Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux (opens in new tab)

EZDrummer, and the other examples are a different beast. Those are sample based drum plugins. They are made to sound like real acoustic drums. They are great and wonderful.

This is a pastern based drum machine for non-acoustic sounding drums (Usually). So you are comparing two different tools.

For me a huge change the past years was the coming of Bitwig Studio audio workstation to Linux. Commercial software, but rock solid and high quality.

I haven't used Hydrogen yet but it seems to be much more than just a drum synth/simulator, such as the ones you referenced as comparison (Studio Drummer, EZDrummer, etc).

Drum machines can mix and compose a variety to samples and synth sounds, these samples can be drum kit sounds but it's not necessary. So you likely only sampled a limited portion of the functionality.

You could also always purchase high quality drum samples and use it with this OSS programs if the built in library sucks. From experience, you could accomplish quite a bit with relatively simple drum machines.

The synth products on the other hand were the thing that was complex and needs to be high quality. Which is likely what you were looking for a drum simulation.

> I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, even though I had one of the few soundcards that had drivers for Linux (Edirol FA-101).

I don't know anything about your area, but it sounds like a pre-built Linux image with realtime kernel and maybe some custom driver setup would be useful here. I use LinuxCNC [1] and they provide a super-convenient Linux image that take only a few minutes to get setup and controlling real CNC machines / robots.

[1] http://linuxcnc.org/

After hearing some oldschool electronica my 9-year old asked me about drum machines. Is there a good kid-friendly one you can recommend for win or android?

>> ..only reason I have Windows installed on my private computer

When you say Reaper, you lose me. I have used it for a long time and it's really the most basic of all the DAW alternatives.

LMMS is great for easy EDM composition, but lacks a lot of things essential for a serious workflow.

I'd recommend Ardour for more studio-oriented work: http://ardour.org/

Also, Ardour works with Alsa as backend.

It's actually like FL Studio for Linux as it is pretty much a carbon copy. If you want to draw a direct comparison of "Ableton for Linux" then the logical choice is Bitwig, which is quite frankly "Ableton for Linux" since all of the original Ableton developers left to start Bitwig and the interface is a 100% copy of the original.

Here's an album I made exclusively with LMMS and it's default setup of sounds and plugins:

https://kruhft.bandcamp.com/album/listener

It's a pretty good piece of software.

I'm a happy LMMS user of many years, but "It's like Ableton" is somewhere between wrong and not-even-wrong. It doesn't have anything like the feature set nor the basic paradigm of Ableton, and anyone trying LMMS on this basis will be seriously disappointed.

The actual comparison is FL Studio - because LMMS started as a cheap-and-cheerful open source clone of FruityLoops, to the point where many FL Studio how-tos (particularly for the 3x Oscillator, sorry Triple Oscillator) also work for LMMS.

LMMS also imports pretty well from Hydrogen, apparently.

LMMS plus points: it costs $0, and it's open source! Minus point: it has only volunteer developers, who come and go; there's no support organisation.

LMMS is very easy to get started on and it's lots of fun. The Woolworths guitar of disco; cheap, cheerful, inadequate and readily available.

[The Woolworths guitar was cheap and helped punk rock along greatly; Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks had one that he'd basically beaten to a plank.]

I like LMMS but the funny thing about it is that some of the essential features (such as extrrnal VSTs) don't work on Linux (unless you set it up on wine, which has it's own issues).

Ahh, when I last tried it, it was called Linux MultiMedia Studio :)

Do you happen to have a good reference on using the Pi3 for audio? I spent a lot of Saturday trying to make mine do some stuff, and while a lot of the technical snafus were the usual sort, I did end up burning a lot of time googling around until I finally found someone who suggested turning off CPU performance scaling. Which was a forehead slap moment for me after that, but, still, it'd be nice if there was somewhere I could go that had that stuff more laid out.

(As implied, I've googled already. A lot.)

(The Pi3 seems to have more than enough CPU power for it to do what I want but I was having trouble just routing audio in a USB mic straight out to the speakers without dropouts and failures two or three times a second, even though the CPU is barely at 10%. I think turning off the scaling seemed to fix that, though I ran out of time just as I tried that to be sure.)

Yeah, the number of single developer projects combined with developer attrition has certainly orphaned a ton of linux-audio projects.

Just to add a bit to this:

Renoise is really rock solid, fast, light-weight, powerful, Lua-scriptable, and really cheap compared to your typical commercial DAW, like Bitwig. I think I paid less than $80 for Renoise, compared to about $400 for Bitwig.

The tracker paradigm is very different to the piano-roll paradigm that most other DAWs use. If you can get used to the tracker way of doing things, which is very keyboard-centric (kind of like vim and emacs), then you could be very productive, if not you might be better off with a traditional DAW.

Finally, trackers are usually used for making electronic music, and might not be the best fit for other types of music, or for making or editing long recordings. You might be better off with something like Ardour or Bitwig for that.

Here's an example of an album I made with ReNoise and it's default sounds/plugin set:

http://kruhft.bandcamp.com/album/macro-2

All of it is mixed, played and recorded'live' with the pre-programmed tracks being mixed using an offboard midi controller.

Renoise is great, especially for breakbeat/jungle drum programming. Just load up your break of choice, put in some slice markers (or play it with offset commands like on old trackers), and you're set.

I do find the pattern-based workflow a bit of a productivity killer though (I usually get stuck on perfecting the same 8/16 bar loop).

Most DAWS might have drum machines but most serious users end up using a third party product. The built-in ones are undeniably good but thinks like Kontact/EZDrummer etc. are on another level.

Pulse/alsa/jack shenanigans make audio production the only thing I still use MacOS for.

Define "removing". Pulseaudio is a hard beast to put down.

The typical workflow for Hydrogen is to turn a whole desktop session into your DAW, building it from the ground up with your own selection of tools.

I've dreamed of doing something like that for awhile, but at the end of the day it's almost always easier to just reach for a self-contained DAW.

It's not precisely your desire/use-case, but that sounds vaguely like you might like some of the programmatic sound generation systems out there:

Overtone - http://overtone.github.io/ Tidal - https://tidalcycles.org/

Perhaps those might be hooked into something you're already building?

All kinds of sound-generating software you can control using midi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI