Which BSD is the best for music production?

3131417

I only need LMMS and LV2 plugins

Jay

3131417 both are available in NetBSD (pkgsrc)
https://pkgsrc.se/audio/lv2
https://pkgsrc.se/audio/lmms

So it can be built on any of BSDs.

nia

we use LMMS for music production on NetBSD - it's extremely good, portable software, and runs well on everything.

3131417

nia Do the LV2 plugins work? I think LMMS requires Carla to be installed for them to work

neb

@3131417#u4773
On this note I'd like to remind you/draw your attention to this talk on audio production on FreeBSD.

bsduck

I'm also into music and my first choice is FreeBSD. It depends on your needs, but for me NetBSD and OpenBSD don't have enough audio/midi software available, neither do they have adequate realtime features (needed for playing synthesizers live with a low latency). DragonFly may work well too, but I still have to try it so I can't tell about it.

beate

My impression is that the limitations of the sound interface might be more severe than the limitations of the software, expecially the lack of support of multichannel (usb) deviced. When i tried on NetBSD (8.x) a while ago, the 4 channel interface of my litte mixer (A&H ZEDi 10) was not supprted. Which makes it pretty meaningless that there was a port of even Ardour availabe... same for OpenBSD at that time (AFAIK the kernels used the same pretty old drivers).

As i am a bit disappointed in NetBSD 9 i plan to migrate to something more useful and wonder if there is any BSD kernel without such limitations or will i have to use devuan linux for this?

bsduck

FreeBSD should work. I don't use a hardware mixer myself but at least some people use such hardware successfully.

Have a look at https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/freebsd_in_audio_studio/

nicklindert

You could try freebsd which has pretty good audio hardware support. But to be honest i tried to make it work but in the end i gave up and went back to linux. I could not get jack audio to work and it was very unstable. You can't do realtime audio as a normal user which makes working with ardour very problematic. On the positive site, freebsd desktop is making a lot of progress and for normal desktop usage it works pretty well already. But the professional audio is a little difficult at the moment. I will try again next year with freebsd current

bsduck

nicklindert You can't do realtime audio as a normal user

You can. All you need is https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/mac_rtprio/

nicklindert

bsduck
Weird, i did not see this driver mentioned anywhere. I give it a try because i really like freebsd.

bsduck

NetBSD now has JACK2 and Ardour. Nice 🙂

I'm still missing something before considering NetBSD usable for my music work:
Is there a way to connect a MIDI keyboard to JACK and/or Ardour?

Nothing shows up in JACK when I connect a keyboard, and Ardour's MIDI settings are greyed out.

On FreeBSD there is https://www.freshports.org/audio/jack_umidi/ but I couldn't find anything similar for NetBSD.

nia

bsduck Can't jack_umidi be used on NetBSD? Likely you just need to give it different device paths

bsduck

Maybe... you're much more competent to answer that question than me!

I tried to build it but that doesn't work.
In the Makefile I changed PREFIX and LOCALBASE to /usr/pkg (default is /usr/local).
Here's what I get with make:

#   compile  jack_umidi-main/jack_umidi.o
gcc -O2 -I/usr/pkg/include -Wall -DHAVE_SYSCTL   -fPIE    -std=gnu99         -c    jack_umidi.c
jack_umidi.c: In function ‘umidi_watchdog’:
jack_umidi.c:529:1: warning: no return statement in function returning non-void [-Wreturn-type]
 }
 ^
jack_umidi.c: In function ‘main’:
jack_umidi.c:646:8: error: ‘errno’ undeclared (first use in this function); did you mean ‘error’?
       (errno == ENOMEM)) {
        ^~~~~
        error
jack_umidi.c:646:8: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in
*** Error code 1

Stop.
make: stopped in /home/gespenst/jack_umidi-main

nia

bsduck Add #include <errno.h> to the top of the file jack_umidi.c.

bsduck

That works! Thank you @nia!!

I have to use export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/pkg/lib, otherwise jack_umidi doesn't start because it can't find libjack.so.0. How can I make the software know the correct path so it doesn't have to be set manually? Is there something to add in the Makefile?

nia

bsduck Usually pkgsrc automatically adds -Wl,-R/usr/pkg/lib to the LDFLAGS.

Is it working with JACK applications though? 😃

bsduck

It is! I was able to use a keyboard in Ardour 😃

This is becoming quite interesting...

Next step is to be able to run Ardour for more than two minutes, because as of now it keeps crashing 😅

bsduck

https://pkgsrc.se/commits.php?path=audio/zynaddsubfx

Log message:
audio: Enable JACK (where supported) for some "professional" tools

Nice move @nia 🙂

bsduck

@nia I want to test ZynAddSubFX with JACK but there seems to be a problem.

I built it from pkgsrc-2021Q4, where the JACK backend is enabled by default. While it does give me both "ZynAddSubFX - Jack" and "ZynAddSubFX - Jack (multi channel)" desktop entries, the application still doesn't accept JACK connections.

In menu File -> "Nio Settings" I can only choose between OSS and NULL backends.

Running from the command line doesn't help either:
zynaddsubfx -I jack -O jack

Error: JACK is not a recognized audio backend
Defaulting to the NULL audio backend
Error: JACK is not a recognized MIDI input source
Defaulting to the NULL input source