10 Nice tools for Music-making: on Linux!

[Jay Vaughan]

> I'd love to explore me some Ubuntu with all the niceties there are to find -- what computer (i'm thinking Ultrabook) would you recommend? Or is it wiser to start out with en emulator (I'm on the Mac) for now?

Some 200-300 buck PC is good enough to see what all the fuss is about.  An ultrabook works.  Best thing, if you’re serious, is to get yourself a dedicated machine according to budget, and set it aside from your ‘real computer’.  Give it, its own space and breathing room.  Feed it by using it.  A little cheap laptop is a great way to get started; same with a recycled desktop machine that you think has ‘mostly decent’ specs.  (BTW, just adding SSD to pretty much everything these days, makes it work great again..)

My personal brand is Ubuntu Studio - stuff just plain works, and its got Debian underneath it all, functioning quite properly.  Nice to get packages installed, get package source, tweak, make new package, install it with package management.  It’s a great, great, really .. great .. development environment if you want to do something you can’t do on OSX/Windows so easily: use the source.  For everything.  

I’m not suggesting you dig in and recompile Ardour for your AMD machine, but I do wish to point out that one thing you’ll get out of a -studio variant of linux: a whole new world of wonderful software, unlike the Win/OSX world, in actuality.  Source for Pro Tools/Cubase/Ableton?  Pfft.  Source for Ardour, Rosegarden, seq24, et al?  Just a command line away ..

j.