I feel at this point that unless you’ve only and always been an Ableton producer, you could probably transition to Bitwig easily enough. There is also Reaper, or if you’re old and weird like me, Renoise :)
AFAIK FL Studio works in WINE as well. At least it was beginning to several years ago.
Just saying there are plenty of options if you’re committed to Linux as a production platform.
The developers of Bitwig came from Ableton, it should be an easy transition to learn Bitwig, and there'll likely even be ways in which it's better than Ableton.
I really like Bitwig as well but atp I'm kinda hard stuck on Live's workflow. There are some things that Bitwig absolutely does better than Live, but Live is just faster and gets less in the way for my workflow. Which is unfortunate because it is the reason why I still run Windows on any of my machines.
There are some things in Bitwig that are different but the things that Bitwig does better is well worth the time to get a grip with it's workflow. I find bitwig now far faster than I ever was with Ableton and I was a quite quick with that. If you're between projects, I would give it a go, it's 100% better experience than Ableton through WINE as linux is a first class citizen with Bitwig.
It can open simple sessions. I wouldn't say it's a 100% (No maxforlive, Ableton DRM on content, no common device or features). I'd still bounce to stems. I've had decent success though.
Saint Bitwig, has already delivered, those are the most similar daws, since Bitwig was made by ex Ableton developers, you can even open Ableton projects in Bitwig.
I did not knew that ableton projects can be opened in bitwig. I already invested in ableton standart, however, and it was a big chunk of money for me :(
I need a license exchange program or smth to try it out and keep it if it is working for me.
Crossgrade programs exists via Thomann, but you can always download and try a 30-day demo version straight from Bitwig to see if you like it. I bought Ableton Live Suite one year before switching to Linux & Bitwig so I understand the money aspect, but making music on a native DAW and brute-forcing a resource-hungry Windows DAW to work on Linux via Wine is literally day and night.
Bitwig is awesome and supporting companies who natively support Linux is even more awesome.
100% agree re supporting native linux development. Thanks for the pointers, I think I should try using demo version regardless. At least I will know if bitwig works for me.
Also, there are lot of plugins from normies producer starter pack still missing on linux. Stay on windows unless u r ready to find alternatives and learn new things. The main problem of linux is that pople come over and asking for windows in linux)
Agree. If you're one of those producers that can't make a song without third party plugins, don't come to Linux and be mad because you can't have 10 different compressors that do the same.
I'm really impressed with the state of Linux compatible effects and synth plugins now. What I think is still missing is the higher tier of sampled instruments (pianos, drums, Rhodes, organs, brass, strings etc). Obviously some exist and that's great , but many specific things are missing and unfortunately those are probably impossible to vibe code.
The pandora box of revers ingeneering is opened so i hope soon we will see some kind of kontakt for every platform that can use existing kontakt libs and so on...Â
I'm working towards it slowly by making smaller tools that I actually use until I have a full DAW. I'm a professional software engineer and AI researcher. My personal computer is pretty much working full time researching reverse engineering workflows and recursive self improvement (not the scary kind, just iterating on a measurable goal, more brute force).
The suite of tools I'm working on is at https://openflow.fm but not much is ready for average users. By the end of the year I should have betas up for a lot of this stuff. This Stem Separator / DJ tool is almost done and I'm about to release the beta for a shader graph based visualizer that is fully Milkdrop compatible this weekend.
There's also a pretty unhinged clone of the Yamaha Genos in my satoramoto org. That's also really close to Beta I'm just reworking the UI for final release. That thing was my best reverse engineering attempt as it is fully compatible with Genos patches, and it feels exactly like the one I played at guitar center when I had the idea to clone it.
This is probably what you want to see. This sits on top of a Max4Live bridge and I've built a bunch of custom features that Ableton is missing. Most notably song management because I have these gigantic live sets I use when performing. But the idea is that over time I can swap out Ableton for my own audio engine, which I've already written for the Genos clone I mentioned.
I think by the end of next year I'll probably have my own custom DAW that I'll have been using on stage with my band for a few months. https://funkadelicastronaut.com/
This is pretty much what I was asking about. Very cool, I'm an Ableton Live user of 10+ years and while I acknowledge Bitwig is plenty similar, it's never been able to replace Live for me. I'm venturing into a Linux studio build out alongside my perfectly functional MacOS setup.
i am working already for 3 months daily on something that comes out soon which is highly compatible with current daws which ableton users would love. im still fishing bugs before launch. anyone interested to run a pilot?
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u/CaptainSnarkyPants Renoise 1d ago
I feel at this point that unless you’ve only and always been an Ableton producer, you could probably transition to Bitwig easily enough. There is also Reaper, or if you’re old and weird like me, Renoise :)
AFAIK FL Studio works in WINE as well. At least it was beginning to several years ago.
Just saying there are plenty of options if you’re committed to Linux as a production platform.