LMMS is a music production software. I use it on my PC. Is it good as an alternative for paid DAWs?
It has some cool features that aren’t available even in some of the leading industry DAWs like key/scale note highlight, but it also lacks some absolutely essential basic features like showing the playback position in beat mode (it means when you writing beats you can’t see where playback is at currently).
As an amateur who used it for a year before switching to FL Studio, I could only recommend it as a way to explore DAW-based music creation for free before switching to something paid and better.
It’s just not feature complete enough, missing basic features like VST3 support (or VST support at all in the Mac version,) time signature changes, sample manipulation capabilities, or in-DAW recording, and it’s built-in effects plugins are overly hard to use. I’ve also seen claims it’s rendering engine is flawed and causes a minor distortion effect, but I can’t verify that myself.
Tracktion Waveform is free and has unlimited tracks, seems pretty nice, and is much more modern looking than last I checked on LMMS. I’ve been meaning to check it out more. It’s the parts version, just 1 version behind the paid product.
Otherwise, I will probably just get the cheap Reaper license. The Commala theme has made that pretty sharp and it seems to do more than I know what to do with at this point
I have never heard of it although I lurk the major audio forums daily. From what I see on their site I think Reaper + free plugins will get you farther.
I have used LMMS for quite a bit. It’s fairly stable, and I really like the UI and the general experience, plus, it comes with basic samples and plugins with presets, which is nice.
The biggest drawback in my opinion at the moment is the lack of native support for lv2 and vst3 plugins, which limits the access to some usefull plugins like Surge. That and the lack of a record audio tool.
I tried Ardour which is much more complete. It’s alright, but i’m not a fan of the user experience and it is far more complex.
ZRythm is very promising, but is not really stable right now.
So yeah, LMMS is defintely a good FOSS option and a good DAW despite the lack of some features in my opinion
