Arch Linux

peets

Member

From: Montreal

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 936

Website

Making music Unix-style

I'm trying to use my computer to make some music. This would involve pretty lo-fi recording & processing and sequencing "virtual instruments" (midi? vst? etc)

There are a lot of options, and I haven't been able to "just get started". I'd like to benefit from your experience.

Is there any software to make music that feels Unix-ish? It seems everything I find so far involves knobs and buttons and sliders and lights and everything is integrated in one big scary app. Are there some right tools for the right jobs that present simple and clear interfaces?

In your experience, is it worthwhile to study decisions like ALSA vs OSS, whether or not to use JACK or PulseAudio, etc? I don't yet have a clear idea about the differences between these or how they relate. Can I just use my basic setup (default arch install + alsa I think) and get o.k. results?

Here's the kernel modules I load on boot, it looks like there are a lot that have to do with sound

MODULES=(!pcspkr r8169 slhc acpi-cpufreq cpufreq_ondemand snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm-oss snd-hwdep snd-page-alloc snd-pcm snd-timer snd snd-hda-intel soundcore kqemu nvidia)

I also have the "alsa" daemon running.