FOSSPicks
Giada
The Linux audio community received some excellent news recently when Tracktion's highly regarded T7 DAW became a free download – even the Linux version. This tactic is likely designed to tempt users to upgrade to the latest and greatest version, but it's still a great initiative. T7 is a powerful application that's more than capable of producing professional results. It has a similar feature set to Ardour, but it manages to be much easier to use. This makes it a good choice for new users who can't deal with Ardour's steep learning curve, although I'd still consider Ardour the application of choice if you can handle it. More importantly, however, T7 is not open source. While it's brilliant that a Linux version has been made available for free, there are still plenty of creative and open source music applications if that's important to you.
Giada is a perfect example of one of those hidden open source gems. It's a minimalist loop player, perfect for DJs and live performers who would otherwise be juggling MP3s with their own mixer and effect. The UI lets you drag and drop huge batches of samples before giving you plenty of control over whether they're actually looped or one-shot samples. But you can also do the same with MIDI data loops for playing MIDI synthesizers and drum machines. There's even a matrix note editor for creating MIDI loops, just as you'd find in something like Muse or Ardour, and it's the same for audio. Giada calls this the "action editor," and the new version in the latest release is sample accurate, but it's more than a simple MIDI editor. The action editor can include any action you perform within the application, with a different set of events that can be managed for audio and MIDI, as well as those that deal with the application's internal operations. It can also be used to trigger the samples for an action within a channel, which is perfect for constructing drum beats. An internal audio waveform editor can be used to modify the loops you load as you play with your composition, and channels can be recorded directly as inputs as well, giving you lots of different sources for your audio.
With the loops loaded or created in the actions editor, you either trigger playback with the mouse or the keyboard or use a controller, with the output perfectly mixed through Linux-native VST effects. You can start as many or as few channels as you need, and they'll keep in time with the global tempo. Many of the controls can be adjusted during playback, so you can start a set and make it up as you go. Or you can record while you play and save the output as an audio file for later editing and mastering. It's simple enough to use but has plenty of powerful options. In testing, it proved stable enough for live performance. It's also open source.
Project Website
Windows game
Proton
Wine, the Windows compatibility layer, has been around for a long time, and for a long time, it was the only way to get many Microsoft Windows games running on Linux. This challenge is horrendously complex: Not only does Wine need to swap out the Windows calls for the Linux equivalents, often when there is no Windows equivalent, it needs to do the same with graphics and driver calls. This obviously has a knock-on effect on Linux performance, but it was often worth it to play titles that were never likely to have a native Linux release. Wine, though, was complicated to configure, too, which is why projects like PlayOnLinux helped a great deal by prepackaging specific game configurations for use with its own version of Wine. CodeWeavers, Wine's benevolent upstream contributor, tried the same thing with their commercial offering, but nothing has quite made Wine performant or usable enough for the many people willing to ditch their Windows partition for only a few more games run on Linux.
Then, the mythical Valve released Proton, a modified version of Wine that's embedded within Valve's proprietary Steam Play client. When this is combined with DXVK, the Vulkan D3D11 and D3D10 wrapper, many games just work. What's remarkable is that with this feature enabled from the client (currently in the latest Steam Play beta), many Windows games will become installable on Linux, even without the original publisher making them available. It works amazingly well offering many games you never thought you'd see on Linux, including No Man's Sky, Burnout Paradise Ultimate, Tomb Raider Anniversary, Borderlands, and even VR titles like Beat Saber and Google Earth VR. It's a wonderful development, which we hope leads both to more Linux users and some excellent new code making its way back to Wine.
Project Website
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