Perhaps you don't understand that I wrote the software that makes running Windows VST plugins on Linux possible (along with Ardour and JACK). Audacity uses Wine too, but in a different way than Ardour because we care about scaling, and the Audacity approach (running plugins in a different (Wine-controlled) process doesn't scale in the way that an actual DAW (intended to be use with hundreds of tracks and hundreds of plugins) requires.
In general, audio technology companies do not make very much money. Digidesign is almost close to bankruptcy, and laid off the bulk of its engineering staff. When Yamaha purchased Steinberg, it cost then a few tens of millions of dollars - for the number 2 company in the industry at that time. Most new audio technology companies fail within a few years. The recording industry does NOT pay significant cash to "well funded teams of software engineers" for this technology, which is one of the reasons why companies like Digi are having a hard time (along with their older cousins, the makers of large-format consoles, which are also no longer a line item in most budgets). The recording industry does not function like the video industry, and hasn't for more than a decade, if they ever did.
Probably the most successful audio software company right now is Ableton, and they've created an entirely new workflow for music creation, entirely over the opposition and disbelief of people with years of experience on more traditional DAWs. Another example might be Waves Audio, who have significantly diversified their products and focus from their traditional plugin-centric approach, again reflecting changes in what people will and will not spend money on (hint: broadcast and live PA work are now significantly more cash-flow endowed than recording).
What the linux audio software lacks is not funding from the recording industry (and note that Ardour is already the basis of products from Waves Audio and Harrison Consoles), but enough paying users, which in turn is a reflection of what happens when you develop for a tiny niche inside of an already niche software environment.
1) Quite a few manufacturers choose not to use the USB audio class specification
2) I can't write the software fast enough. Ardour has taken up 16 years of my life already, with a huge amount of help from other people.
This is not accurate. JACK uses ALSA. And tools like Ardour can now use ALSA directly, rather than via JACK, if the user prefers.
This isn't really true.
If companies adhere to the USB standards, then stuff just works. That's why you can plug a Behringer (Midas, really) X32 into a Linux system and it all just works. All of it.
iz RADAR.
Oh, and Ardour no longer requires JACK either (on any of the 3 platforms on which it runs), but can use it if the user wishes to do so.
PulseAudio is nothing like WDM on Windows, in any sense at all.
Your "one system for everyone (CoreAudio on OS X)" is also true on Linux too. The issue is the presence of "middleware", such as PulseAudio or JACK. But JACK provides functionality that is not possible with just CoreAudio (interapplication audio, shared transport control and more), so the comparison is a bit more complex.
And by the way, if low latency is the primary metric for measuring the quality of an audio system, then ALSA still wins.
And finally, almost all new audio interfaces use USB, and almost all of them are class compliant, which means that the manufacturer doesn't write a driver at all. One driver, all applications, all Windows, OS X and Linux.
There are LOTS of multichannel USB audio interfaces that work perfectly on Linux. What matters is whether the devices correspond to the USB audio class specification, which is also equivalent to asking whether they come with their own drivers for OS X and Windows. No drivers? They will work on Linux.
I suppose it is just too hard these days to imagine recording music (the question was about a home RECORDING studio) as actually meaning RECORDING musicians performing on instruments.
I can assure you that there are plenty of people using Linux to do that, without the issues you're describing above. I'm also going to assume that you live in the USA, because if you lived in Europe (notably Germany) I think your perception of Linux would be quite different.
I wrote JACK. I'm sorry but your response reads like total gibberish. Perhaps your ideas are just too much for my current mental state.
I already rebuffed your comments about "really high end stuff" - I am not sure why people keep spreading this myth.
As the primary author of Ardour, I can point you at a dozen people who do this kind of recording with Ardour at least weekly. I can even point you (anonymously, alas) at a major UK-based mobile recording truck service that is now installing Ardour as its secondary recording systems, in scenarios that typically involve recording at least 72 tracks at once. Yeah, it would be nice if it was the primary system, but I'm patient. After all, its only been about 6 months since the last
nobody agrees on (a) what the subsystem should do (b) what API it should have (c) how it should be enforced.
your description of your problems with JACK doesn't match any of the user experiences i've heard about for the last several years. perhaps you should be providing bug reports, feedback and other useful to the JACK development community rather than just commenting about it on
i wrote JACK (originally, and with help from many others) by the way.,
what do you consider "top end hardware interfaces"?
RME HDSP and MADI interfaces, the choice of most highly-multichannel configurations worldwide, work perfectly on Linux and have done for a long time. Perhaps you are one of those who believe that firewire devices are "high end"?
Computer programmers do it byte by byte.
