Hello fellow pirates! I made the switch to Linux almost a year ago and i really really really miss producing music. I honestly don’t want to bother with Ardour. Bitwig can’t be pirated afaik and my 4-Track license is just way too limiting for serious production. I really miss Ableton but i don’t really want to dualboot if there’s a way around it.
I was able to install Ableton and it works, but the crack doesn’t work due to some hardware-id shenanigans.
Has anyone else tried this? What options do i have? (Winboat, Wine, VMStudio etc.) Or shouldn’t i even bother and just bite the bullet and dualboot?
Alternatively: Is there a way to pirate a recent version of BitWig?
Popping my head in here to suggest you try winboat, as that resolves 99% of my issues when programs refuse to run under wine. I am ignorant to the specifics on producing software but If you have a crack you know for a fact works on windows Id give it a shot in winboat. Just use the vnc window provided in winboat to make sure it actually loads up and works properly before you try and integrate it with your DE. Good luck!
I recently went down that same rabbit hole.
I ended up buying Bitwig Producer and I’m running it in an Arch install.
I tried a number of different distros which all caused different headaches. Arch ended up being the best fit for my Linux audio needs and was way easier to set up than Lubuntu, Debian, PopOS.
With the right setup, latency is better than I was getting in Ableton on Windows and Mac. I can even record live audio without any perceivable latency.
Bitwig made me realize how convoluted and stupid Ableton’s UI is. The team behind Bitwig holds good values, so I felt they deserved my money. However I have seen torrents available for it. I suggest you try a 30 day trial first that way you can check if you even like Bitwig before going through the hassle of getting a pirated version working.
My current pain point is Serum in Wine has GUI rendering issues making it unusable. Luckily Vital for Linux works perfectly.
Fabfilter plugins work with some minor tweaks.
My Waves license is on an ilok, which I know doesn’t work in Wine. So eventually I’ll pirate the cracked version and try that.
So far I’m really happy with the setup. Another benefit of Linux audio over Windows or Mac is the routing abilities. I can route any program as an input, allowing me to stream YouTube or Spotify into Bitwig so I can play live music over the songs without having to download them first or rig up some weird aux cable nonsense.
I’ve not tried getting Ableton working on Linux, but I’ve done a bit of audio production in Debian & Arch in the past. It’s gotten much better over the years, but it’s often not plug-and-play. Some suggestions from someone haunted by JACK and ALSA:
- Wine is a rabbit hole. If you’re fine with hacky DIY stuff (and, hey, it’s fun), go for it. However, your results will vary wildly depending on your hardware, software version, etc. In many cases you’ll have to be content with being several versions behind. In any case, it’s usually a frustrating experience.
- Reaper is a solid DAW and now offers a Linux build. Highly recommended. Full-featured indefinite trial, but the license is only $60.
- Ubuntu Studio is designed for audio/video production, and has audio drivers wired up. Great place to start, too.
If you’re stuck on Ableton, you might find some info on getting it to run properly through Wine via the forums on Lutris or PlayOnLinux.
+1 for Reaper!
If you need low latency audio (ie, live music) Windows programs have to do a lot of ugly tricks to do this efficiently on Windows, and it’s different from the ugly tricks you have to do on Linux, and even if wine can attempt to translate the tricks from one to the other you may struggle trying to make this work well cross-platform to in Linux AFAIK.
However if you’re just doing all-digital production I don’t see why wine wouldn’t work. Other people seem to have had success minus the latency issue I mentioned. And most of that was years ago, it mentions people are working on improving it, and honestly, Wine has come a really long way in the last 2 years. I’d recommend giving it a shot and see how it goes.
