[dawhead]

Every day, there are NEW DAW users who have no plugins.

I think you're also not fully informed on the scale of existing plugin development on Linux. Several commercial developers now produce plugins for Linux, and there are some open source ones for many tasks that are actually outstanding. Noise removal/restoration is one particularly weak spot.

Finally, Ardour doesn't run on just Linux. Anyone on OS X or Windows can use the program, along with their full set of VST (Windows) or AU (OS X) plugins on those platforms.

[jdietrich]

>Several commercial developers now produce plugins for Linux, and there are some open source ones for many tasks that are actually outstanding.

I've demoed a large number of open source or Linux-compatible plugins; with the exception of Pure Data and the Calf Studio plugins, they were uniformly awful. Pure Data is still substantially inferior to Reaktor. Last time I checked, the Calf Studio plugins weren't cross-platform and had considerable shortcomings compared to their proprietary equivalents.

A huge proportion of my bread-and-butter plugins have no Linux equivalent that is even remotely comparable: Kontakt, Vienna Symphonic Library, Omnisphere, Melodyne, Izotope Rx and Ozone, Bias FX, the UAD and Arturia emulations etc.

Producing music on Linux would be an exercise in frustration. The plugins available on Linux compare very badly to the bundled plugins that come with Logic or Cubase, let alone the whole market.

The very best open source plugins are mediocre at best. In many absolutely crucial categories, they are laughably bad - compare Freeverb3 with Vienna MIR or Altiverb, for example.

[dawhead]

Pianoteq ? U-he ? Distrho? Harrison Consoles ? These are all proprietary plugins for Linux, all of them excellent.

PureData is a VERY VERY different program from Reaktor, capable of things not possible in Reaktor, but also with a totally different work flow and interaction model. There are many PD users who would absolutely disagree with your characterization.

My point was not to say "The plugin situation on Linux is totally comparable to the one of OS X or Windows", indeed far from it. But your post suggested that there's no signs of life at all there, and this just isn't true.

You also seem very focused on a style of music production that is really built around plugins. This is common today, but far from universal. I know many studio owners in the USA and Europe who use plugins very minimally, because they focus on recording performing musicians.

As I've said many times, if you have a workflow that is tightly bound with platform-specific plugins, you should stay on that platform. With this release of Ardour, people are now free to consider using Ardour on that platform. That is all.

[fit2rule]

I concur - been using DAW's for decades now, and Ardour out of the box on a newly installed Ubuntu Studio-based system has tons, and tons of plugins - there isn't a single category of plugin in the OP's list that isn't available. You just have to not shop for them, and rather look in the repository, because they're there ..

[Joeboy]

This is a Free Software antipattern. Yes, there are things that exist that claim to do the same thing as commercial software. No, that doesn't necessarily mean they're actually functional replacements for that software.

I mean some of them are, but there's no sampler that will painlessly play modern sample packs, no usable pitch correction, nothing a tenth as good at noise reduction / audio restoration as Izotope RX.

Also, maybe a violin is as good as a guitar, but you can't hand a guitarist a violin and expect them to be fine with that. Or vice versa, if you prefer.

I like, use and pay for Ardour, but I also like realism.

[dawhead]

That's all fair and correct.

But why is there no Izotope on Linux? People gripe at free software developers for "not providing Izotope", when in reality that software represents years of dedicated R&D, something that most people are not willing to pay for (even on platforms other than Linux). The simple reason why Izotope and Kontakt and Melodyne are not available on Linux is not that free software developers haven't written them, it is that the companies that do write them have chosen not to make them available.

I was very fortunate to start Ardour at a time when I did not need the income. Expecting to see world-class plugins like these show up without the involvement of the companies that did the R&D (and/or defined the proprietary file formats in use) is naive.

FWIW, I have talked to Melodyne in the past about adding support for their non-linear data access API, but they have been "unable to come to a consensus about how we could permit this in an open source project".

So for sure, these kinds of plugins are not available on Linux: because their developers have chosen that.

[Joeboy]

I don't gripe at free software developers for not providing Izotope, I gripe at people who pretend Audacity is the same thing. I think the usual result of this mis-selling is that people quickly go back to proprietary software with renewed hostility towards Free Software and its advocates.

Edit: To be clear that isn't intended as a gripe at Audacity, just at the misrepresentation of Audacity.

[fit2rule]

On the other hand, there are audio tools in the Free Software world that wouldn't be possible in a commercial context.

The point is this: its up to the user to gain maximum value from their investment. Nobody is going to do that for you.