I wanted to do electronic music since I was a teenager. But the first time I did something was in LMMS. I just learned how to do the software, and did some sort of shitty techno. It was kinda weird tbh. The software is still quite rudimentary and there was a lot of stuff I couldn't do. It's basically based on FL Studio. A friend of mine showed me, he was doing something more like mental tribe tekno.

Anyway one day in a tent town full of weird german people in Portugal (where I tried surf for the first time), some dude showed me Ableton. I liked the grid view.

So I took bitwig (an ableton clone), and with the right script and one of those 8x8 pad launchpad, you could record and loop things easy. So now I need this feature. I wish lmms had it and I'm planning to implement it someday, but in the meanwhile, I'm using bitwig.

But noway I'm paying 200 euros everyyear. So I downloaded a crack. The crack is in flatpak.

But it doesn't have good synth. Zynaddsubfx is the synth I was using in lmms and it's pretty decent, with the right preset it can generate out-of-this-world sounds. But the issue is that it needs some library.

Not that big on the linking part of binary code, but asaik usually, the vst (so a .so or a .dll) is linked to libraries directly. But no, not here, because flatpak is sandboxing the /usr/lib directory. So even though I installed the right library from the AUR (arch repos), it couldn't see it.

So I was stuck. I couldn't use the synth, which blocked me in my artistic energy. It was bad after I lost my laptop but I'm trying to get back into it. And I found myself limited by the samples to be honest, I want to compose stuff and sample that instead. Maybe sample some music directly (now that I can use IA to separate tracks in a song that's way easier). But I was stuck, I couldn't have the synth I wanted in my DAW.

But then I found the solution. It's very simple. Guess what it is.