I am getting a new secondary computer, and I have been thinking that I could use it for audio related stuff, seeing as it might be easier to set up a dedicated machine for this rather than trying to get programs like JACK to work on a more general-purpose computer. In any case, I am wondering what software I should look into.

There are, however, some constraints that I have:
* The program must be in the main section of the debian archive. (I am planning on using debian buster for this machine.) (Note that this *does* restrict the selection to open source software, as software that is not open source will never be accepted into the archive per debian policy.)
* The computer is not exactly powerful. Specifically, it has an Atom CPU (z8350), 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. (The storage could be expanded via microSD or USB 3; the RAM can't be increased, but remember that Linux isn't as RAM hungry as Windows, which I plan on wiping right away.)

I believe I do have enough USB ports for what I would like to do, particularly since I have the Raspberry Pi keyboard, which has the nice characteristic of including a USB hub (so I can connect another USB device, like a MIDI keyboard, to it).

Currently, some of the software I am considering looking intio is:
* Ardour
* Audacity
* LMMS
* Rosegarden
* Supercollider
* sonic-pi
* musescore

Any thoughts on them? Also, perhaps it might be useful if someone would clarify what these pieces of software are used for and whar they are not suitable. (Well, I am pretty sure I understand what musescore is for, at least.)

(I don't have experience with audio software; I am, however, an amateur musician, can read music (but not guitar tabs) just fine, and have some music theory knowledge.)

Ardour is a DAW, which is what you'd use for multitrack recording & mixing & mastering. Audacity is similar, though it's historically more a tool for editing sound than it is a multitrack mixing solution, but it's grown features over the time. I like Audacity for simple stuff like clipping recordings, running an EQ or some filter through it, adding crossfades, etc.

LMMS is a suite for creating digital music by composing with synthetic instruments, drum machines, samples, etc.

Rosegarden is for writing sheet music. Idk if it ever got midi playback support, maybe it did? It's IMO quite heavyweight / "bloated GUI" style application, I think there are simpler tools that take easy-to-write ascii input and spit out a sheet.

Supercollider, IIRC, is a language for writing synthesizers. (See also csound, puredata (aka. pd), etc.)

No idea about the last two.

Other things you might want to look into (I'm not gonna check if they're in Debian repos):
Traverso DAW (yet another DAW)
ZynAddSubFx (very nice sounding softsynth)
Hydrogen (drum machine)
Sonic Visualizer (tool for visualizing sound, I use this for transcribing songs to guitar tab / notes, because my ear sucks)
MilkyTracker (you know what a tracker is, surely; I like milky, it's simple and does what it says on the tin)
TuxGuitar (hey, you can learn to read guitar tab! it shows notes too.. ux sucks for editing though, IMO)

I'm not into Linux, so I can't tell if these programs are in the main section of the debian archive.
However, these are Linux programs (and their purposes are usually put on their homepages).

Radium: [url=http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/index.php]http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/index.php[/url]

Jokosher: https://launchpad.net/jokosher

Mixx: https://www.mixxx.org/

Qtractor: https://qtractor.sourceforge.io/qtractor-index.html#Intro

Guitarix: http://guitarix.org/ (if you neeed a guitar processor for linux)

I'm an amateur bass guitar player and I can cover all my needs with:

* Audacity: to edit, slow down, change tune, mix up multi track all the songs I work with
* Musescore: to write down my music and preview it
* Hydrogen: to create drums base for my projects


They are all free and installed on my Ubuntu machine, that means obviously, no problems with debian releases too

I haven't used any of the others but I've been using Audacity for years as a simple audio editor. I find it just perfect, very resource light, just the right features, etc. You can plug in LAME and FFMPEG addins which significantly expands what file types it works with, eg, open say an .mp4 video file directly and it'll auto-extract and use just the audio without needing to manually extract it into an .m4a first. Macros are hugely useful (eg, mass converting all files in a folder from one file format to another whilst applying whatever filters). One great feature is splitting one large file containing many songs (eg, a whole album ripped to one file) into individual songs based on detecting 1-2s silence between tracks. Just lots of little things like that which add up to a really nice piece of software given its price tag.

Since you're already going with the Linux road why not use Ubuntu Studio which already have those softwares mentioned included, and uses a low-latency kernel (which is a must)?

https://linuxmusicians.com/

It's a shame BeOS isn't around any more because that OS was the only one that knew how to poll resources effectively...

Haiku is sill around, no?

Haiku OS: Which is basically an open source (built from scratch) inspiration of BeOS.

I've used LMMS in the past, and it wasn't my kind of DAW. It couldn't load 20+ minute-long wave files, so I didn't even try loading my usual kind of projects with 25+ tracks. Virtual instruments were easy to load and work with, so if you're looking to create music with just that, or for creating blueprints, then LMMS would be a good option. For the time being, I don't see this being a viable solution for creating long, production-heavy tracks, though.

If you want to do conversion without needing a gui (say, make an mp4 to m4a or mp3, raise volume, change tempo, etc) or other stuff, FFMpeg might be worth a look.

"The program must be in the main section of the debian archive. " - I don't know about that, sorry.

I've used Audacity to record and tweak audio, and it seems to run fine on lower-end hardware. There are a lot of options under "Effect" and I assume you can add more somehow but I never looked into that. It may be basic compared to the others, I don't know but it got the job done for me.

I'd encourage you to at least try out Audacity. Probably unnecessary but I included a screenshot.

Thanks for this thread, soon I was looking into exploring some more programs of this sort.

Audacity is pretty awesome in editing sounds adding effects that sort of thing and it imo is fairly easy to get to grips with. I would for sure reccomend it at least alongside something else.

Musecore is good for writing down compositions sort of an alterntaive to finale.

Lmms is one of the few digital music creators with full features but i never really liked it myself idk i guess its just not my thing. It is worth trying though.

I know, but it's going really slow forward, not to mention they've been focusing too much on binary-compatibility with BeOS 5 and it's hardware support is a lackluster.

However, if they manage to get it move forward faster now that Beta1 is out, I predict it could (perhaps) once again kill those bloated and slow OSs/kernals; Windows and Linux.

I apologise wholeheartedly to dtgreene in advance for this off-topic post.

I myself have been watching it for years (using BeOS occasionally prior to that), and have tried it with great success on a few different computers over the years. I even tried to use it exclusively on a couple of occasion (in the early days, with basic built-in net access), because it worked so well. But at that time, software support was extremely limited, so had to return to Linux.

Yes, monumental tasks like this can be excruciatingly slow to develop (much like ReactOS), especially when looking at it from an outside perspective. But I try to look at bright side, and think, all good things come to those who wait...

Since you've already received your answers about the applications in question, let me ask you if you're playing a *real* musical instrument; if you plan to connect an instrument/microphone, do you already have an audio interface? If not, you should consider getting one, unless all your music will be written through midi controllers/VST instruments etc. and monitoring will be done using normal desktop pc speakers or headphones.

Also, i'm not sure if your specs will cut it for the music you're going to produce, but audio recording/editing that spans over many channels is quite the task for a PC to handle and you may find that you need more RAM or a faster CPU, although if you're only going for a guitar/vocals plus some midi (let's say some piano and/or drums), you'll be fine.