slurp

An LLM wrote this

I recommend Vital. Different UI but it's free and can do most (if not all) of the same stuff, from what I can tell (I've not delved deep into Alchemy). Surge XT is apparently more powerful but I find Vital offers plenty of complexity and there's a much steeper a learning curve, so I wouldn't start there.

It shows the trend but the colors make this look far more severe than the scores reflect

I use ImagePipe, which has worked well for me

Okay, that doesn't sound too bad then!

I've been looking for a good channel strip for a bit as I've heard good things about them as a workflow. Also, aa it's an emulation of a physical device rather than a more perfect compressor etc, it adds some nice colouration that works really well for some instruments. The saturation is particularly nice and I'm surprised how much I like using the EQ.

And yeah, iLok is awful.

Thanks, I'll take a look!

Plugdata seems like a deep rabbit hole, so I'm a little afraid of it but maybe that's the next step.

For now, I'll share my latest Linux plugin find: https://store.harrisonaudio.com/all-products/harrison-32classic-channel-strip says it doesn't support Linux but if you buy it and download the "old" version from here https://support.harrisonaudio.com/hc/en-gb/articles/19516617411613-Harrison-AVA-downloads-OLD-VERSIONS (it has the same version number as the most recent Windows copy), then you can activate it and it works well. I think I had to say no to linking iLok when purchasing. It's crap that they've recently stopped supporting Linux (because they've moved to using iLok) but I've been happy with the plugin.

The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don't work at all.

On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.

One thing I've seen people talking about is the metadata library, which is apparently very good

No it wasn't, shitty bosses were and AI was their excuse.

Not a full solution, but painters tape to seal the gaps might stop further nest building

Yeah, I probably gave Bazzite less of a chance because I had so many issues installing it. I believe I had to wipe my other Linux partition to get it installed in the end.