Running Sound Applications under Wine

Oldman has a valid point, although there are still times when running windows sound apps under Linux is worth it.

For everyday computing, such as web browsing, mail, viewing movies etc. I use Linux. This is because Windows committed suicide on me several times, forcing me to reinstall it, and all my applications, each time. If I want to take a break and dabble in some music making I don't want to reboot into Windows. Audiomulch works under wine without any hastle and I have never known it to crash. One should also remember that Microsoft is making it increasingly hard to update unlicensed copies of its current operating systems. If you want an MS OS and you don't want to pay for it, then sooner or later you will probably have to restrict yourself to software that will run on Windows 2000.

One thing Dave Phillips didn't mention is that a great many VST plugins work under Linux, but outside the wine environment proper, using various wrappers such as dssi-vst. Most of the ones I have tried have also worked within audiomulch.

If you are setting up a dedicated studio and your tool of choice is cubase, ableton or whatever, and you don't want a lot of hastle, then of course you should choose an OS that won't give you any nonsense. As Dave said, at the moment those kind of tools don't work at all within Wine, and even when they begin to, there will probably be some pain involved. Then again, even though it will be harder work to get these to run flawlessly on Linux--Audiomulch's developer has a much friendlier attitude to Linux than the companies that make the other stuff--I suspect that this will indeed happen sooner or later.

That said, if you want to use ableton or whatever then you should do it on a mac rather than windows both because the audio latency is usually lower and because of all the other problems you get with windows that most windows users already know too well.

If, on the other hand, you are willing to do the nerd work, you may find it very useful to use windows audio apps alongside traditionally unix ones (of which there is a very long tradition) in a Linux environment. One reason is that it is possible to achieve very low, glitch-free, audio latency, even under very heavy system load. There is also a huge potential for working over a network in ways that tend not to happen under windows or mac os. Some of these, such as clustering, don't apply directly to windows apps and plugins running in wine or a VST wrapper, but others, such as syncing low latency audio backwards and forwards across a network, certainly do.