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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Linux
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So this is kind of going to be weird advice. Maybe not exactly what you are looking for.
You don't need all those synths and plugins. You really don't. You can get so, so far just by learning to use the tools that are built into Reaper or Bitwig.
There are really only a handful of audio effects that "really exist" a lot of FX plugins are just complex chains with fancy UIs. But if you understand what they're doing "under the hood" you can reproduce almost any sound from from the basic building blocks you have.
The same is true for synthesisers. You truly only need one synth as long as it is a flexible, general purpose modern synth. Learning to use one specific synth to it's full potential will let you make almost any sound you can imagine. Vital synth is a perfect candidate here btw.
Overall I kind of think part of the Linux mindset in general is kind of about doing things your self based on an understanding of the core principals at play.
That being said, there are tons of plugins coming out with native Linux support all the time and it's getting better every day.
I'm actually about to drop some Linux builds of some plugins myself but I don't want to dox myself here so that will have to remain a mystery for now.
It's an ungodly amount of trouble to make an additive synth work like an FM synth and neither of those can accomplish what a wavetable synth does without even more work so I really have to disagree. Vital is great, but it would take way too long to make it do what Arturias Vocoder V does for example, or even at that, as easy to use for that specific purpose.
Technically you are correct, but I would rather spend my time making music instead of spending hundreds or thousands of hours setting up automations and almost unnoticeable tweaks to make each effect and each instrument work in a way I want them to (like if I want a specific sound of known instruments).
Like, I could make a full song with several "instruments" using one sample of a spoon falling off of a table too, and that's neat, but it's also not what I want to be doing. If I wanted this involved of a workflow, I would probably be making my music in a tracker or on a physical, fully modular synthesizer.
Inspirations come a lot easier when you have many synths with many presets in my experience, and tweaking a lot of their parameters for the sounds they make are usually simple if you are using the actual thing you want instead of something else.
Furthermore, most of Arturias V collection are emulations of the real physical hardware, and this is why I like them. I could use vital to try to emulate a Juno-106 with degraded voice chips, but the Arturia Juno emulation lets you do this with 2 clicks.
Anyway, I know what you are trying to say, but it is not what I am looking for most of the time. For stuff like that I play around with my Roland P-6 and Korg Monotrons.
Thanks.