I’m a professional instrumentalist and I’ve begun tinkering with digital audio production , hoping to start a side career composing digital music.
I’ve been working with Linux in general for over 15 years, and I’d like to stick with it, but I’m wondering if its actually viable in the professional world. It seems like most professionals are working with Ableton or other commercial software. I’m learning and working with Ardour, which seems great, but I wonder if I shouldn’t be investing my time in software that will be more useful longterm.
Anyone here have thoughts/experience with this?
Seems like it really depends what you mean by joining the professional world. If its just you making music and releasing it, then the world is your oyster. What you use doesn’t matter as long as the result is great. If you need to work with other people’s files and session, you’re going to have a pretty hard time.
I want to be a game music composer, so definitely more than just putting out my own creations for fun. At some point I’m sure I’ll be learning some middle-ware and game engine stuff, but for now I’m just trying to write some music for games that don’t yet exist.
What are you referring to when you say middleware in this context?
I think this would be doable with FOSS. As long as others don’t want to share their sessions or have you share your sessions with theirs. You might be able to get away with sharing stems instead.
Middleware basically is a software that bridges your audio editing with game engines. Fmod is one example. I suppose if I’m just a lone composer and not part of an audio team it won’t matter how I create my source material.
Out of all the open source programs, Ardour definitely is the most capable one currently. LMMS fills a niche of chiptune, but seemed inferior in every other way when I tried it.
If you are just concerned using linux but are open to closed source software, bitwig is the way to go probably. It’s pretty much made by the old Ableton team.
If you want to make digital orchestral music specifically, Musescore 4 with musesounds is the best option, as they are the only program not limited by MIDI. And who knows, maybe Audacity will become more capable more quickly once they’re done with their refactoring.
NB: You can absolutely develop a pipeline where you make certain things in one program and export what you did in another program.
I think it is entirely possible with FOSS. this kinda reminds me of the situation 10-15 years ago when people were trying to make their windows laptop look like a mac… because mac was more “respected” in audio circles… FOSS will work for professional audio… how many sneers and eyerolls it solicits from others who paid $$$$, who knows… prob a good bit depending on the circles you roll through.
