
Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux - ferrantim
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/
======
donquichotte
I have tried Hydrogen some time ago when I tried to build a linux audio
workstation with Jack and Ardour.

As much as it pains me to say this, don't expect it to be even remotely as
good as commercial software drum machines like EZDrummer, Superior Drummer or
Studio Drummer in terms of sample quality or usability.

Generally, I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-
latency audio workstation, even though I had one of the few soundcards that
had drivers for Linux (Edirol FA-101).

EDIT: That was like 5 years ago, maybe the audio landscape has changed until
then. 2017, year of the Linux Audio Workstation!

2nd EDIT: Today I use Reaper on Windows. Reaper is amazing and the only reason
I have Windows installed on my private computers. It is to audio editing and
recording what Sublime Text is to text editing: slick, fast, inexpensive, easy
to install, easy to use.

~~~
Pxtl
After hearing some oldschool electronica my 9-year old asked me about drum
machines. Is there a good kid-friendly one you can recommend for win or
android?

~~~
redacted
Check out the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators [0], so much fun to play
with. I enjoy messing around with chiptunes on my PO-20 Arcade far more than I
ever did in software.

The PO-12 [1] and PO-32 [2] (if you can find one) are the two drum machines in
that line up.

[0]
[https://teenage.engineering/products/po](https://teenage.engineering/products/po)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzEvGGINE20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzEvGGINE20)
(this guy has videos for most of the PO series)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMk8x9fsUQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMk8x9fsUQE)

------
trickell
Check out LMMS (Let's Make Music). It's like Ableton for Linux and already has
VST's like Hydrogen, etc. built into the software itself:
[https://lmms.io/](https://lmms.io/)

~~~
jameskegel
It's actually like FL Studio for Linux as it is pretty much a carbon copy. If
you want to draw a direct comparison of "Ableton for Linux" then the logical
choice is Bitwig, which is quite frankly "Ableton for Linux" since all of the
original Ableton developers left to start Bitwig and the interface is a 100%
copy of the original.

~~~
davidgerard
Do you know anything on the story of Bitwig vs Ableton? (Google gives me lots
of feature comparisons, but not the story.)

edit: [http://djtechtools.com/2012/01/12/bitwig-studio-announced-
ab...](http://djtechtools.com/2012/01/12/bitwig-studio-announced-abletons-new-
competition/)

------
badosu
For anyone interested in checking the state of Linux and Free/OS software for
music making I strongly recommend checking out:
[http://libremusicproduction.com/](http://libremusicproduction.com/)

There have been great improvements on the latest years in regard to plugin
availability and support for professional workflows/devices that might be
overlooked.

------
shams93
It's great on the pi3 runs well in arm. It's nice this isn't abandonware a lot
of the open source projects for Linux audio became abandonware.

~~~
jerf
Do you happen to have a good reference on using the Pi3 for audio? I spent a
lot of Saturday trying to make mine do some stuff, and while a lot of the
technical snafus were the usual sort, I did end up burning a lot of time
googling around until I finally found someone who suggested turning off CPU
performance scaling. Which was a forehead slap moment for me after that, but,
still, it'd be nice if there was somewhere I could go that had that stuff more
laid out.

(As implied, I've googled already. A lot.)

(The Pi3 seems to have more than enough CPU power for it to do what I want but
I was having trouble just routing audio in a USB mic straight out to the
speakers without dropouts and failures two or three times a second, even
though the CPU is barely at 10%. I think turning off the scaling seemed to fix
that, though I ran out of time just as I tried that to be sure.)

~~~
fundamental
You may want to check out some of the posts at
[https://autostatic.com/](https://autostatic.com/) and the forums for zynthian
[https://discourse.zynthian.org/](https://discourse.zynthian.org/) . If memory
serves both sites focused on some of the version 2 revisions of the Pi, but
they may also help with your board as well.

~~~
jerf
Thank you. Using those with site: in Google has produced some interesting
hints.

------
dsr_
I used Hydrogen a few years ago to build a tutorial of
[doumbek]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_drum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_drum))
patterns. It was too difficult to get it to sound like a human was drumming,
but for teaching the basic patterns and getting the timing exactly right, it
was pretty good.

------
unicornporn
For full av more fully featured Linux sequencer I'd recommend Renoise. It's a
tracker (and is not floss), but is super impressive.

~~~
pmoriarty
Just to add a bit to this:

Renoise is really rock solid, fast, light-weight, powerful, Lua-scriptable,
and really cheap compared to your typical commercial DAW, like Bitwig. I think
I paid less than $80 for Renoise, compared to about $400 for Bitwig.

The tracker paradigm is very different to the piano-roll paradigm that most
other DAWs use. If you can get used to the tracker way of doing things, which
is very keyboard-centric (kind of like vim and emacs), then you could be very
productive, if not you might be better off with a traditional DAW.

Finally, trackers are usually used for making electronic music, and might not
be the best fit for other types of music, or for making or editing long
recordings. You might be better off with something like Ardour or Bitwig for
that.

------
xatan_dank
The interface reminds me a lot of FL Studio (which I currently use on Ubuntu
via Wine, works great). Hydrogen looks interesting, but I think most DAWs
simply have almost all of these features and far more. That being said, this
looks to be FOSS, which I really admire. I'll have to check this out after
work.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Most DAWS might have drum machines but most serious users end up using a third
party product. The built-in ones are undeniably good but thinks like
Kontact/EZDrummer etc. are on another level.

~~~
peapicker
Never used Kontact or EZ Drummer, but seems like it would be hard to beat
Ableton Live Suite's combo of drumracks and stacking effects per drum
sample... Do you have experience with both? Any reason I should look into the
former when I've invested in the latter?

edit: Nevermind, after looking at Native's offering (Kontact), I can see it
has a lot of advantages for a certain kind of music, but that isn't the music
I'm writing...

~~~
k-mcgrady
I use Ableton and Logic and their built-in drum software often. They're both
very good. When you want to program super real sounding drums EZDrummer and
especially Kontact are unbeatable (and as another comment mentioned Kontact
has libraries for much more than just drums). For me the reason I like contact
is that the mixing interface for each element in the kit is really easy to use
and tweak. Besides that the samples are phenomenal. Another option that may be
more relevant to you is NI Battery [0]. Personally I just like to experiment
with different options as I find that the simple fact of working in a
different UI will result in different creative output.

[0] [https://www.native-
instruments.com/en/products/komplete/drum...](https://www.native-
instruments.com/en/products/komplete/drums/battery-4/)

~~~
xatan_dank
Thanks for the comment- I was hoping to hear about why you prefer using a 3rd
party drum machine in a DAW. For the time being, I record or find all of my
samples so I'm not particularly attracted to the kits. The interface looks
great however. I probably won't use it anytime soon, but it does appear to be
quite powerful.

------
toFret
Been using this for a couple of years, synchronized with Ardour DAW through
the JACK sound server.

Works great.

------
betaby
Only I hear cracking sound at the end of every beat? Removing pulseaudio helps
to shorten it but not completely eliminates.

~~~
hashkb
Pulse/alsa/jack shenanigans make audio production the only thing I still use
MacOS for.

~~~
digi_owl
Pulseaudio should not even be involved, as the program do not require it. But
then it keeps inserting itself into the "conversation" by hijacking any
connection to and from Alsa...

~~~
frutiger
If it's doing that, you might want to check your ~/.asoundrc, which might be
specifying pulse as the default ALSA device.

------
catwell
This brings me way back. I used to play drums, and I used Hydrogen to help
with drums patterns practice. I translated the manual and tutorial in French
back in 2004, and 13 years later my name is still there in the changelog :)

------
camtarn
Beta versions work on Windows too, although they're a little buggy.

This has pretty much been the standard-issue software for composing and
distributing drum patterns for Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Society drum crews for
years - amused to see it crop up here :)

------
3131s
I've made a bunch of stuff with Hydrogen. I really like it and it's more
stable (as in, does not crash all the time) than it used to be. It has its
limitations, but in general I am easily able to create the sounds I want with
it.

------
_joel
If you like this, then take a look at
[https://www.dyne.org/software/dynebolic/](https://www.dyne.org/software/dynebolic/)
(probably a bit old now) or the Ubuntu Studio distro
[https://ubuntustudio.org/](https://ubuntustudio.org/) that have a lot of
Linux based DAW and multimedia creation applications.

------
gntech
I have heard a lot of good stuff about DrumGizmo[0] lately, it has a very
active development as well. Havent had the oppurtunity to try it out yet. But
I have recently heard people moving from Hydrogen to DrumGizmo.

[0]: [http://www.drumgizmo.org/wiki/](http://www.drumgizmo.org/wiki/)

------
dyeje
I've checked out Hydrogen a few times, but have been turned off by clunkiness
in the UI each time. I'd rather use an web based one for quick one offs or
just boot up my DAW for something more in depth.

That said, it's a nice little tool if you're not willing to shell out for a
DAW.

~~~
yellowapple
The typical workflow for Hydrogen is to turn a whole desktop session into your
DAW, building it from the ground up with your own selection of tools.

I've dreamed of doing something like that for awhile, but at the end of the
day it's almost always easier to just reach for a self-contained DAW.

~~~
badosu
That's the idea of Non:
[http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?page=Non%20DAW](http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?page=Non%20DAW)

Separating each part of the composition process with specific applications.

------
stevehiehn
Does anyone know if it Hydrogen can be controlled via api/commandline? I would
like to try generating patterns with machine learning.

~~~
zhengyi13
It's not precisely your desire/use-case, but that sounds vaguely like you
might like some of the programmatic sound generation systems out there:

Overtone - [http://overtone.github.io/](http://overtone.github.io/) Tidal -
[https://tidalcycles.org/](https://tidalcycles.org/)

Perhaps those might be hooked into something you're already building?

~~~
stevehiehn
Thanks! I'm aware of super collider and it is cool. However i'm not interested
in real-time. I have been generating midi patterns and rendering audio server-
side over many hours. I've started hand rolling a system to play drum samples
from generated patterns. It would be nice if i could find something already
built.

~~~
adamsea
Maybe a music-oriented programming language like Chuck, Supercollider, or Pd?

I would recommend looking at Pd (Pure Data), which, imho, is the open source
version of Max/MSP, a very popular graphical programming language used for
music composition as well as the creation of audio applications.

------
phatbyte
Good stuff here, and nice to see an OSS GUI application with a good UI/UX for
a change.

------
andresgottlieb
Works perfectly in macOS Sierra

------
ndh2
Landing page == news feed -> nope

------
mrcactu5
everyone on Instagram puts music tracks to their videos. they could be ironing
their clothes but they will attack a hip-hop track our country music tune and
get 10000 views quickly

------
spednar
why is this on HN? Hydrogen has been around for ages no?

bump for Tidal if you're looking for interesting ways to arrange sample
playback: [https://tidalcycles.org/](https://tidalcycles.org/)

