... 3 hours on the system?

Windows was there by Windows 3.0.  Mac OS was there even before then.

Microsoft and Apple simply had different priorities and development/design targets than the people developing Linux.  And the lack of infighting within those corporations made it easy for them to deliver the type of UX that they have delivered.  When the Linux Community is busy reinventing the wheel 100x over, it's a lot harder to compete with that.  There was always too much unnecessary development duplication, IMO.

Lots of good comes from that, but it pretty much killed it in terms of competing seriously for mindshare and marketshare in the consumer desktop market.

The nature of the server market is such that it naturally avoids many of the worst parts of Linux, so it goes extremely well there as a result.

[Maestro]

7 hours ago, Soundwise said:

Sunshine looks good, functionally, but I really can't stand looking at it, either.

I bet that sounded like a great joke when you thought about it, huh?

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

5 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Can you run Helix Native under any Linux kernel at 96k using a 16-sample buffer size (sub 1ms total round-trip latency)?

The answer is, no.

Is the answer 'no' because of Linux itself or because Line 6 doesn't support Linux? It's because of the latter. If you could, theoretically you could run at 8 samples in 96k. RME cards can do that in Linux and are fully supported.

5 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

You may have 2000 plugins... but you don't have anywhere close to the best plugins available.

Can you run Keyscape, Omnisphere, Kontakt with advanced/scripted libraries, Waves plugins, UAD plugins, SSL plugins, etc (all native)???

The answer is, no.

The same question for the Helix goes here. Linux supports VST3 and the format is now open source, so it's not a case of format compatibility anymore. u-he has Linux plugins, Audio Assault has Linux plugins, Voxengo has Linux plugins, Auburn Sounds has Linux plugins...

Since you are talking critical apps not having Linux versions...I'm gonna list a few professional apps which do: Maya, Blender, MODO, Nuke, Houdini, DaVinci Resolve, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Harrison Mixbus and so on.

What many large companies want you to believe is that Linux is still stuck in 1995 and will never be as performant as Windows when...You have instances were AMD outperforms nVidia in graphics under Linux not even using their proprietary drivers, but the open source ones. There was also the infamous scheduler bug in Windows 10 with the 32 core Threadripper cpus which didn't exist on Linux. Many large companies also dissuade people and companies from using FLOSS software by spreading the lie that this kind of license forces your content to also be free and open source, when that's patently false. But this is something else.

Let's not forget that at one point, Microsoft invented an error that would trigger on DOS versions not made by them simply to prevent Digital Research from dominating the market with their DR-DOS, which was better than Microsoft's.

5 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Without profit/competition, you're not going to see massive development.

That's not true at all. If it were, Musescore wouldn't have been bought by Ultimate Guitar, Blender wouldn't have received 1.2 million from Epic, Pixar wouldn't officially support their Renderman engine on Blender and....Hundreds of FX houses across the world wouldn't use Blender as their primary money making tool.

[Jim Roseberry]

3 minutes ago, Maestro said:

1.  Windows isn't any more or less bloated than a typical Linux desktop system, especially if you're getting a user on something that installs a full system without them having to cherry pick which packages to install (half of them with horrible descriptions, and tons of -devel crap in the list).  Have you ever seen the amount of crap Fedora, OpenSUSE, and other Desktop Distros install onto a system?  Windows is lightweight compared to that.  Ubuntu does install a relatively compact system, but last time I tried it I had to go and install about 50 dependencies just to install actual software I wanted to use onto the system.

Windows also uses about as much RAM on a fresh boot as macOS and a Linux Distro.  Linux Graphical Desktop distros often use more, unless you start tweaking the system to "remove the bloat."  Same with disk space, and Microsoft has been decreasing that by quite a bit by getting rid of old code and optimizing other parts.  There was a Windows 10 release that literally gave users back gigabytes of disk space.  Windows is pretty efficient, especially now.

Keep in mind, Windows NT is not the same as the Windows 9x systems that Linux came onto the scene competing against.  Everything changed after XP [practically] obsoleted those old Windows releases.

2.  There's nothing dumbed-down about Windows.  If you want to script or use a more powerful command shell, it has that option.  PowerShell.  There is more than enough for a power user there.  The main difference between Windows and [especially earlier] Linux Desktop Distros is that it was designed to be highly intuitive and consistent.  Windows software general adheres to CUA standards, so common keyboard shortcuts are consistent across applications.  Menus are arranged relatively consistently across general purpose applications.  Iconography is more consistent.  All of this makes the system easier to use, and more productive to use, in fact.

 

FWIW, You don't have to convince me about the virtues of Windows 10.  ?

I'm quite aware of them...

I've built custom Windows DAWs professionally for going on 30 years.

As a Cakewalk user, I go all the way back to Pro Audio 4.0 (first version that could record audio).

 

As to "bloated" and "dumbed-down", that's a matter of opinion/perspective.

To cover such a vast user-base, Win10 (by default) has to be more broad-based compared to OSX.

Note, I'm not an Apple fan... so no need to get into the downsides of OSX.

How many folks complain that they can't disable Automatic Updates?  

How many people complain about Cortain, OneDrive, etc (extraneous, annoying components)?

Less tech-savvy users often don't know/realize these things can all be disabled.

Once reined-in, Win10 is a fine DAW platform.

[Esteban Villanova]

19 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

AVLinux is a custom Debian build with everything installed and already set up correctly. Realtime kernel tweaked for multimedia work and so on.

I don't see Windows offering any kernels specifically made for real time operation or something that comes even close to the flexibility and features JACK has.

REAPER, Waveform and Bitwig all have native Linux versions with VST3 support. Developers like u-he and Auburn Sounds also have native Linux versions of their plugins. Many audio interfaces, thanks to iOS devices and mobile are now class compliant and you don't even have to install drivers for them. You plug them in and the kernel already has drivers for them.

Do you have all the plugins you get in Windows and MacOS? No. In fact, Linux has the opposite problem. Not only you have plugins, you actually have too many plugins. A standard Ardour installation with the regular set of plugins you install from packages can have anything between 300 and 2000 plugins in total.

 

Hi, I’m running AV Linux (newbie) and it’s working well so far. How do you install plugins from packages? Are those the same as repositories? Aren’t all of the plugins installed by default in AV Linux? I’ve noticed that not every plugin or program that’s included in KX Stutio is installed, for example. Cheers!

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

1 minute ago, Esteban Villanova said:

Hi, I’m running AV Linux (newbie) and it’s working well so far. How do you install plugins from packages? Are those the same as repositories? Aren’t all of the plugins installed by default in AV Linux? I’ve noticed that not every plugin or program that’s included in KX Stutio is installed, for example. Cheers!

I don't believe this is the right avenue to ask that sort of question. You'll have better luck at a linux specific forum or Discord server.

[Maestro]

5 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

As to "bloated" and "dumbed-down", that's a matter of opinion/perspective.

No.  It's really not.