I’m seriously considering switching to #linux to use #bitwig. I’ve made several attempts, but when I get to the audio drivers part, I get lost. I would like to be able to record videos and do live streaming for #youtube, but the audio routing is a bit of a nightmare. Plus, I don’t know which Linux distribution to choose. The barrier is quite high!

@animatek
I'd recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon to start with. It's incredibly friendly and everything should just work out of the box.

Pipewire with wireplumber will be the best sound routing without needing you to mess with anything, and it's made for upcoming Wayland assumed replacement of x11.

Personally, I prefer and only use Alpine Linux, but it is a text mode installer so it feels intimidating to start, but is incredibly robust.

#linux #bitwig #youtube

@animatek Audio routing is pretty much the same as any other operating system out of the box, but you can use a program like Carla to route any stream to anywhere, making it trivial do do things like set Bitwig's output to stream to both the input of OBS and to your headphones. For common usecases you can completely ignore that and it all just behaves like you would expect though.

@animatek

I will add that I used Ubuntu Studio for years and was quite happy with it.

@animatek
Hi, I don't know much about audio but I remember some people praising Ubuntu studio because it has JACK setup.
I don't know if it support flatpak out of the box but I can help with that.

@animatek Bitwig is using Ubuntu as reference, so it would make sense to use something like Ubuntustudio. But since Ubuntustudio is using KDE, it maybe better to direct use Ubuntu, because it is using Gnome as Desktop Environment (Bitwig Reference).

As "Audio driver" there is pipewire. Regardless what you want to use (PulseAudio, Jack) pipewire integrates them all with a very low latency. Alsa is the low level driver layer.

As Patchbay I recommend qpwgraph . In my opinion better than Helvum or any other suggested Patchbay.

If you are new to linux, you should know, that pipewire not only manages audio. It manages also Midi and with the change from display Server Xorg to Wayland the next'ish year, you can manage also your video sources. Like you can do now with audio and midi.

And don't start "optimizing" with realtime or low latency kernels. That information are very old, and you don't need that any more. Since 2-3 years. So better forget about that 😀

So to be hassle free take the original Ubuntu, install qpwgraph.

For Windows plugins, you need to install yabridge from robbert with wine-staging. The installation is very easy and good documented on his git repository https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

If you have issues with Bitwigs audio engine as realtime process, you can translate my blogpost for that situation https://hyperblog.de/hoergen/2023/09/08/pipewire-modul-rt-konfiguration/

@bobzub Thank You definitely i will try the Ubuntu 😀

@animatek #Pipewire has pretty much made the audio routing better than other operating systems. I use my Mac to do mostly music but when I’m on my work PC, I use Bitwig with Pipewire backend. I have Debian running on that.

With Pipewire I’m able to do stuff that I need Loopback on Mac, i.e. route audio somewhat freely between apps.

3rd party plugins that I actually use work too. For U-he stuff I have native Linux versions and FabFilter goodies I use through #yabridge.

Generally Windows plugins that are programmed with love in the first place (like FF stuff) works super solid with Yabridge, sometimes even more stable than real Windows. For super proprietary stuff like XLN Audio stuff I keep them only on my Mac.

Pipewire has sort of fixed things that I had to complain in the past with Linux audio.

I sort of like constructing tracks on my Linux PC given the more limited set of plugins. It keeps the focus on track construction, not on swapping plugins :-) I tend to finish the tracks on my Mac.

You should probably consider more realtime oriented kernel for the installation. I personally use https://liquorix.net/.

PS. I would not touch Ubuntustudio style distro’s because they tend to tune things sort of “old world” ways and sometimes even counter-productive. You are better off with e.g. standard Debian or Ubuntu installation. In addition to more real-time oriented kernel, you might want to add threadirqs to /etc/default/grub and install and systemctl enable rtirq with its default settings , This will give priority to your USB audio interface. I’m not sure if you even need at modern times to do anything to /etc/security/limits.conf given that by default Pipewire daemons do run already with real-time priorities and Bitwig has a Pipewire backend option.

To summarize, a stock distribution, real-time’ish kernel, rtirq and Pipewire would be me go-to list. At least I experience no glitches. And then the desktop is not tuned too heavily to a single purpose (audio), and configuration sort of stands better time as it is not too specific in its adjustments. Not that different from Windows or macOS in the end. In both you also need to few tweaks here and there to get a good result…

@animatek As far as sound cards go I love my RME Babyface Pro FS :-) I boot it in class compliant mode when using Linux and proprietary mode when on macOS.

Thank you for all the anwser😀 I´m very happy, I'm going to install Ubuntu and gradually assimilate all this information and put it into practice! I'm very interested in Pipewire, and I think it's the most suitable option. Jack seems quite complicated to me. On the other hand, I'll have to figure out how to make my Facecam camera work with it, but that's something for later. Thanks to everyone!

Btw Mastodon is Amazing 😍