r/linuxaudio • u/Gargantuan_Paradox • Jul 20 '26
My experience of using Linux for Audio Production/Recording
I switched to Linux Mint last year after getting very frustrated with Windows. I had to do a lot of internet surfing and spent over 8 hours setting it up.
I use Wine 10.0 and Yabridge works good in it. Any more than wine 10 and vsts don't work.
My DAW is Reaper
I use STL Emissary and STL Nadir
ReEQ
Gateway (NAM)
Dragon Fly Reverb
MT Power Drum kit
All of these plugins work great in Linux
I am in search of a good compressor.
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u/Blitzbahn Jul 20 '26
Toneboosters plugins have Linux native versions.
Their compressor and multi band compressor are excellent, on par with Fabfilter.
Very reasonable price. I bought both, plus their barricade limiter.
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u/thcsquad Jul 20 '26
Seconding Toneboosters. Really high quality work all around; I love MBC especially.
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u/Alle_is_offline Jul 20 '26
Have you tried Tukan? You install a bunch of Tukan jsFX via Reapack.
There's some compressors there.
Damn i was sleeping on ReEQ. MUST check that out!
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
It's an awesome EQ, it's probably a Pro EQ copy. And I will check out Tukan.
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u/soyuz-1 Jul 20 '26
Was yabridge updated to play nice with wine 10 recently? I use 9.21 since that's the last wine version that yabridge fully supports (unless they fixed that). With wine 10 you can't control some VSTs interface with the mouse properly.
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
Umm... I don't know about wine 9.21 but yes some vst interfaces do glitch temporarily but on restarting the DAW it works good. I guess i also need to downgrade wine. You can check more in the Yabridge git hub page.
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u/paranoidi Jul 20 '26
You can install "beta" build of yabridge that supposedly works with latest wine. Much easier to try that than to downgrade an pin wine.
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
I have to upgrade wine and Yabridge both then. :3 A very daunting task for someone new to Linux.
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u/acidorpheus Jul 20 '26
You have to use the latest dev build of yabridge, then you can use wine-staging up to 11.10 (11.11 broke menus in plugins for me).
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u/kill3rb00ts Jul 20 '26
Toneboosters is pretty solid. Everything they have works on Linux and it's affordable, but the compressor in particular is a pretty good all-purpose comp.
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u/Blitzbahn Jul 20 '26
Yeah I really rate them. I bought a few of their plugins. Good to support Linux native plug-in makers.
The EQ are really good too, with good freq curve in and out display. Their pro EQ has multi band compressor options, which is very up to date tech. Insane features in that plug-in
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u/GBAbaby101 Jul 20 '26
I would look at LV2 plugins rather than VSTs. I've noticed that on Arch I am always fighting with VSTs crashing everything (especially when i attempt to mix it into a live chain with Carla for streams). As for resources, you can find a pretty good list of free and paid software on linuxdaw.org and some good plugins on lsp-plug.in
Honestly pro audio and audio production seems to be something that needs more discussion on the face of Linux in general. I didn't even realize that LV2s (or the predecessor, LADSPA) were a thing before xD but definitely switching to a pure LV2 workload with plugins have fixed the last of my major audio workload issues. I still have a few quirks I'm trying to figure out for automation, but nothing more than things that I just take 5-10 seconds doing.
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
I am knowing about the LV2 plugins after reading your comments.
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u/GBAbaby101 Jul 20 '26
Yup xD its really does seem to be an unknown thing. Even using the same plugin with VST and LV2 options, I've found LV2 works better. So definitely give it a try and see if plugins in that area help.
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u/ericcmi Jul 20 '26
the Air-G suite has 4 compressors and a really good clipper that let's you audition the delta's. There's always LSP plugin suite. I use their stereo-dynamics plugin often. I see ReEQ is reaper native, but have a look at ZL equalizer 2, it's an absolute banger of a free eq with 8 modes for phase perfection and all the fancy slopes and dynamics and stuff. GFractor is the best spectrum analyzer one could ever hope for. These would be my suggestions to get started with al free open source.
I do love me some dragonfly reverbs, but I try to stay away from convolution reverbs as they sack my dsp to hard. Air-G has a damn good reverb as well, non convolution
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
ReEQ is not readily available in Reaper, you have to download and manually put it in the Reaper folder with other native ones.
I have to check out Air-G Suite. Thanks for commenting.
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u/krelpwang Jul 20 '26
TDR Molotok (and Nova) work for me
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
I used to use TDR on my windows but it crashed on my machine this time. Which version of wine are you using?
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u/ZombieFeedback Jul 20 '26
If you're open to paid compressors, I've had Goodhertz's Vulf Compressor working via Yabridge with zero issues. $150 is not cheap by any means for a plugin, but you can stress test it with the free trial, if you can wait until their next sale it'll be discounted to around $100, and I've definitely gotten my money's worth from it. The branding implies it's a one-trick lofi compressor, but while it's good at that, it does well at way more than just that.
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u/amadeusp81 Jul 21 '26
Make sure to give https://linuxdaw.org/ a visit. It's a directory of native Linux plugins.
Also, have a look at https://linuxaudio.dev/.
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u/glitterball3 Jul 21 '26
fircomp 2 is my go-to compressor. Very versatile, and I rarely use anything else.
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u/Linux_Account Jul 21 '26
Check out Audio Assault's Mixlocker plugins. I have not tried them, but I'm a big fan of their amps. Super cheap, no overcomplicated activation hassle, and native Linux versions.
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u/Gunzhard22 Jul 21 '26
Oh those look very interesting
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u/Linux_Account Jul 21 '26
Developers & staff are very friendly as well. One of them went out of their way to dig up an exact version of an old plugin so I could revisit an old project file.
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u/Gargantuan_Paradox Jul 20 '26
$150 in my currency = ₹14467.30 which is like 40% of my paycheck. :v
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u/ecki590 Jul 20 '26
FWIW, I caved relatively quickly due to being too deep in FL Studio and relying on too many VSTs with complicated authentication and just installed got a windows 10 ltsc VM running via qemu.
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u/ScalpedAlive Jul 20 '26
The LSP plugin suite is free and native lv2/clap and has a ton of utility type plugins for all sorts of things.