So I just ditched Windows, but then realized that my music production stuff (mostly REAPER and a few free VSTs) are all Windows/Mac only.
Audio on Linux is fun (as in, pain). JACK seems to be really flexible but is a pain to set up correctly.

Any of you use Linux for music production? Any advice?

I'm using Elementary. Essentially, I need:
1. A good DAW for recording, minimal MIDI.
2. A good sampler.
3. Standard plugin suite - reverb, eq, filters, compressors, delays, etc. I'm not too choosy.
4. Basic synths (I'll be happy with a simple saw/square wave generator, but the more the merrier).

How's Ardour? Compiling it from source right now.

REAPER on Wine doesn't run well for me, so that's out. And they don't have a native Linux version yet.

(no Bitwig, please, I'm not ready to pay $300 or whatever right now)

Is anyone familiar with Bitwig? It's a pretty good DAW and you can write your own controller scripts in JS. I bought two controllers (Launchpad Mini and Launch Control), one of which has a really outdated factory script and the other one doesn't have anything, so I decided to update the existing one and port it over to the other controller. They do similar stuff.

I started going through the code and I think it gave me cancer. It has many gems, but so far this is my favourite. The second is a function that takes two parameters and returns false.

I wanted to do electronic music since I was a teenager. But the first time I did something was in LMMS. I just learned how to do the software, and did some sort of shitty techno. It was kinda weird tbh. The software is still quite rudimentary and there was a lot of stuff I couldn't do. It's basically based on FL Studio. A friend of mine showed me, he was doing something more like mental tribe tekno.

Anyway one day in a tent town full of weird german people in Portugal (where I tried surf for the first time), some dude showed me Ableton. I liked the grid view.

So I took bitwig (an ableton clone), and with the right script and one of those 8x8 pad launchpad, you could record and loop things easy. So now I need this feature. I wish lmms had it and I'm planning to implement it someday, but in the meanwhile, I'm using bitwig.

But noway I'm paying 200 euros everyyear. So I downloaded a crack. The crack is in flatpak.

But it doesn't have good synth. Zynaddsubfx is the synth I was using in lmms and it's pretty decent, with the right preset it can generate out-of-this-world sounds. But the issue is that it needs some library.

Not that big on the linking part of binary code, but asaik usually, the vst (so a .so or a .dll) is linked to libraries directly. But no, not here, because flatpak is sandboxing the /usr/lib directory. So even though I installed the right library from the AUR (arch repos), it couldn't see it.

So I was stuck. I couldn't use the synth, which blocked me in my artistic energy. It was bad after I lost my laptop but I'm trying to get back into it. And I found myself limited by the samples to be honest, I want to compose stuff and sample that instead. Maybe sample some music directly (now that I can use IA to separate tracks in a song that's way easier). But I was stuck, I couldn't have the synth I wanted in my DAW.

But then I found the solution. It's very simple. Guess what it is.