Linux Audio

I've been running on Arch for the past few years and using PipeWire with the relevant drop in packages for the last year or so to handle audio. Wouldn't necessarily recommend Arch for someone mainly focused on doing production work as brand new PipeWire releases sometimes cause issues.

• Ardour for working on music / audio editing

• qpwgraph for routing (i used to use qjackctl but qpwgraph is built with PipeWire in mind and does what i need + can save and load routing )

• carla-rack for mic processing (some noise reduction, compressor, eq for voice chat / OBS recording fed into a virtual mic source)

• the pro-audio package group on Arch provides a bunch of tools and plugins conveniently. I just keep all of them installed and find something new to try out here and there. You can see what packages are part of that group for inspiration and find the packages for whatever distro you wanna use

• i make the most use of x42, LSP, and Calf plugins for day to day stuff

Other than that just some bash scripts that run pactl commands to create the virtual sinks and sources I typically use on startup, then when qpwgraph is started it will load my saved routing to those sources

I've been using Pop!_OS for a while and have found it to be really stable. It's based on Ubuntu but without snap or a lot of other Ubuntu crap and it plays great with Nvidia cards.

I have used Ardour on it with Yabridge to convert VSTs and had pretty good results.

It seems like snap is a bit of a disaster. I have a VM running Ubuntu for testing some things and ended up completely removing snap it was taking up so much space.

I run Manjaro. Installed it in 2018 and stuck with it. I use Reaper for mixing and mastering. Production and recording away from the computer.

How is Ardour for mixing and mastering?? Can you compare it to Reaper?

Debian testing with PipeWire for audio (and qpwgraph for routing). I really don't do anything remotely complicated recording-wise so my usual setup is Pure Data (usually with some sort of instrument input from my Fireface UCX) or SuperCollider (usually with TidalCycles for live coding) stereo outputs into Audacity where I just do basic normalization and compression. Was thinking of maybe getting into using a tracker for more "fixed" composition and I downloaded MilkyTracker (or maybe now that I think about it mb I could look into using LMMS more) but haven't toyed around with that too much yet.

I use Arch btw, was recording and mixing in Ardour but since I discovered how great Reaper is concerning MIDI workflow I'm going to stick with Reaper.