Something I learned today

Today I successfully built software from source for the first time.

It goes like this: I use the Digital Audio Workstation known as Bitwig. I own a license for it, which cost me over $200, and my renewal still hasn't expired, but despite that, I'm considering switching to the FOSS DAW Ardour. Why? Well, it's not that I don't like Bitwig... in fact, I like it a lot. The thing is, I'm not a professional, I make music as a hobby, so even though I can afford Bitwig, I feel like I don't need it. The fact that Ardour is open source is also attractive to me, but the biggest reason that I want to learn Ardour is that I want to be able to honestly recommend it to people who can't afford a proprietary DAW, and help them if they get stuck.

The biggest disadvantage with free DAWs is that they don't include many fancy plugins out of the box, unlike proprietary ones. What you're paying for is the convenience, a complete package that lets you get started creating music without any additional downloads (some people still pay hundreds of dollars for virtual synths regardless). Proprietary DAWs also have disadvantages, such as the plague of exclusive, DRM protected DLC that makes it so you can't seamlessly collaborate with people who use other DAWs, but that's its own can of worms and I won't open it today. When you use a free DAW, you have to fill in some of those gaps with external plugins. For me, some of those plugins were ChowDSP plugins, such as BYOD and the Analog Tape Emulator. The problem with these is that they only package .deb files, and I'm on Fedora, so my only option is to build them from source.

So I did. I ran into a couple of errors due to missing dependencies at first, but with my detective skills I was able to figure out which devel packages I needed, and when I was able to compile the plugins, I felt exhilarated. A whole world of free software at my fingertips, and I don't depend on someone else to package it for me? That's pretty cool. My switch to Ardour is coming along nicely, too, though I still need to figure out what I'm gonna be missing compared to Bitwig.