A few years ago (becoming many years ago now) I was a Linux loving sound engineer. I am also a guitar player with a family which means I have not been much of a guitar player for a while now.

Well, I recently got a new (to me) laptop to replace my Pinebook Pro and I have decided to dip my feet back into music production. With that in mind I feel I can add to the conversation by giving how things are going after a few years away.

I always lean towards Fedora for my personal workstations, so this will be Fedora-centric. There are definitely other options:

• Arch Linux has a detailed Wiki page for Professional Audio here
• Ubuntu Studio has been around for years and works really well by all accounts
• AVLinux has also been around for ages, but seems to be less active that Ubuntu Studio

As I said though, I like Fedora, so I will stick with that.

What I need

I want to be able to record guitar, piano (including MIDI) and vocals. Neither I nor my wife can play drums, so I will need a drum machine (ideally a virtual drummer of some form). I also want to be able to play guitar just for fun. So I need

• Real-time audio
• A Digital Audio Workstation
• Guitar amp modelling
• Drum machine
• Synths

I have a Behringer UMC202HD which I already know works out-of-the-box. Back in the day this was the biggest hurdle, but USB class-compliance has completely changed the game here.

I also use a cheap MIDI interface that allows me to use my wife’s old (pre-USB MIDI) digital piano. Like the audio interface, this is USB class-compliant and worked flawlessly out of the box.

The Fedora Music Ecosystem

The first place to look is for a Special Interest Group (SIG) that could be helpful. Sure enough, Fedora has the Music & Audio SIG that is geared towards exactly this. From this I discovered a few things:

• Yann Collette is maintaining a COPR dedicated to music production
• Audinux also has some excellent resources
• Linux Musicians has an excellent thread that covers basically everything “under the hood”

Getting Good Latency

Latency need to be very low in order to actually play anything.