Bitwig is available on Linux now and works great in my experience. I actually prefer it to Ableton anyway.

Second the Bitwig, with a caveat: Read the Manual or Suffer. There are a alot of absolutely non-obvious UI rakes you can step on, can be really off-putting if messing around blindly (from the top of my head: if you accidenly turn on clip player for a track, it will not play the timeline; not disabling polyphony will prevent your Note Grid from running continuously; microtonal notes are being sent to MIDI differently depending on the MPE settings ...)

Bitwig + Pianoteq is the ultimate toy to tinker and relax with.

Thanks! I think I'll print that sentence on A2 paper with 72 point font, an tape it on our helpdesk:

Read the Manual or Suffer.

Maybe get someone with a God's Booming Voice to speak it in the phone voice mail message , too.

I thought I had tried all the linux DAWs, but I haven't tried Bitwig; thanks for mentioning it, I'll try it out this week.

Just a heads-up: Make sure to have enough time to mess around with it because it's a massive time drain. Especially if you like sound design. Exciting and fun time drain, but a time drain none the less.

I bought a midi controller to make music for a game I'm working on part-time, knowing absolutely nothing at all about music.

It is the most relaxing, pleasant time-sink I have encountered in years, I wish someone had told me the joy of music creation earlier. Even just fiddling with the piano is quite extraordinarily relaxing.

Ah, I remember the joys of discovering music production and the exploration of the audio multiverse. What I wouldn't give to be in your shoes right now :)

I also unfortunately remember trying to RTFM incomplete / incorrect docs and trying to hunt down some obscure forums in search for some nuggets of knowledge. Oh, and YT wasn't quite a thing it is today, so watching potato resolution YT videos (if any) was the norm.

Luckily that's much less the case these days, so you're starting at a massive advantage if you want to learn. In that regard, someone in the BWS community some time ago shared a list of tutorials for people starting out: https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=7515a658a4ec4aee9f40910485a...

That should get you going nicely :)

Thanks! The problem nowadays is sorting the wheat from the chaff, there's so much stuff on the internet, it's hard to find "the best" material instead of lazy SEO stuff. The list will help, thanks again.

What about VSTs? They won't all work on Linux.

Many work 100% a few may have cosmetic quirks on their UI but remain usable, a few don't work at all, but those are a small number. Take a look at Yabridge, as suggested by another user, it's great. A nice aspect of running plugins under Yabridge/WINE is that you can run obsolete plugins that wouldn't load anymore on modern Windows versions, so there's no planned obsolescence that would stop you from using that beloved synth or effect that was never upgraded for example beyond Windows XP. The only problem I encountered with some among really old plugins, and I mean from well over 20 years ago, is that the installer stops as it detects a negative amount of storage available, which is very likely the result of trying to fit a bigger variable carrying the number of bytes free of modern filesystems structures into the smaller one that old code can read. I believe the error could be prevented through a quick & dirty kludge by implementing a WINE executable option that fakes the free storage the installer sees just temporarily until the end of the install procedure.

Quite a list here of Linux compatible VST/VSTi, some paid, some FOSS : http://linux-sound.org/linux-vst-plugins.html

Next to some awesome open source VSTs (SurgeXT, Helm, Vital etc.) there's plenty of closed source VSTs that run native on Linux (u-he plugins come to mind)

But you could also use something like yabridge [0] in order to run Windows-only VSTs.

0: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

One of the reasons I like Bitwig is that the included instruments are really good and you can use the grid to build just about anything. So I find myself reaching for third party instruments much less.

Hopefully this new CLAP plugin format takes off though.