An 'out-of-the-box' working DAW for music production

Question

I wonder if there is a decent DAW for elementaryOS that can be used straight out of the box. That is to say: With minimal configuration, a beautiful minimalist yet functional professional and engaging interface.

If not, could we build one...?

DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. There are several packages for PC,Mac and Linux that can do that job and usually the best ones are only available under commercial license. (Protools, Cakewalk, Samplitude, Reason)

In any case most of them require a certain degree of technical knowledge, proper hardware and spend sometime configuring stuff that in my opinion is never as friendly as it should be. Not to mention a very complex UI.

Linux, however great, also requires huge effort configuring Jack. I've unsuccessfully tried using Ardour, Rosegarden and many other tools available in the App center. Most of them are good but still not quite what I'm looking for.

I believe elementary OS to be the perfect platform to develop a simple yet powerful app capable of recording both audio and midi in a simple way. What I basically need is something that can be installed from the App center and requires minimal configuration. Just plug a mic, usb, analog or midi, and then record.

I'm posting this question because I'd be willing to develop such an app in accordance to elementary's elegant standards. But I would need help and support from fellow programmers as I feel I lack the needed skills to accomplish that.

Any one interested in this idea?

Answer 1

I was playing with Bitwig, was working nicely on Ubuntu, but I really did not do anything more than just setup and played few samples. I hear nice words about it.

Answer 2

I've tried the few that are available for Linux, and, meh.

That, and sound under Linux can be a pain. Pulse Audio was buggy at times, and JACK made me want to kill myself.

While I use eOS as my primary driver, I dual-boot into Windows and run PreSonus Studio One for my DAW. (That, and soo many VSTs only work under Windows / OSX...)

(Side-story: I reached out to the developers at PreSonus to see if they were working on a Linux version. In short: Nope. The audio-layer is too difficult where OSX and Windows take care of a lot of that for you.)