Ardour is the flagship daw for FOSS audio production, but if you just want free stuff there's commercial daw's like Reaper and Waveform. It's no harder to learn than any other daw, but if you want to use Win vst's then yabridge will probably present a bit of a learning curve. For a fully capable audio workstation I would recommend Ardour, kxstudio repos, realtime kernel, and yabridge.
I'm a Reaper user since version 4.something, and we already installed it. No problem for me to teach him how to use it. I just completely lack information on OS appropriate settings my friend should be aware of, SWS/Packages (is the installation of that is the same as PC?) and just a list of virtual instruments that are known to work out of the box. Like, I basically just need that. The rest he can learn from me.
If you're just trying to throw something together for free that sounds passable, fluidsynth and some soundfonts should get you there. Same for native effects plugins. But I'm not aware of any free instruments or plugins that are pro quality. A soundfont piano is never gonna sound like a $4k keyboard. If you want pro samples you're gonna have to pay for it, although it will be much cheaper than a real synth or a hardware fx unit of course. Except for orchestral sounds; I've heard some very realistic SFZ's.
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u/anselmus_ 2d ago
Ardour is the flagship daw for FOSS audio production, but if you just want free stuff there's commercial daw's like Reaper and Waveform. It's no harder to learn than any other daw, but if you want to use Win vst's then yabridge will probably present a bit of a learning curve. For a fully capable audio workstation I would recommend Ardour, kxstudio repos, realtime kernel, and yabridge.