Installation
Well begun is half done, right?
The projects featured in this Roundup aren’t part of the default installation on most Linux distributions, but you’ll find them in the software repositories.
Although distributed under the GPL, Ardour insists on users buying a subscription plan of $1, $4, $10 or $50 per month, which provides updates and downloads for as long as the subscription continues. There’s also the option to make a single payment of less than $45, which will give you the current stable release and updates, but not the next major release. The subscription is based on a sliding-scale donation system. However, the subscription will get you a ready-to-run program, and you don’t have to spend time building it from source manually. The project doesn’t provide any support should you need help compiling it from source. Thankfully, you’ll find Ardour in the software repositories of most distributions, such as Ubuntu and Arch.
If your distribution doesn’t ship Audacity in its repositories, you can find installable binaries on third-party sites such as rpmseek. There are also unofficial PPAS for Ubuntu and Linux Mint. The project does caution users against installing version 2.3.0. Instead, users should opt for version 2.3.1 or 2.3.2. Unlike Ardour, which doesn’t provide any instruction on building the project from source, you will find detailed instructions on compiling Audacity on its website.
In contrast to the other projects, Ocenaudio is not featured in the software repositories of many of the most popular desktop distributions, such as Ubuntu and Fedora. Thankfully, it provides 32 and 64-bit DEB and RPM packages for various distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu Centos, opensuse, as well as packages for Arch.
LMMS and Qtractor both provide distribution-neutral Appimage packages for easy installation. Remember to mark the package as executable before running it. The chmod +x packagename.appimage command will do the trick. You should opt for the Appimage package if your distribution features a much older version in the software repositories. Qtractor provides thorough instruction on building the package from source. You’ll find the Appimage package on its Sourceforge page.