Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia editing/creation flavor of Ubuntu. It's built for the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional.

JACK

Exploring Ubuntu Studio, you will find dozens of audio editing, mixing, and synthesizing programs, plus a wide selection of effects plugins for those programs

Pro audio on Linux (regardless of the distro) always comes down to two components: the high-end audio server JACK and a low-latency kernel. Both are available through standard Ubuntu repositories, but Ubuntu Studio makes them the default and provides sane setups preconfigured.

Ubuntu Studio does build on top of JACK with an impressive array of audio applications, from hard disk recording to MIDI control. Foremost in this arsenal is Ardour, the multi-track recording, mixing, and editing workstation. Ubuntu Studio provides the latest revision, Ardour 2.0; vanilla Ubuntu is stuck with a much older 0.99-series build.

In addition, there are samplers (SooperLooper, LinuxSampler), sequencers (Rosegarden, Shake Tracker, Timidity), software synthesizers (Csound, Hydrogen, FluidSynth), mixers (JAMin, Mixxx), effects racks (JACK Rack), even music typesetters (Lilypond) and soundfont editors (Swami).

The distro breaks out special effects plugins -- both Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) and DSSI -- into a separate package collection. The selection is geared for modular synthesis, and includes everything from basic oscillators like BLOP to extensive personal collections like Steve Harris's.

The sound and the fury

The long and the short of it is that if you are a musician or audio enthusiast, Ubuntu Studio is a big win: you get a stable, tested, preconfigured source for the high-end audio components you need to do serious recording and editing, and you get it built upon one of today's most popular, well-supported mainstream distros. The millions of vanilla Ubuntu users on 32-bit Intel machines can add the Ubuntu Studio goodness with a simple cut-and-paste APT repository addition (instructions are at ubuntustudio.org) -- a far nicer alternative than installing a separate distro.

Luckily, with open source, users can contribute to making future releases better. The project has a dedicated multimedia forum on ubuntuforums.org, and an active wiki.

As multimedia distros go, Ubuntu Studio's decision to build on to an existing distro instead of reinventing the wheel gives it a leg up on its competition.

Get the latest version of Ubuntu Studio at the Ubuntu Studio website: 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/9.04/release/