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Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux
- andresgottlieb 10y agoWorks perfectly in macOS Sierra
- dsr_ 10y agoI used Hydrogen a few years ago to build a tutorial of [doumbek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_drum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_drum) patterns. It was too difficult to get it to sound like a human was drumming, but for teaching the basic patterns and getting the timing exactly right, it was pretty good.
- camtarn 10y agoBeta versions work on Windows too, although they're a little buggy. This has pretty much been the standard-issue software for composing and distributing drum patterns for Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Society drum crews for years - amused to see it crop up here :)
- _joel 10y agoIf you like this, then take a look at https://www.dyne.org/software/dynebolic/ https://www.dyne.org/software/dynebolic/ (probably a bit old now) or the Ubuntu Studio distro https://ubuntustudio.org/ https://ubuntustudio.org/ that have a lot of Linux based DAW and multimedia creation applications.
- toFret 10y agoBeen using this for a couple of years, synchronized with Ardour DAW through the JACK sound server. Works great.
- dyeje 10y agoI've checked out Hydrogen a few times, but have been turned off by clunkiness in the UI each time. I'd rather use an web based one for quick one offs or just boot up my DAW for something more in depth. That said, it's a nice little tool if you're not willing to shell out for a DAW.
- yellowapple 10y agoThe typical workflow for Hydrogen is to turn a whole desktop session into your DAW, building it from the ground up with your own selection of tools. I've dreamed of doing something like that for awhile, but at the end of the day it's almost always easier to just reach for a self-contained DAW.
- badosu 10y agoThat's the idea of Non: http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?page=Non%20DAW http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?page=Non%20DAW Separating each part of the composition process with specific applications.
- betaby 10y agoOnly I hear cracking sound at the end of every beat? Removing pulseaudio helps to shorten it but not completely eliminates.
- hashkb 10y agoPulse/alsa/jack shenanigans make audio production the only thing I still use MacOS for.
- 12bits 10y ago^ This.
- digi_owl 10y agoPulseaudio should not even be involved, as the program do not require it. But then it keeps inserting itself into the "conversation" by hijacking any connection to and from Alsa...
- frutiger 10y agoIf it's doing that, you might want to check your ~/.asoundrc, which might be specifying pulse as the default ALSA device.
- obombration 10y agoDo you use an audio interface? What have you found is supported well by Linux? Saffire Pro 24 + Addictive Drums + Logic is what is really keeping me tied to macOS at home.
- digi_owl 10y agoDefine "removing". Pulseaudio is a hard beast to put down.
- betaby 10y agoapt remove pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils then reboot, not really that hard.
- donquichotte 10y agoI have tried Hydrogen some time ago when I tried to build a linux audio workstation with Jack and Ardour. As much as it pains me to say this, don't expect it to be even remotely as good as commercial software drum machines like EZDrummer, Superior Drummer or Studio Drummer in terms of sample quality or usability. Generally, I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, even though I had one of the few soundcards that had drivers for Linux (Edirol FA-101). EDIT: That was like 5 years ago, maybe the audio landscape has changed until then. 2017, year of the Linux Audio Workstation! 2nd EDIT: Today I use Reaper on Windows. Reaper is amazing and the only reason I have Windows installed on my private computers. It is to audio editing and recording what Sublime Text is to text editing: slick, fast, inexpensive, easy to install, easy to use.
- zevv 10y agoFor me a huge change the past years was the coming of Bitwig Studio audio workstation to Linux. Commercial software, but rock solid and high quality.
- flavor8 10y agoDo you have to jump through Jack shenanigans to get it working? Or does it just work, nicely?
- baldfat 10y agoI don't care what OS your on. When you start talking about latency it is all a nightmare. If latency isn't an issue then Pulse Audio works totally fine. I actually like Jack when it is concerning latency and think it is a good system. BUT it is a pain. I used 2 separate sound cards. One is a Pro level I/O breakout box that Jack controls and the on board sound card is controlled by PulseAudio.
- tjr225 10y agoI have no issues with latency on MacOS with absolutely zero configuration. It's one of the reasons I won't switch from MacOS to linux.
- trickell 10y agoCheck out LMMS (Let's Make Music). It's like Ableton for Linux and already has VST's like Hydrogen, etc. built into the software itself: https://lmms.io/ https://lmms.io/
- badosu 10y agoLMMS is great for easy EDM composition, but lacks a lot of things essential for a serious workflow. I'd recommend Ardour for more studio-oriented work: http://ardour.org/ http://ardour.org/ Also, Ardour works with Alsa as backend.
- jameskegel 10y agoIt's actually like FL Studio for Linux as it is pretty much a carbon copy. If you want to draw a direct comparison of "Ableton for Linux" then the logical choice is Bitwig, which is quite frankly "Ableton for Linux" since all of the original Ableton developers left to start Bitwig and the interface is a 100% copy of the original.
- davidgerard 10y agoDo you know anything on the story of Bitwig vs Ableton? (Google gives me lots of feature comparisons, but not the story.) edit: http://djtechtools.com/2012/01/12/bitwig-studio-announced-abletons-new-competition/ http://djtechtools.com/2012/01/12/bitwig-studio-announced-ab...
- andai 10y agoAhh, when I last tried it, it was called Linux MultiMedia Studio :)
- Tenoke 10y agoI like LMMS but the funny thing about it is that some of the essential features (such as extrrnal VSTs) don't work on Linux (unless you set it up on wine, which has it's own issues).
- davidgerard 10y ago
- xatan_dank 10y agoThe interface reminds me a lot of FL Studio (which I currently use on Ubuntu via Wine, works great). Hydrogen looks interesting, but I think most DAWs simply have almost all of these features and far more. That being said, this looks to be FOSS, which I really admire. I'll have to check this out after work.
- k-mcgrady 10y agoMost DAWS might have drum machines but most serious users end up using a third party product. The built-in ones are undeniably good but thinks like Kontact/EZDrummer etc. are on another level.
- peapicker 10y agoNever used Kontact or EZ Drummer, but seems like it would be hard to beat Ableton Live Suite's combo of drumracks and stacking effects per drum sample... Do you have experience with both? Any reason I should look into the former when I've invested in the latter? edit: Nevermind, after looking at Native's offering (Kontact), I can see it has a lot of advantages for a certain kind of music, but that isn't the music I'm writing...
- clappski 10y agoKontakt is pretty cool, not just for drum machines but any samples. For example, the NI orchestra samples are absolutely amazing. For drums it's just another sampler, you're probably better off sticking with Drum Rack unless you want the specific samples offer d by Kontakt.
- k-mcgrady 10y agoI use Ableton and Logic and their built-in drum software often. They're both very good. When you want to program super real sounding drums EZDrummer and especially Kontact are unbeatable (and as another comment mentioned Kontact has libraries for much more than just drums). For me the reason I like contact is that the mixing interface for each element in the kit is really easy to use and tweak. Besides that the samples are phenomenal. Another option that may be more relevant to you is NI Battery [0]. Personally I just like to experiment with different options as I find that the simple fact of working in a different UI will result in different creative output. [0] https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/drums/battery-4/ https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/drum...
- shams93 10y agoIt's great on the pi3 runs well in arm. It's nice this isn't abandonware a lot of the open source projects for Linux audio became abandonware.
- fundamental 10y agoYeah, the number of single developer projects combined with developer attrition has certainly orphaned a ton of linux-audio projects.
- flavor8 10y agoIt would be nice if Ubuntu pruned dead / barely working products from their repos. There's an astonishing number of frustratingly bad audio apps in their main repo.
- fundamental 10y agoI'd say that's part of their issue, the other side is that they don't seem to track the development of projects all that well. In some cases this simply is shipping old versions with known and long fixed bugs and in other cases they miss the evolution of various projects as maintainers change over. The latter case includes some abandoned/nearly-abandoned standalone tools getting converted to plugins (generally LV2) and receiving more active development. More active package repositories such as kxstudio seem to resolve at least some of this friction.
- hashhar 10y agoI think this has to with community. The Arch community moves pretty fast and forces users to go look up packages online and comment/vote on their state which results in packages being both promoted to default repos and getting thrown out of the default repos.
- jerf 10y agoDo you happen to have a good reference on using the Pi3 for audio? I spent a lot of Saturday trying to make mine do some stuff, and while a lot of the technical snafus were the usual sort, I did end up burning a lot of time googling around until I finally found someone who suggested turning off CPU performance scaling. Which was a forehead slap moment for me after that, but, still, it'd be nice if there was somewhere I could go that had that stuff more laid out. (As implied, I've googled already. A lot.) (The Pi3 seems to have more than enough CPU power for it to do what I want but I was having trouble just routing audio in a USB mic straight out to the speakers without dropouts and failures two or three times a second, even though the CPU is barely at 10%. I think turning off the scaling seemed to fix that, though I ran out of time just as I tried that to be sure.)
- spednar 10y agowhy is this on HN? Hydrogen has been around for ages no? bump for Tidal if you're looking for interesting ways to arrange sample playback: https://tidalcycles.org/ https://tidalcycles.org/
- unicornporn 10y agoFor full av more fully featured Linux sequencer I'd recommend Renoise. It's a tracker (and is not floss), but is super impressive.
- blockoperation 10y agoRenoise is great, especially for breakbeat/jungle drum programming. Just load up your break of choice, put in some slice markers (or play it with offset commands like on old trackers), and you're set. I do find the pattern-based workflow a bit of a productivity killer though (I usually get stuck on perfecting the same 8/16 bar loop).
- kruhft 10y agoHere's an example of an album I made with ReNoise and it's default sounds/plugin set: http://kruhft.bandcamp.com/album/macro-2 http://kruhft.bandcamp.com/album/macro-2 All of it is mixed, played and recorded'live' with the pre-programmed tracks being mixed using an offboard midi controller.
- pmoriarty 10y agoJust to add a bit to this: Renoise is really rock solid, fast, light-weight, powerful, Lua-scriptable, and really cheap compared to your typical commercial DAW, like Bitwig. I think I paid less than $80 for Renoise, compared to about $400 for Bitwig. The tracker paradigm is very different to the piano-roll paradigm that most other DAWs use. If you can get used to the tracker way of doing things, which is very keyboard-centric (kind of like vim and emacs), then you could be very productive, if not you might be better off with a traditional DAW. Finally, trackers are usually used for making electronic music, and might not be the best fit for other types of music, or for making or editing long recordings. You might be better off with something like Ardour or Bitwig for that.
- mrcactu5 10y agoeveryone on Instagram puts music tracks to their videos. they could be ironing their clothes but they will attack a hip-hop track our country music tune and get 10000 views quickly
- stevehiehn 10y agoDoes anyone know if it Hydrogen can be controlled via api/commandline? I would like to try generating patterns with machine learning.
- zhengyi13 10y agoIt's not precisely your desire/use-case, but that sounds vaguely like you might like some of the programmatic sound generation systems out there: Overtone - http://overtone.github.io/ http://overtone.github.io/ Tidal - https://tidalcycles.org/ https://tidalcycles.org/ Perhaps those might be hooked into something you're already building?
- stevehiehn 10y agoThanks! I'm aware of super collider and it is cool. However i'm not interested in real-time. I have been generating midi patterns and rendering audio server-side over many hours. I've started hand rolling a system to play drum samples from generated patterns. It would be nice if i could find something already built.
- adamsea 10y agoMaybe a music-oriented programming language like Chuck, Supercollider, or Pd? I would recommend looking at Pd (Pure Data), which, imho, is the open source version of Max/MSP, a very popular graphical programming language used for music composition as well as the creation of audio applications.
- sampo 10y agoAll kinds of sound-generating software you can control using midi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
- stevehiehn 10y agoAgreed. The hard part for me is finding software that runs serverside on linux. I have been using https://github.com/teragonaudio/MrsWatson https://github.com/teragonaudio/MrsWatson which is really good
- 3131s 10y agoI've made a bunch of stuff with Hydrogen. I really like it and it's more stable (as in, does not crash all the time) than it used to be. It has its limitations, but in general I am easily able to create the sounds I want with it.
- phatbyte 10y agoGood stuff here, and nice to see an OSS GUI application with a good UI/UX for a change.
- gntech 10y agoI have heard a lot of good stuff about DrumGizmo[0] lately, it has a very active development as well. Havent had the oppurtunity to try it out yet. But I have recently heard people moving from Hydrogen to DrumGizmo. [0]: http://www.drumgizmo.org/wiki/ http://www.drumgizmo.org/wiki/
- badosu 10y agoFor anyone interested in checking the state of Linux and Free/OS software for music making I strongly recommend checking out: http://libremusicproduction.com/ http://libremusicproduction.com/ There have been great improvements on the latest years in regard to plugin availability and support for professional workflows/devices that might be overlooked.
- ndh2 10y agoLanding page == news feed -> nope
- catwell 10y agoThis brings me way back. I used to play drums, and I used Hydrogen to help with drums patterns practice. I translated the manual and tutorial in French back in 2004, and 13 years later my name is still there in the changelog :)