Zrythm is a new (still in alpha version) DAW on the not overly crowded FOSS DAW market. It’s aimed at music producers, not necessarily engineers like ardour.
What I like a lot, is that it does a bit of everything, borrows nice concepts here and there, here are a few examples.
- Dragging the bottom right corner of a region duplicates the region.
- It supports all linux plugins format (I’m looking at you LMMS)
- It has a nice plugin browser, a monitor section and you can easily export stems (I’m looking at you qtractor)
- I has a chord/scale helper, perfect for creating solid harmonies.
- It has a solid MIDI system (looking at you ardour)
- It does audio and MIDI, od course
- You can modulate parameters using a modulator track (think modulate your pan or just any plugin parameter using an LFO)
It’s not entirely stable yet, there a quite some little things to iron out, but it’s already usable, testable, and the dev is really reactive. Please report bugs (you can even do it per email, without singing in) and support the project if you can.
Does it support VSTs? I mean, I am all for moving away from VSTs but the fact is right now it is very difficult to avoid them.
Also luftikus and helm are great!
I know it runs vsts, but I’m not sure if it runs them natively or if you have to run them through Carla. Also, I don’t know if it works with windows VSTs using wine, or only linux native. It was a while ago when I tried zrythm out, and I was mostly using LV2 plugins with it.
It runs native Linux vst 2 & 3 without problem. And while vst2 was a pain to work with due to the complicated licence, the vst3 standard is open, so it’s not that bad. Though LV2 seems to offer more possibilities to devs.
You’ll still need an external bridge for Windows vst as far as I know.
And yeah, I like Luftikus and help, but they are not my go-to plugins.
I want to like Zrythm. I’ve been having some issues with it though.
I’ve tried the MacOS version to no avail (opened once, crashed and would not open again. even after a reinstall) And the Linux version (Ubuntu 23.04) is having problems with needing more permissions. It can probably be fixed, but I haven’t messed around with it yet as I’m still thinking about doing some bistro hopping.
Coming from a longtime FL Studio user though. It looks promising!
Very cool! Competition on that market is definitely very welcome. I’m still quite tied to Ableton Live, which is why I could never leave macOS full-time, I suppose.
Looks promising, however there is an initial lie that has to be highlighted, it’s not free, it’s not FOSS.
It’s an open source Freemium, which makes a lot of difference. Free users have access to limited features (25 tracks, limited Fx, etc…).
