Imagine you had a DAW with lots of live tools and synths and effects – a bit like FL Studio or Ableton Live – and it was completely free. (Free as in beer, free as in freedom.) That’s already fairly cool. Now imagine that everything in that environment – every synth, every effect, every pattern maker – was built in SuperCollider, the powerful free coding language for electronic music. And imagine you could add your own stuff, just by coding, and it ran natively. That moves from fairly cool to insanely cool. And it’s what you get with LNX_Studio, a free environment that runs on any OS (Mac now, other builds coming), and that got a major upgrade recently. Let’s have a look.
LNX_Studio is a full-blown synth studio. You can do end-to-end production of entire tracks in it, if you choose. Included:
- Virtual analog synths, effects, drum machines
- Step sequencers, piano roll (with MIDI import), outboard gear control
- Mix engine and architecture
- Record audio output
- Automation, presets, and programs (which with quick recall make this a nice idea starter or live setup
- Chord library, full MIDI output and external equipment integration
It’s best compared to the main view of FL Studio, or the basic rack in Reason, or the devices in Ableton Live, in that the focus is building up songs through patterns and instruments and effects. What you don’t get is audio input, multitracking, or that sort of linear arrangement. Then again, for a lot of electronic music, that’s still appealing – and you could always combine this with something like Ardour (to stay in free software) when it’s time to record tracks.
Also good in this age of external gear lust, all those pattern generators and MIDI control layouts play nice with outboard gear. There’s even an “external device” which you can map to outboard controls.
But all of this you can do in other software. And it’d be wrong to describe LNX_Studio as a free, poor man’s version of that gear, because it can do two things those tools can’t.
First, it’s entirely networked. You can hop onto a local network or the Internet and collaborate with other users. (Theoretically, anyway – I haven’t gotten to try this out yet, but the configuration looks dead simple.)
Second, and this I did play with, you can write your own synths and effects in SuperCollider and run them right in the environment. And unlike environments like Max for Live, that integration is fully native to the tool. You just hop right in, add some code, and go. To existing SuperCollider users, this is finally an integrated environment for running all your creations. To those who aren’t, this might get you hooked.
Here’s a closer look in pictures:
When you first get started, you’re presented with a structured environment to add instruments, effects, pattern generators, and so on.
Fully loaded, the environment resembles portions of FL Studio or Ableton Live. You get a conventional mixer display, and easy access to your tools.
Oh, yeah, and out of the box, you get some powerful, nice-sounding virtual analog synths.
But here’s the powerful part – inside every synth is SuperCollider code you can easily modify. And you can add your own code using this powerful, object-oriented, free and open source code environment for musicians.
Effects can use SuperCollider code, too. There’s also a widget library, so adding a graphical user interface is easy.
But whether you’re ready to code or not doesn’t matter much – there’s a lot to play with either way. Sequencers…
Drum machines…
More instruments…
You also get chord generators and (here) a piano roll editor.
When you’re ready to play with others, there’s also network capability for jamming in the same room or over a network (or the Internet).
Version 2.0 is just out, and adds loads of functionality and polish. Most importantly, you can add your own sound samples, and work with everything inside a mixer environment with automation. Overview of the new features (in case you saw the older version):
Main Studio
Channel style Mixer
Programs (group & sequence Instrument presets)
Automation
Auto fade in/out
Levels dispay
Synchronise channels independently
Sample support in GS Rhythm & SCCode instruments
WebBrowser for importing samples directly from the internet
Local sample support
Sample Cache for off-line use
Bum Note
Now polyphonic
Added Triangle wave & Noise
High Pass filter
2 Sync-able LFO’s
PWM
Melody Maker module (chord progressions, melodies + hocket)
Inport MIDI files
Audio In
Support for External instruments & effects
Interfaces for Moog Sub37, Roland JP-08, Korg Volca series
Many new instruments & effects added to SCCode & SCCodeF
I love what’s happening with Eurorack and hardware modular – and there’s nothing like physical knobs and cables. But that said, for anyone who brags that modular environments are a “clean slate” and open environment, I think they’d do well to look at this, too. The ability to code weird new instruments and effects to me is also a way to find originality. And since not everyone can budget for buying hardware, you can run this right now, on any computer you already own, for free. I think that’s wonderful, because it means all you need is your brain and some creativity. And that’s a great thing.
Give the software a try:
http://lnxstudio.sourceforge.net
And congrats to Neil Cosgrove for his work on this – let’s send some love and support his way.
This looks incredible! Peter, do you know if smaller computing boards such as Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone will be able to run this?
It’s OSX only so it’s hard to imagine one can port it easily to the boards you have mentioned.
Well, SC itself runs as smoothly on Linux as on OSX (never tried it on Win). It uses Qt as a crossplatform gui. So, LNX-Studio should be relatively easy to port at least to Linux.
I’ve compiled a gui-less version of SC on a Beaglebone black and it runs brilliantly.
The linux version of this is I believe in beta for a bit longer. You might able to contact Mr Cosgrove to get in on that. I think LNX is bullt on top of a slightly older version of SuperCollder, but one that has decent Windows support – so at least there are no hard technical barriers against a Windows version (though I don’t doubt it would require some work…).
SuperCollider runs great on BeagleBone as Axel mentioned, and RaspberryPI, ODroid, etc etc (with GUI or headless). The full GUI lnx with GUI might be a stretch processor-wise on some of those, but the synths – no problem.
Hi. Yes we are working on the Linux version at the moment but it still needs a bit of love. We got about 90% of the features working so it will be a month or so before you’ll see anything solid. As for a PC version… Yes, but not right now. There are a few other thing I want to do 1st. Maybe later on in the year when I get more time.
Article says this is open source, but I can’t find the source anywhere?
here you go… https://github.com/neilcosgrove/LNX_Studio
Thanks, I should have thought to do a github search 😉 Shouldn’t porting it be relatively straightforward if you are using SuperCollider’s GUI? This thing needs to go properly cross platform!
Going properly cross platform is the plan. 🙂 It shouldn’t be too difficult but we do a fair few Mac & Linux OS calls so its finding the PC equivalent. Also not sure how easy it is to make a SuperCollider PC standalone.
Good concept about writing a DAW around a very flexible sound generation package.
Agreed. This looks pretty cool. I’ve written a Csound based modular DAW and plugin development kit call Cabbage (http://cabbageaudio.com). Similar to this project in so far as users can hack and edit any of the instruments, but each instrument can be also exported as an audio plugin, or even an Android instrument. However I really like the look of this. It’s where I would like to take my project some day.
Is this pattern based? Where do you switch or arrange them?It was nice to see the musical components but how is this demo song put together?
I think an early mention that this is OSX-only would be helpful.
VSTs?
” (Mac now, other builds coming)”
– Peter I cant find anything on the site that suggests this, can you point us to the page defining other OSes and when they are (likely) to show up?
What a project! Congratulations!!!
wow, this is *incredible*
What an incredible dull demo-video. Anyway looks interesting and all that, now I wonder, how can this be synced to your existing daw? Is it pluggable?
Is it easy to connect my own devices, say a MIDI-over-USB pad controller AKAI MPD-226 as in Ableton ?
If you are into DAW, you may be interested in the Audio Injector Octo Raspberry Pi (GPIO) sound card. The multitrack sound card which seemed impossible till it was done !
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1250664710/audio-injector-octo-surround-sound-for-the-raspber