New roundup of Linux audio-editing tools

in linux on 2014-07-15 12:23 (#3QS)

Linux is not exactly the heavyweight OS for audiophiles and musicians. Apple still holds the crown on that one, and the real professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software packages target Windows as well. But things are looking up. Tech Republic just published this round-up of open source tools for musicians, and some of this software is looking pretty good indeed. Have a look at:

Audacity
Ardour
Traverso
QTractor, and
Linux Multimedia Studio

I've been using Audacity since about 14 years ago, and it's truly come a long, long way. Now if we can just sort out the PulseAudio/ALSA mess, we'll be able to make some sweet music indeed.

5 comments

Traverso (Score: 1)

by axsdenied@pipedot.org on 2014-07-16 12:57 (#2H2)

Thank you. I have not heard of Traverso before.

By the way, Audacity has found its uses in quite unexpected places... for example to analyse signals captured by SDR (Software Defined Radio).

Re: Traverso (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-16 14:26 (#2H7)

I've used it to convert old cassettes to Ogg Vorbis. You play the cassette into the microphone jack, and then chop up the tracks using Audacity. Easy peasy.

MuseScore (Score: 1)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-07-16 13:39 (#2H3)

This is not exactly the right thread perhaps... but MuseScore is an excellent musical notation software available for Linux systems. I switched a friend from Sibelius to MuseScore about three or four years ago and for his needs he says he likes MuseScore better (than the version of Sibelius going at that time). Admittedly he is not a power user, but he does draft up a surprising amount of scores in very little time...

Re: MuseScore (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-16 14:25 (#2H6)

I'm going to have to look at that one. I looked at musicTeX a bit, and then moved to Lilypond, which I loved in theory but which I found horrendously frustrating - seemed you needed to write custom code (I forget, was it SLANG or something?) pretty soon in the process. It may have improved since then.

I know David Kastrup is working on the Lilypond project - brilliant programmer behind the previewTeX system for emacs and also highly involved in aucTeX. If you've ever used LaTeX on emacs, he's your man.

But What About Video? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-16 17:24 (#2HA)

I like Audacity but it has or had a fatal flaw in that all of its work files seem to be completely uncompressed. It's very easy to run out of room. (A little 40 MB MP3 can turn into one or more 1 GB files/directories.)

I hope one day they use a compressed working file format by default.

I'd really rather have a full featured video editor and let that take care of audio editing "for free". There are lots of projects in various states of development. OpenShot seemed to be the choice for the nonprofessional crowd. It's... okay. Still doesn't compare to the ease of use of Windows editors.