Ubuntu Studio makes available some of the most popular and recently updated audio software in the Linux world.

JACK

Jack is a low latency capable audio and midi server, designed for pro audio use. It enables all Jack capable applications to connect to each other. The preferred method of controlling Jack with Ubuntu Studio is our very own Ubuntu Studio Controls (pictured below):

• provides low latencies (less than 5msecs with the right hardware)
• allows multiple audo devices to be used at once
• recognizes hotplugged USB audio devices

Ardour

Ardour is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), suitable for recording, mixing and mastering. Some of its features include:

• Unlimited audio tracks and buses
• Non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo
• Anything-to-anywhere signal routing
• Unlimited pre- and post-fader plugins
• 32 bit floating point audio path
• Automatic track delay compensation
• Sample accurate automation
• Standard file formats (BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF, CAF & more …)
• More than 200 LADSPA & LV2 plugins freely available
• MIDI CC control with 1 click
• Level 2 MIDI Machine Control
• MIDI Timecode (MTC) Master or Slave
• Full integration with all JACK applications
• Video-synced playback, pull up/pull down

Carla

Carla is a virtual Audio Rack and Patchbay, otherwise known as a plugin host, that can use audio plugins normally used in a DAW such as Ardour as if it was a rack of audio hardware. Some of its features include:

• Saving virtual racks and connections
• Interacting with several plugins types, including LADSPA, LV2, DSSI, and VST.
• Has a plugin bridge that utilizes WINE to use plugins compiled for Windows devices (experimental, not installed by default).

Sequencers and Synthesizers

Ubuntu Studio comes installed with other notable applications such as:

• Audacity – Audio Wave Editor
• Qtractor – midi capable DAW
• Hydrogen – Drum machine / Sequencer
• Yoshimi – Software Synthesizer

Virtual Guitar Amps

Rakarrack (preinstalled) and Guitarix are two popular guitar amp simulators.

Jack Session

Gladish will enable you to start applications, make connections between them, and save the whole configuration to file.

Audio Programming

There are numerous easy to use audio programming environments available to Ubuntu Studio, such as the preinstalled puredata. Others are installable, such as supercollider, csound and chuck.

Blender

Blender is a full fledged 3D content creation suite. You can create 3D models and animate scenes. Blender also has its’ own game engine and is vastly expandable with addons.

• 3D Solids and character modeling
• Scene animation
• Physics and particle functions
• Shading
• Game engine (create a whole game using only Blender)
• Imaging and compositing
• Highly extensible

Inkscape

Inkscape is a superb vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

GIMP

GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program, and is a similar to Photoshop.

MyPaint

(Available in Ubuntu Studio versions up to 18.04)

MyPaint is a digital painting tool, designed to work with graphic tablets. It comes with a large collection of brushes, including ink and charcoal.

• Designed for pressure sensitive graphics tablets
• Simple and minimalistic user interface
• Extensive brush creation and configuration options
• Unlimited canvas (you never have to resize)
• Basic layer support

PikoPixel

(Available in Ubuntu Studio version 18.10 and above)

PikoPixel is an easy-to-use application for drawing & editing pixel-art.

• Unlimited undo
• Supports multiple layers
• Customizable canvas background and grid patterns
• Hotkey-activated popup panels
• Export upscaled images
• Supports linear (gamma-correct) color blending

Openshot

Openshot is a simple video editor for Linux. Add videos, photos and music to create DVD’s, youtube clips and a range of other formats.

• Simple and clean UI
• Intuitive use
• Format support based on ffmpeg

FFMPEG

“FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffserver, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding, streaming and playing.”

DVDStyler

Use DVDStyler to create custom, professional looking DVD’s.

• User-friendly interface with support of drag & drop
• Multiple subtitles and audio tracks
• Design your own DVD menu or select a template
• Create a photo slide show
• support of AVI, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG, WMV and other file formats
• support of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid, MP2, MP3, AC-3 and other audio and video formats

Darktable

Darktable is a photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

Shotwell

You can use Shotwell to organize your library of photos.

• Import multiple formats
• Edit tags
• Convert formats
• Simple editing on the fly
• Publish directly to social sites

Tour: Publishing

Allthough not everything is preinstalled, powerful tools for book publishing are at your fingertips, installable from the repo using Software Center.

Calibre

Calibre is a popular program that makes things easy for new users by providing excellent templates for common formats, such as kindle, various types of tablets and other hardware readers, and a lot more.

Scribus

Another great tool is Scribus, which will let you creat professional PDF publications. There are some nice templates for posters, business cards, brochures and more.

LibreOffice

And of course, we have LibreOffice. With LibreOffice Writer you can create the text, and save in any format you like. Including MS Office formats, as well as export to PDF.