PureOS for Creatives Part 2: Audio Engineering with the Librem 15

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[This is part two of a three part series by our guest blogger Tre Scranton: PureOS for Creatives – covering Music Creation.  If you hadn’t read part one covering music production with LMMS but would like to, click here.]

PureOS, the operating system that powers Librem’s range of Purism products – is built upon a powerful Debian-based foundation that is stable, reliable and secure–perfect for today’s digital content creators.

One use-case scenario, is using the Librem Mini, Librem 15, or the upcoming Librem 14 as the centerpiece of your music studio. There are several programs available for free in the PureOS Store that will turn your computer into a multi-track recording studio, like the powerful and professional-grade DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Ardour.

Ardour is a multi-track Digital Audio Workstation, for recording, editing, mixing and mastering audio and MIDI. Ardour’s core user group is audio engineers: “people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects.” When you need complete control over your tools, when the limitations of other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make things work the way you want them to: any number of tracks and buses, non-linear editing, non-destructive (and destructive) recording, any bit depth, any sample rate, dozens of file formats. It can be expanded with LV2, LinuxVST and LADSPA plugins, including full-mixing and mastering suites–most notably Mixbus.

Mixbus is a DAW built on top of Ardour, and if it wasn’t for an extensive upgrade to the Mixing View UI–adding custom bus tracks loaded with EQ and Analog Tube Compression by Harrison Consoles–you couldn’t tell them apart. Ardour is a full-featured program in it’s own right, but with MixBus, you’ve got a full-on mixing and mastering suite in a computer! Just remember to get a good pair of closed-back headphones for those times when you’re working away from a sound room with the proper acoustics for mastering an audio project.

In the video below, I walk you through a mixing and mastering session of a cinematic score for a soundtrack using Ardour for the arrangment and applying creative effects. Then I add sheen and shine to the final master in MixBus. I hope you enjoy!

About the Author

Tre Scranton is an open source advocate, electronic musician, and writer for LBFQ. He likes researching about current practices in the Cybersecurity and Data Analytics fields.