>i can't use linux bc all my fav programs don't run on it
i'm like
<i can't use windows bc all my fav programs don't run on it
@mario Problem is, it's an old MacBook Pro, EFI in those didn't follow the UEFI spec. There is a way to tell EFI not to initialize this GPU and it's enough to get Mac OS X and linux running, but Windows seems to ignore it and tries to init it anyway. I'm sure there is a way to do it, like booting in safe mode and disabling it in Device Manager, but I'm to lazy to do it 😁
Void Linux runs just fine and is very power efficient — which is a nice thing for a laptop.
@mario Sure! I've been using linux since my teenage years and I'm very comfortable with it. It would be nice to have a laptop capable of running Ableton Live though. So I could make music when I'm not at home. Newer versions of macOS won't run on this laptop, so maybe I should just run an older release, it's the system this laptop came with after all so it's probably a better choice than Windows anyway. I should just stay off the Internet with that out of date software.
@mario When you deal with audio, latency is very important, I think general purpose VMs are not up to task. On top of that, I'm fairly certain it's impossible to pass a Firewire device like my audio interface down to guest OS the same way you can with USB devices. I know for sure it wasn't implemented in Parallels Desktop because soon after VT-d was introduced which made something like that possible, Apple had released MacBook Air, which had no Firewire and no one cared about it anymore 😔
@EricZhang456 had been experimenting with running Windows DAWs in Linux using Wine and it worked quite well — I think that is what I should try. Running Wine would be problematic because I'm running a musl flavour of Void, but having a glibc chroot would probably do the trick… All right, I'm just a lazy ass 😄
With tech, anything is possible, all the problems boil down to someone being lazy.
My primary DAW is FL Studio. It works super well under Wine. Everything works out of the box. I also tried Ableton Live, also works really well but the left mouse button sometimes won't register and some parts of the UI will take really long to render. I haven't tried Pro Tools but I am almost certain that it wouldn't run as it requires driver-level DRM.
For VST plugins I only have Kontakt installed for now. The library doesn't work so you can only load instruments through the "Load..." menu command.
For the Linux-native alternatives I tried Ardour and REAPER. Haven't really figured out how to use both so I can't give a comment on that but they work. Both Ardour and REAPER don't come with instruments on their own so I installed Calf Studio Gear but the synth that comes with Calf is completely borked for me. But good luck finding plugins that work natively anyway.
I have heard a lot of great things about Reaper, but I'm not sure if it holds for the Linux version. I have never tried using it for anything serious myself, but it looks like a decent DAW, but yes, it's very barebones — there is not much to do there without plugins and I'm pretty sure getting native ones would be a challenge.
Same for Fruity Loops — I have never tried using it myself, but I was just blown away when someone demonstrated it to me in early 2000s: "Was this really done by a single person?" That was true at the time. It looks very versatile, but the problem with it is that it makes all your tracks sound alike — no, not everyone using it sounds the same way, but all tracks composed by one person sound alike. This was the case with my friend. Later I have encouraged him to try Live and helped with it a lot, I have been using it a lot while we were making music together so he eventually switched and… magically his sound became diverse! I don' know what's wrong with FL, I know it's highly customizable and versatile, you can even assign functions to any control (unlike Live, where you can only have envelopes). Probably something with its UI that it doesn't encourage people to use all that, either this or it's too versatile so they get lost.
Live is perfect in this regard, its UI is VERY simple it encourages you to play around with it and not get lost. They did make it more complex in recent versions and while all of that were useful instruments and functions, I think it was a mistake. It's also mostly self-contained — of course you can use external instruments (VSTs, AUs), but built-in ones are decent and I ended up using only them with very few exceptions, moslty homebrew Max4Live stuff and a few developed by others.
> I don't actually have anything at the moment
You have to be so uptight, I think those were just words of encouragement from @charlie_root 😅
@mario
Sorry for using different account for reply, I use my own Pleroma for longer replies as it doesn't have a five hundred character limit. And sorry for hijacking your thread 😅
@m0xee
awwww
you didn't hijack it, you turned a shitpost into a reasonable and interesting discussion
When we speak of multiplatform DAWs, let us not forget about Bitwig Studio. AFAIK the company was founded by a former Ableton developer, so they are "spiritual siblings". To me it seemed like a middle ground between Live and FL Studio — more complex than the former, but easier to use than the latter. It did look interesting, but wasn't yet quite there for primetime use and not worth shelling out extra $$$ — that's another reason I'm going to stay with Live for a while: I'm broke now, I still have my Live 10 license, but I don't have FL Studio or Bitwig one, so it'll be either Live or some free software.
Anyway, I had checked it out long time ago, when it just came out and I'm pretty sure much has changed so it's worth looking into. Problem is, looks like Bitwig now comes as a Flatpak (or this other one, I don't even remember what's it called) — I know, it's possible to install software packaged this way in Void, but I'm not sure I'm personally up to this.
@charlie_root @m0xee @mario
@EricZhang456 Exactly! Like Live in which UI was shuffled around a bit 😄
But they have definitely kept the session view that was groundbreaking for Live. Most music, unlike videos, does have a strong structure and that grid is a better representation of that than the timeline. Some use Live and only use arrangement view that is typical to all DAWs, never switching to session view — well, their loss 🤷
@EricZhang456 Sure, matter of habit. And other DAWs don't have anything like it so there is no way to get this habit elsewhere. But once you get used to it it gets fluent, you start thinking in terms of structuring your tracks this way and that is a huge boost to productivity, moving colored squares around is easier than moving waveforms around the timeline, adding another instrument part is a matter of couple of clicks and it's really hard to mess up this way.
I am really excited to know how it would holds up in terms of latency but i am too tactless to try it myself
@EricZhang456@pl.starnix.network @m0xee@social.librem.one @mario@hornyjail.pro
Both Ardour and REAPER don't come with instruments on their own
we have pacman -S pro-audio tho and it has absolutely everything (that's free as in freedom ofc)
also don't know about firewire sadly
@mario Firewire used to be great for peripherals like audio interfaces and digital camcorders, it made possible for external devices to have direct memory access, which was questionable from security perspective but removed the latency entirely. Unfortunately, even when it was hands down better than USB in every way, it was only available in expensive devices and high-end laptops so remained fairly unpopular and was eventually taken over by USB when it achieved higher bandwidths.
