I’m a voice actor and musician, and moved to Linux about a month and a half ago with Ubuntu Studio. I went from using Adobe Audition and Cubase to Reaper and Bitwig, and highly recommend both. Reaper is WAY more powerful than I realized. For FOSS you could try Ardour, I’ve heard good things. Personally I hated it haha, but that may just be because I tried Ardour first after switching to Linux and had the learning curve of both a new OS/audio setup and a new DAW at the same time with a project due day-of.

The biggest issues I had was just getting audio to work properly. I was stuck using ALSA for a few weeks, which worked but only allows one program to use audio at once. I very much recommend looking into using JACK and setting up pipewire.

You can absolutely start just recording via mic and editing from there. If you want to hook up instruments, check out midi controllers. Some plugins are extremely helpful for creating a more polished sound like eq, compressors, limiters, etc. If the space you’re recording in doesn’t have the best sound treatment, Reaper has a great noise reduction plugin called ReaFIR. It’s a little more aggressive than I like but works really well (feel free to ask me how to use it if you’re having problems).

My recommendation is to start with Reaper (it’s got a free trial that you can keep using beyond the end date) and get your hardware working. After that, record a few tracks, throw them together into your DAW of choice, and play around with them.

I had it working on Windows, just can’t remember how haha. I’ve moved to Linux and I don’t know if I’m missing something to get it going, or if it’s because ProtonVPN isn’t nearly as devloped on Linux as it is on Windows. Appreciate the positivity though!

Same, though I can’t get remote access working while running a vpn on my machine and it’s driving me nuts

How’d it go?

Just wanted to jump back in and mention I tried 580 again, same thing. I was able to launch software sources from the terminal with this. Thanks!

Great to know, thank you! I kept trying to get to Software Sources before it froze

I’m not sure, I just hit install updates when it popped up in Discover. Just looked again and there were a few updates to KDE and Gnome I just installed so maybe that was the problem, but now that I got 570 working again I’m not trying it for a bit

I’m on Ubuntu Studio 24.04. A few days ago I saw that 580 was released but didn’t know how to install it. Today I had auto updates show up so I installed them. 580 was one of them I guess. The taskbar froze up and I got mouse pointer trailing all ove the desktop. Everything else worked fine. I’ll pay more attention next time and exclude 580 in updates for now.

Wow, surprised to see the old Samsung Galaxy S3 on there. Looks like I’ve got a project coming up

Interesting. I’ve seen Sailfish mentioned before, I’ll look into it. I’ve got a couple old tablets to mess around with, seems like a fun project. Thanks for the info!

I’ve switched as well but didn’t realize you could put Linux on an android device. Is it a specific distro and can you throw it on an old android tablet?

Thanks for all the responses, I really appreciate it! I’ve editing my post rather than respond to each one. Just wanna say that while Linux seems intimidating, I’m realizing I was being overly cautious and thought each distro was like it’s own OS instead of just a variation. You guys really come out to help out newbies, so thank you!