Let’s face it, when it comes to digital audio, ProTools is king. I have been a ProTools user for going on 7 years. I left my trusty Fostex 16 track hard disk recorder with a blaze of glory when the Digi001 first came out. I went out and bought the nicest G4 I could find and was sold. These days, there are versions of ProTools out there for every budget. From the $400 MBox2 to the full blown HD systems that can easily tip $200,000, ProTools has it covered.
The other day I came across the Studio64 Debian Distribution and was immediately curious. I had honestly never considered Linux as a viable audio authoring platform. This release is a 1.0 release and I wouldn’t exactly call the tools “Mature,” but it gives us something to put some serious thought into.
ProTools is a power hungry monster. Whether you are running on Windows or Mac, your track count and plug in count is seriously tied to your ram and CPU power. Add in Reason through Rewire with a multi gigabyte drumset or sampler and you are easily going to bring a dual 2.0Ghz G5 Powermac with 2.5 Gigabytes of RAM to it’s knees…(I know, I have done it.)
One thing that Linux shines at to me is low memory footprint and mild system resource usage. It will be interesting to see how that can be leveraged to keep track counts and effects up on more meager systems. For you power hungry users, there is even a 64-bit build for the newest 64 bit Athlon and Xeon systems.
At the core of the audio tools are Ardour (Audio editing, recording and mixing), Hydrogen Drum Machine and JAMin for mastering duties. The system has a ReWire type application called JACK for routing audio between applications as well.
I would like to see someone take this project to the next level and provide more audio interface support, standard RTAS and DirectX Plugin support, and clean up the interface a little bit.
I will admit I did not get to performance test this because I did not have a compatible audio interface, but overall the application looks nice. It’s a little jumbled as you can see in the screenshot, so a little UI improvements would be welcome also.
Keep your eyes out for this one, I imagine by 2.0 this will be a real consideration for the do it yourself home recording folks. To get into 8 tracks simultaneously with ProTools you need either a Digi002R ($1199 or more) or a 8 track M-Audio interface ($599) and ProTools M-Powered ($300) so this would bring real workstation power to the more economical interfaces.
Keep in mind that these applications are already available for other Linux distributions as well so you can download them and run them on your current Linux box without switching to Debian.
JB
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You should check out Ubuntu Studio as an alternative. Also, these people are very into the freedom of the software. This is not related to price, but rather freedom to modify it and use it as you wish. DirectX is not free software in that sense and so will never see a place in a system like this (also it is Windows-only). RTAS plugins are available now (2009) I believe and the Linux-specific plugin method is technologically sound, if not yet standardized.