Lmms Fl Studio Alternative free music making softwar (daw)

[jonnytracker 0]

Anyone familiar with LMMS the free fruity loops alternative, I hear its just the same as Fl studio, with most of the features that comes with fl studio like VST plugins, synthesizers, mixer, and effects.

[mahesh2k 0]

Thanks for the link. I was in search of free alternative for fl for quite some time. This will definitely be handy in long run. I can dump FL now :-P.

[rob86 2]

I tried LMMS a few months ago, and I wasn't that impressed. I respect the efforts of people who are trying to make a free alternative to FL Studio, but it has a long way to go before it can truly compare with FL Studio. It's missing features of FL, it has some bugs, and on the superficial level the blocky interface just doesn't seem as nice, whereas FL's sleek interface seems to be almost perfected after so many years in the business. The bug I'm talking of is this I had an idea for a song in 7/4 time. I played it on my guitar and wanted to get it down on the PC to share the idea with a friend. I started up LMMS, and found that it wouldn't quantize my notes right in 7 / 4 time so it was useless for that. I wasn't going to line everything up by the millisecond manually. I started up FL Studio, and got my song idea down easily in a couple minutes. I don't know if this is a bug, or just something they haven't implemented yet, but regardless, it wasn't working right when I needed it.To be honest, I never gave LMMS much of a chance. There's no way it can compare to FL Studio right now, at least I don't think so, so that kind of discouraged me from actually trying to learn it's way of doing things. Is it good for free software? Yes, it's good free software. It's certainly enough to get someone started making music this way, and the things it's missing are most likely for really advanced people anyway and the average hobbyist or beginner wouldn't miss it. Would a professional choose LMMS over FL Studio if both were free? I highly doubt it, unless they're really into supporting the open source software philosophy. Can it make professional sounding tracks? Yes, surprisingly, my friend who initially detested LMMS, was a little more dedicated than me actually did some nice sounding electro-pop tunes with it and claimed it worked almost as good as FL once she figured out how to work it.I think LMMS has a chance to become better than FL Studio some day, because the open source community can produce great stuff. It's not quite ready for me yet, though.For anyone who is interested, my friend had plans of doing an in depth comparison between FL Studio and LMMS. She's done a bunch of music in FL and switched to Linux, and for a project, she's going to "remix" her tracks in LMMS and blog about differences she experienced and what she had to do or download extra to achieve the results.That plan seems to be on hold though, as Ubuntu annoyed her and she went back to Vista and FL Studio..

Edited December 16, 2009 by rob86 (see edit history)

[truefusion 3]

I had tried LMMS before, but i could never complete any song before experiencing a crash—and this was with keeping track of their newer releases. So i would normally just run FL Studio through Wine. It would be great if LMMS becomes stable, big and popular, but with many open-source project, the developers are normally people who work on these projects when they have the time. I had suggested to Image-Line to hire the LMMS devs so that they may work on a port of FL Studio to Linux, even if it would take them years to do it (which is what one of the FL Studio devs argued), but my request seems to be a dead topic.LMMS is a very good start towards having digital workstations available for Linux, but, unfortunately, i don't think it will grow big enough to compete against commercial projects.

[DodgyPhil 1]

Funnily enough I set out looking for an Ableton Live alternative on Ubuntu (just because I wanted to do some recording whilst on holiday) but couldn't get on with any of the software.Rosegarden was the only thing that came close to creating music, but it lacked so many features: functionality for a start. Unlike most other linux programs it felt like a constant battle against the laptop. Songwrite (a guitar tab app that claims to rival Sibelius) had no where near the amount of features or ease of use. It not only sounded clunky, but refused to let me select any time signature other than 2/4, even though 4/4 was on the list- but greyed out.It's just not worth it. Music software is one of the few places where being cheap doesn't get you far, unless you (like myself) have found a reputable source of free software (don't taddle, it's totally secret).

[rob86 2]

I had tried LMMS before, but i could never complete any song before experiencing a crashand this was with keeping track of their newer releases. So i would normally just run FL Studio through Wine. It would be great if LMMS becomes stable, big and popular, but with many open-source project, the developers are normally people who work on these projects when they have the time. I had suggested to Image-Line to hire the LMMS devs so that they may work on a port of FL Studio to Linux, even if it would take them years to do it (which is what one of the FL Studio devs argued), but my request seems to be a dead topic.

 

LMMS is a very good start towards having digital workstations available for Linux, but, unfortunately, i don't think it will grow big enough to compete against commercial projects.

I was disappointed that FL Studio didn't work so great with Wine. It crashes when I try to save things. It renders it pretty much useless to me. I often miss being able to use it, but I don't want to boot up Windows just for it. My friend who I mentioned in my earlier post had even worse luck, and couldn't even get it started with Wine. I had a lot of fun bragging about my good fortune until I realized it wasn't working quite as good as I thought it was.

 

In general, I find the music software on Linux pretty limiting. I don't think professional musicians ever use Linux for this stuff do they? I always hear about Mac and Windows software, never Linux. I've certainly never seen any pre-built computers in music stores with Linux software.

 

I prefer hardware to software anyway, whether it's recording, mixing, or using a synth, but of course, it costs a lot more so it's more of a dream of mine to have a studio of high end equipment than a reality.

[truefusion 3]

I was disappointed that FL Studio didn't work so great with Wine. It crashes when I try to save things. It renders it pretty much useless to me. I often miss being able to use it, but I don't want to boot up Windows just for it. My friend who I mentioned in my earlier post had even worse luck, and couldn't even get it started with Wine. I had a lot of fun bragging about my good fortune until I realized it wasn't working quite as good as I thought it was.

In Wine, in FL Studio, i was able to do about, if i were to guess, 95% of all the things i could in Windows. That remaining 5% deals mostly with big projects: i could not make big projects the easy way without experiencing the music being too much for my computer to handle. You know when your computer can't handle all the work and when you are previewing the song in FL Studio, the song starts to become scratchy at the parts where the computer can't handle the stress? That's the only major problem i faced when using FL Studio under Wine. The other problems was when i would minimize FL Studio: *gasp* it's "gone." The only way to "restore" FL Studio then was to launch a program that forces the X server to resize the screen resolutions; then, all of a sudden, FL Studio is "back." The final problem i had was that any version higher than FL Studio 7 would not register. After updating to a certain Wine version, the minimize problem went away, but the other two problems remained. Other than these problems, i could use FL Studio satisfactorily.

 

I am uncertain the reason why it wouldn't work for you like it did for me, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was because you stuck to the version of Wine that was in the repository, or if you used the "stable" version of Wine available on the Wine website and not the "development" one. I always compile the latest "development" version of Wine whenever i want to use Windows-only programs.

 

In general, I find the music software on Linux pretty limiting. I don't think professional musicians ever use Linux for this stuff do they? I always hear about Mac and Windows software, never Linux. I've certainly never seen any pre-built computers in music stores with Linux software.

I do not know of any "professional" musicians that use Linux as their digital workstation OS.

[rob86 2]

I installed the latest version of wine, but now I'm having trouble with wine-gecko. When I first ran FL Studio, a window popped up and let me install wine-gecko, but it was going slow so I figured I'd do it later. I can't get that to pop up anymore, and my attempts to manually install wine-gecko failed. Maybe I'll figure it out later..