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by trickell 3387 days ago
Check out LMMS (Let's Make Music). It's like Ableton for Linux and already has VST's like Hydrogen, etc. built into the software itself: https://lmms.io/
6 comments

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.
Do you know anything on the story of Bitwig vs Ableton? (Google gives me lots of feature comparisons, but not the story.)

edit: http://djtechtools.com/2012/01/12/bitwig-studio-announced-ab...

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).
I used LMMS for Windows in Wine for ages. Now using on Ubuntu 16.04 compiled from source linking to libwine. Works fine, I'm not at all clear on what bit of Linux use is supposed to be hard.
Ahh, when I last tried it, it was called Linux MultiMedia Studio :)