Audio workstations
The verdict
W
aveform Pro is strong in most areas, and that makes it our winner. It would be equally at home when recording a band or creating EDM. It takes a modern, multi-panel approach to its GUI, which is highly efficient and mostly pleasant to use. It also comes with a hell of a lot interesting add-ons and a feature list that’s lengthy to say the least. All of the other applications tend to have a mixture of areas in which they’re strong and in which they’re disappointing.
Qtractor is fairly traditional in the way it looks and the way it works. It’s also very “Linuxy”, in feel and in function: it does the basic job, and you’re expected to bring in external tools to extend its functionality. For example, it lacks the built-in MIDI arpeggiators of LMMS and Waveform Pro, but you could wire up an external tool such as QMidiArp (http://qmidiarp.sourceforge. net) to do the job. In the same way, you could use Audacity (www.audacityteam.org) for more advanced audio processing and then bring the track back into Qtractor afterwards. It’s also ideal for running along with other, JACK-enabled music tools.