Noo

Welcome and congrats on your migration under GNU/Linux.

VST is a proprietary format therefore it is made to not work on linux. On linux synth or virtual instruments are LV2 plugins (like Helm, Surge or Vitalium) or SF2/SFZ soundbank (played with Sfizz or Fluid Synth).

Now Ardour, Bitwig and Reaper can load VST plugins, but :

• Some won’t just work,
• Some will work pretty much the same (Kontakt seems to be working for some person, but it depends on the version I think), BUT if the VSTs needs to be installed before hand (like Kontakt, Spitfire, SINE and I think Arturia V falls into that), you will have to install them first using Wine (or with a wine front-end, like Bottles, Heroic, Lutris). Then load them in your DAW, if they don’t work there after being properly download and installed, I don’t think there is anything much to do… … Apart from try using a bridge (like Lin-VST or Yabridge), but here against results are still very unpredictable. I got some pretty good results with both on the past, but on my new setup none would work for my plugins (Spitfires mostly).

These companies won’t make their plugins available under Linux cause ‘there isn’t enough people using it on linux’ (words of someone at Spitfire who I was asking the question).

My workflow for production in a few words :

• One PC (recording, mixing, mastering) with a midi keyboard,
• One PC virtual instruments only, I use it when project requires lot of instrument tracks.

Edit : Yeah Carla can be used as well, it can load VST plugins and act like a plugin library (pretty much like Kontakt).

Try using audacity/tenacity with each mic on one stereo channel, press recording and link the output to OBS.

Eve Online!

On the DAW, the three are good, I use Ardour cause it’s a free software, but I’ve been told the other two are good, specially for people coming from ableton who want something close. Ardour is really a old-fashioned daw like pro-tools.

Check Librazik it’s a distro based on debian made for musicale production.

I’d say you don’t need a specific distro for what you want to do : a Debian or Arch with KDE could do the trick, but I would recommend to use a lighter desktop environment like Xfce. You may not like it coming from mac but it will preserve machine resources for your audio work.

Ardour runs pretty much on it’s own on any distro, you can still do some conf, I suggest to go to linuxmao.fr the website is mostly in French but have a lot of configuration documentation.

This audio interface will not be an issue as it’s plug and play on Linux since a while now.

Poppy Linux should do.

Tennis again?

Joke aside, pure competitive games are indeed just pure competitive games with no context at all. But competition in itself is ideological and political (the need to make the opponent lose) so Pong is too.

It’s a point of view on multiplayer gaming. In Pong there is always a loser and a winner, never two winners, never two losers (can we even make a draw in original Pong? I don’t know).

Pong is also a game that opposed human versus computer, it can be view as pure skill exercise to be a ‘better’ human or it can be literally a fight against the machine like playing chess against a computer. Both makes me want to ask what is the point to do this ? I think answers at this questions are political indeed.

Super Mario make a twist on the trope of the knight saving the princess. The knight is just a plumber and it is said to him that the ‘princess is an another castle’. But at the end the right order of the world is restaured when Mario finally frees the princess from the evil Bowser.

So from a political standpoint Super Mario is a product believing strongly in individualism and in the self made man ideology. The twist shows only that even a plumber can save the princess if he works enough = liberal capitalism making us believed that we’ll be all rock stars and billionaires when we’re definitively not (and yes I’m quoting fight club here). All this is the consequence of the game focussing more on gameplay than it’s narration, therefore it leans towards what was the common thinking of the time.

Polygamy (relationship between Peach, Mario and Luigi, if that’s what you are referring to) is much to me a side effect of the 2 players gameplay possibility, but it is still indeed pretty interesting in itself yeah.

You probably meant it as a joke, but too bad you get a real answer :)

Indeed, I still get someone giving me names of nonpolitical games.

Oh you didn’t perceive the irony, didn’t you?

• Doom promotes strong virilism = political.
• Tetris = promote the control of chaos (view as destructive, because too much and you lose) through psycho-rigid order.
• Need For Speed = yeah nothing political about promoting cars, except the incitation to get one.
• Wii Tennis = tries to make you forget tennis is for rich people only, by making it cute = political.

My point is everything is political, you don’t have to see political standpoint in things, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The Council, The Wreck, Haven, Orwell, Life Is Strange, Journey of course, The Stanley Parable, The Beginner’s Guide, Everything by Christine Love, Everything by Jonathan Blow, Inside and Limbo, Get Even, Betrayal, Kentucky Route Zero, Never Alone, Tell Me Why, A Plague Tale (both), Deathtrap Dungeon (interactive video adventure), Kholat, Asemblance, Firewatch, Her Story, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter.

I include a bit of everything…

I would like to find a game free of political message, can someone please show me one?

I’m really curious about what this mythical beast might look like…

I think someone at ubi played Astrobot and thought “wait a minute”…

Solium Infernum : strategy game, with a lot of diplomacy mechanisms ( like you can’t attack directly an enemy but you can ask them to pay you tribute, if they refuse you can attack on response).

Fruity Loops doesn’t have any easy equivalent on Linux. I’d say try reaper and ardour as they provide windows binaries. Be careful LMMS isn’t a FL clone, it’s midi only.

For the Arturia plugins you can install them with wine and use yabridge to make them compatible if they are not in vst compatible format (ardour can take vst2 and vst3 but sometimes it will not work). You can also have a dedicated PC for instruments (it is what I do) on windows (using audio gridder). Gotta test the Linux server version of audio gridder to see if I can go back to linux on m’y second PC. Or you can just send the midi notes to pc2 then get the audio out to pc1.

It’s doable to make proprietary plugins run on Linux but the reliability is the nightmarish part, as an update can break the wine compatibility and it can take a few mins/hours to restore.

It’s a real issue because, technical aspect aside, lots of instruments cost a lot of money and are necessary to keep up with the trend. Also theses plugins can save you a lot of time, meaning you can provide more music on short time (effect plugins are concern as well here).

As a professional music composer myself and working on Linux with Ardour, I’d say it is overall pretty good since many years. If you don’t like midi in Ardour you can use another soft to runs midi notes. On Linux the good thing is that if you don’t like something you can change, specially with audio softwares.

To me the two major issues with professional music on Linux are :

• Proprietary plugins for virtual instruments are a nightmare (hard to make them to work, expensive on machine’s resources and unreliable),

• Most company still think free software = unprofessional/amateur, which can make it harder to get jobs.

Debian/ubuntu got binaries in their repository.

Yes!

So it could take some time to teach her.