If you like dabbling a little in music creation, but prefer to use free software solutions, you’ll notice a distinct lack of software available. When you want to run Fruity Loops (FL Studio) under Linux, you need to resort to using either a virtual machine running Windows, or try and emulate it using WINE. Neither is an acceptable solution, and the Fruity Loops team flatly refuse to write their software for other operating systems.
The other day I came across an application called LMMS, which “combines the features of a tracker-/sequencer-program and those of powerful synthesizers and samplers in a user-friendly graphical user-interface.” Essentially, the team is writing Fruity Loops for Linux.
LMMS is a qt application, and is Linux native. Although it might feel more at home in a KDE desktop, the interface is very intuitive and pleasant to use. The interface borrows somewhat from the Fruity Loops feel, but various aspects are different — for better and for worse, in some cases.
It comes with useful number of samples and effect generators, and you can always add your own. The only thing that I’m missing is the effects channel filters, which can be replicated anyway with a bit of leg work.
All in all, LMMS is a great start to what will hopefully be a great audio application. If you’re not interested in paying through the nose (again) for shoddy Windows-only audio software, give this a try.
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Pros:
- Linux Native
- It’s Free Software - You don’t pay for it, and can modify it as you see fit.
- Has a really cool range of instrument plugins
- Has an auto-limiter function to prevent clipping
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Cons:
- It’s at version 0.2 - People have been complaining of crashes. Compile from the latest CVS version, or wait for the next release to solve most problems.
- No effects channels
- Some interface discrepancies between Fruity Loops. It’ll take some getting used to.
Responses
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6 Comments
Free software FTW.
Indeed it is a complaint of many that there is an extreme lack of decent audiovisual content creation software available natively to Linux.
Though many applications exist, they’re all still in their infancy, and ‘advanced users’ of Photoshop and the like are too stubborn or too stupid to alter their work habits slightly to fit with the different GUIs that accompany the free software versions.
Their loss I suppose; if they want to pay how many hundred bucks for Photoshop instead of using free software… ;-)
Photoshop isn’t that cheap. New it’s US $589.99 from Amazon.com. I’m not sure I know anyone who paid that much.
Yep I’ve installed it on my Ubuntu but I can’t used the VST ….I know LMSS can use the VST, I will try soon :-)
lmms is good, using a real time kernel with a modern linux platform (like sidux for example) is the best foundation for audio production. period.
software like this is work in progress, but already most of these apps have features which live up to their commercial counter-parts and will only get better, with our help, so support it!
“Though many applications exist, they’re all still in their infancy, and ‘advanced users’ of Photoshop and the like are too stubborn or too stupid to alter their work habits slightly to fit with the different GUIs that accompany the free software versions.”
You get what you pay for. A professional product that is orders of magnitude more capable than any opensource alpha alternative.
I like free (as in beer and speech) software as much as the next guy but it is ridicules to suggest that gimp or anything has any edge on Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effect or any number of products put together by an actual team of developers.
@ezKiel, it’s not ridiculous to suggest that free software can compete with proprietary software. Take de-noising software — GREYCstoration piles all over commercial alternatives. Inkscape vector software is so far ahead of Illustrator in features it’s difficult to even compare the two.
Gimp may not have the same professional level feature set of Adobe Photoshop, but to say it’s orders of magnitude behind is a bit of a stretch.
Thanks for your feedback.