Home Recording Studio
 

Well I've found my self with a huge dilemma here. I just purchased a nice Delta 66 sound card. I'm going to be building a machine thats sole purpose will be to do home recording. Mostly guitar and vocals.

My problem is that I'm not sure if I should go Linux or Windows. I know that I am asking this question in an extremly biased forum but I think this deserves some opinions. In my own experince I've messed around with ardour and various other linux tools out there for recording. I've found the documentation on these tools to be mostly fragmented and not to clear. On the other hand I've seen people using proprietary software such as Cakewalk or others on Windows which have been highly recommended.

Being such a die hard Linux user it would seriously pain me to have to make this machine run Windows. I just wanted to get some opinions out there. Anybody have something like this setup? Would you go Windows or Linux? What software would you use?

As much as it pains me to say this, you simply can't go past the plethora of excellent audio recording / compositing tools available to Windows. For example, the Cakewalk series of progs, Steinberg progs (Cubase, WaveLab etc), Cool Edit Pro, Anvil studio and so on and so forth. And not to mention the ton of plug-ins for these.

On the other hand, Linux seems to be "audio handicapped" in that respect. There are very few professional quality audio tools available. Glame comes to mind, but I haven't used it so I can't really comment on it's pros / cons.

Anyway, that's my :twocents: I still prefer Linux over Windows (by a long way), but sometimes you have to sleep with the enemy :p

Baldrick

Same problem here. I bought a really cool guitar program that included a drum machine and now I cant use it now.:(

hmmm...some people have sworn they have gotten things to work great with programs like ardour or rosegarden. I really don't want to use Windows but I guess this is like gaming: if you want to do it you have to use Windows.

I would actually say go with a dual boot. Windows right now has the better options but after reading some recent articles in Linux Format and Computer Music magazines Linux is on the way up and it will give your a chance to try all options. Also I once stumbled across a great forum for home recording. As soon as I find it again I will post it.

I can't disagree with these people. I use 100% Linux, but sometimes I feel the quality of some applications isn't at the same level as Windows alternatives.
I use Audacity and Ardour quite a lot, and I like both. Audacity is a great replacement for Soundforge. Ardour is really good...earlier versions seemed pretty unstable, but it has gotten much better recently. For what I do with it, though, I'd still rather be using Acid.
Other music applications, such as Reason, Fruityloops, and Cubase don't have anything even close in Linux (unless it's Rosegarden? I haven't tried Rosegarden, and I don't plan to...Qt is just too crappy).

The May 2004 issue of Linux Journal has a 5 page spread about creating an "All Linux recording studio" written by Aaron Trumm. Not sure if it is available online, but perhaps your local library has it?

In any event, this guy seems to know what he's talking about...and reading the article could help to make up your mind either way.

here's a link to that LJ article, as well as a couple related ones:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7205

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7274.html

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7577


but yeah, i also think that sometimes using windows is inevitable...

=(

I have that issue of Linux Journal. The article gives a great overview of how to setup home recording with linux. It does not however get into the technical aspect of setting up the box. I've messed around with ardour but as I said before I've found the documentation to be fragmented. Ardour is very powerfull but its very frustrating to setup in my opinion. Perhaps my knowlege of alsa and jack are not up to par. If I could find a very concise tutorial on how to set up ardour, alsa, and jack I would give it a go.