I find Linux lacking a good tool for music creation project/session management, i.e. a smooth way to load all (Ardour)-external software and setup all needed connections (using saved session files) before loading Ardour.
Simple example: Start Yoshimi with stored setting → start Calf organ with stored settings → setup Jack connections → save away previous session → open Ardour. There are free apps that can (claim) to do this, but lets be honest, they don’t work that well and could be replaced by a professional tool managed by the Ardour team. I use sh-files for this purpose, and it works fine, but I’m sure this could be done smother using a professional ui. Opinions anyone ?
Why not use plugins instead of external applications? That not just keeps everything in one place, and slightly increase performance (no context switch to external app), but also allows for parameter automation.
In the distant past, when I used JACK, I tended to use bash script to automate launching external apps. I never managed to get any of the many jack-session managers to work reliably.
Calf and Yoshimi do not work in Ardour as plugins due to that they’re not statically compiled so they need to be loaded outside Ardour. Maybe that is a small problem for the community but I use those apps frequently. Apart from that, scripts are what we ( advanced ) users do but that may not attract those that see it as the devil materialized
Ideally I would like to setup Ardour with all plugins and external software and all connections and then “Save Session” in Ardour but i understand that that is not easily done.
tl,dr: Yoshimi LV2 links to over 60 system libraries, including Wayland libraries and libblkid and libmount for accessing block devices directly. Unless I have misunderstood something, I believe the current default build configuration should be considered completely broken.
The way I did that was to load Carla as a plugin inside Ardour, and then load Yoshimi or clap instruments inside the carla plugin.
In carla you can load plugins or also direct to an application path for a program.
More recent I did discover Element : Element - Kushview
Hoping this helps.
And completely agree : there is no better than Linux !!!
