Spoiler alert: it's a clickbait title, I'm not really a rockstar! :-)
That said, it's usually not that well known, but Linux has an amazing ecosystem for creating music, whatever genre you like, with a ton of fantastic applications to tackle different stages of the music production. In this presentation, I'll share what my experience has been in this past couple of years, talking about the different applications I've used to compose, orchestrate, process, mix, master and so on, with real or virtual instruments, and how that allowed me to publish a few albums just for the fun of it.
The music production ecosystem on Linux is huge, and yet it's unortunately not that well known, possibly because it's seen more as "just" software for entertainment purposes rather than something much more serious and valuable than that. JACK and, more recently, Pipewire provide an excellent environment for working with low latency music, and there's a ton of applications that can help at different stages of music production. There's software for composing and/or orchestrating your music, using music sheets, piano rolls or patterns; software for processing your real instruments and software for simulating virtual instruments, including complex syntethizers; DAWs to work on music projects in a more organized way; a plethora of plugins that can be used in different applications to customize the way each track needs to be processed, and mix/master your work; and so on and so forth. And while I mostly like working on "rock" and orchestral music (and so the talk will focus a bit more on software that helped me do that), there's so much software out there to help with basically any genre that you may be interested in, from classical music to dub and beyond.
I'll also talk a bit of the community aspects of it (for instance introducing the LinuxMusicians forum or the "Made with Ardour" topic that allowed me to meet so many other people using FOSS to create and share their music), and share a few notes about how you can indeed share your music with the world (or at least how I did it!).
Speakers: Lorenzo Miniero