Hey, iv'e just put linux Ubuntu 9.04 onto a old pc ive had just to test it out, and i must say im impressed, no problems what so ever so far. But as im a musician i like to record, i decided im going to use my linux box for recoriding but i need some suggestions on software. On my windows i use Sony acid pro and ableton live to record my guitar, i'm not to fond of audiciaty. Can anyone recomend me any software for linux like these? It needs to have keyboard key mapping/shortcuts, looping functions and be able to have multi track.

And with the windows WINE emulator for linux will it run any exe? or only certain ones because i installed WINE from the add remove programs menu, and when i right click a downloaded exe file and click run with wine laucher nothing appears at all. Is something wrong? Thanks.

oops nevermind


I like audacity. What issues do you have with it?

wine is an attempt to create a compatibility layer for Windows programs; essentially to recreate Window's libraries and api calls. Whether any specific program will work under it depends on whether the api's it depends on have been faithfully reproduced. It's a big job, and progress is slow and ongoing. At the current time many programs work well, many partially work, and others either don't run at all, or are otherwise useless.

The best thing you can do is to first check out the wine appdb and documentation, and second to try it yourself, playing around with settings in winecfg. But as I said, in the end it all comes down to the individual program.

You might also check out the Codeweavers commercial version of wine, they may be able to get some things running that the regular wine cannot.

Maybe Ardour will be good enough for your needs (it's in repo too). About wine, it's best you first run "winecfg" from terminal (there should be menu entry somewhere too), and just wait for it to come up (and it will create necessary files & dirs in your home directory). Just make a quick "tour" thru it's tabs, and close it. Then try right clicking exe and running it with wine. If that doesn't work, try from terminal - "cd /home/me/Downloads" (use proper dir where you downloaded it) and from there "wine setup.exe" (or whatever .exe file is called). At least you'll see some messages and errors if there are any.

EDIT: oops, too late, didn't see replies

I suggest using a native solution if possible, like ardour suggested above or rosegarden. For native effects you might want to search for ladspa, and for real time stuff you might want to check into the jack sound system if you still didn't.

If you truly want to use some program under wine you might be interested in wineasio (if you ever used asio drivers and vst stuff under windows). For the rest, search the wine application database as someone suggested above and see if there's something about the concrete program you want to run. Wine is not perfect since most stuff is reverse engineered they can only guess things, and that takes a huge amount of time and a lot of trial and error.

Thanks for all your replies, i would try them but i just went to turn on my linux pc and it failed. It loaded the spalsh screen, loaded all the bar and now has just gone to a black screen.... I can see and move the cursor, but nothing can be done. Cant anyone here help me or do i need to start a new thread? And ill reply to your replies to my intitial question when i can get this going... Thanks.

Starting a new thread with a new title will give you a better chance to get better help for this new problem.

I posted another topic, ill be replying back here about the music recording and wine when i can get it running again Thanks

Suse and maybe other distro have extended wine support that seems to be better than the stock wine. I got the software that came with my line 6 ux2 to work all except the usb part. Darn..


Anyway see also hydrogen and tuxguitar.

Im pretty annoyed but unforntuantly i had to install windows xp in ubuntu's place. Linux just doesnt have the right programs for music recoriding and editing, and wine refuses to work with the two main programs i need, acid pro and ableton live. It's a shame i liked linux Thanks for all your help though guys.

I wonder if you really searched hard enough ...

Well im new to ubuntu, and i liked the operating system and all, but i was wanting something that i could just straight put those two programs on and then get going. Maybe when a full windows compatability wine comes out on linux ill switch back, but untill then i dont really want to spend hours trying to get wine to work. Unless anyone knows that ableton live 7.0.3 and Sony acid pro DEFFINATLY work on wine and theres a step by step quick guide to get wine up and running for begginers somewhere.

Hi, I've never heard of those two programs, I use ardour and audacity, rosegarden and hydrogen-drums with fluid synth and sound fonts.

Audacity is really good for simple stuff, you can add tracks as you go. I used it for creating a podcast for an assignment.

Ardour is a fully featured Music app, I use jackd to start and stop all the apps in time and patching (patchbay).

I agree though, it would be nice to plug n play, I get bogged down in configuring and rarely get around to recording.

lmms (linux multi media studio) is another newish program.

10 years ago I used vst/cubebase and cakewalk, but it gets expensive when you upgrade/update hardware and software. Both programs were incompatible with each other and I needed a stream of programs to get the job done.

It can be done with GNU/Linux, but you need to be patient.

Good luck with it. ;-)

regards Glenn

If you want only those programs then there is no point in you using Linux, I don't see why you tried at all, why did you want to use Linux ? Just to run those programs through wine ?

Now, now...don't fault someone for wanting to check out something new. How's anyone going to learn if Linux will work for them unless they try it out? Often there are only one or two programs holding a potential user back, and if they can get those to work under wine, or find good substitutes, then they can switch completely. Unfortunately in this case it seems that it doesn't suit the OP's purposes, but at least he gave it a chance, and maybe he'll be more inclined to come back to it again some day.

By the way, there are a couple of other options available that haven't been mentioned yet. One is to set up a dual-boot system, where you can boot up either OS, depending on the programs you need to run. The other may be to run Windows inside a virtual machine inside Linux. It would depend on whether the hardware support you need is available to the VM, but assuming it works, it would give you the safety and stability of Linux with the programs you need running on Windows inside of it.