My main music machine is a Mac and my main everything else system is a Lenovo laptop with Pop!_OS. I would like to have the option to play with ideas on my Linux machine instead of having to switch systems when I feel inspired.
I already own the full version of Bitwig Studio butvI would love to throw some must have, Linux compatible, VST plugins into the mix.
Free sample sources would also be much appreciated.
Could you please provide a brief description of Vital? I'm in the process of rebuilding my musicmaking setup after a 15 years long hiatus, so I need to update myself on what's out there.
On that note, it looks like I'm gonna go for bitwig over Ardour. Any thoughts/opinions on that?
Vital is a vst similar to Serum, a pretty popular paid vst. It has a bunch of preset sounds but offers a lot of options for effects and automation to design your own sounds. I use it a ton personally and get a lot of range from it.
In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it's the closest thing to a native experience that I've come across.
You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.
You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there's a bit of a typical "how well does this work under wine" crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.
Getting plugins to install is often a big hurdle, if they are working, they work. However I think performance suffers alot. Didn't try it on any bigger synths yet tho.
I use it for spitfire labs, ott, and delay lama (very important) and all work great. There are occasional crashes when messing with parameters, but usually those don't happen more then once. I haven't noticed any performance issues.
Might depend on what DAW you use but I found it abit tedious to setup with Ardour, but after that it worked perfectly with the VSTs I was running on Windows, mainly Amplitube 5.
There's also a CLAP version available, if you use a daw that supports CLAP (like REAPER (which you should totally use btw (it's like the emacs of daws if emacs actually ran faster than everything else)))
Just use Windows VSTs! This video was a game changer for me. Turned my vanilla Linux Mint into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency. Incedible!
Surge XT is a must. Best FOSS synth there is IMO. 3 oscillators in 2 scenes. Filters, effects, all the LFOs and envelopes in the world, all the modulation, expression aftertouch, etc you need. A bunch of presets out of the box. Very flexible synth, though can be a bit learning curve to get going.
Honorable mentions to Dexed (basically a software DX7), GeonKick (for synthesizing drums), and pianoteq (proprietary, but best there is in piano synth with native linux support).
unrelated but does Ableton work with Linux yet? I did a quick search and someone says it works "flawlessly" but the comments indicate this is not true.