LMMS

Hi !

Well, three years after and since this blog is still getting some visits trough search engines, I would like to correct a particular information that I gave at the time I used to post regulary here.

I said that LMMS in its beta versions was too unstable to be usable - sure, I should have checked the production release. I definitively missed something big.

But now, LMMS is in the repositories for Ubuntu, several versions of the distribution have it, and if you have the latest, it's sure you can get it this way, but it should also work with any Ubuntu version not too old. Install LMMS by typing in a terminal (console) :

sudo apt-get install lmms

Then sudo will prompt you for your password, and then, you're done (you can also use graphical tools such as Ubuntu Software center to install any software, by the way).

You can then launch Lmms with the Applications menu or in the terminal by entering

lmms &

Lmms will ask you to set up a few options. Since it is not mean to be used to produce live music, unless you want to use it this way latency is not a big issue, so just any software layer used to output the sound is good, let the default choice selected or select another one at your choice.

LMMS can be used with Jack, providing jackd is running. Jack has now a version 2 available in the Ubuntu repositories that you should check.

But LMMS can be used without Jack and provides built-in support for exporting the song in .wav audio format.

You'll have to discover how to use it by yourself... Sorry I will not post a complete tutorial. But LMMS is easy to use and anyone should guess how to do so easily.

Note that with my version of Ubuntu, Lmms came bundled with a few interesting LADSPA effect plug-ins that I was able to use in Audacity as well.

Happy music making !