Hey guys, in this video we’re going to talk about Qtractor, which is an open source digital
audio workstation for Linux.
This program supports multitrack recording and mixing, MIDI recording, sequencing, and
virtual instruments.
There’s a lot of included effects, but the included virtual instruments are limited.
When you start up Qtractor, the first thing you need to do is create a new track.
Go to the track menu at the top and select Add Track.
Here you can name your track, change the colors and set it as audio or MIDI.
This popup as has options to select how many inputs you want to use.
To do this, click the 3 dots next to the button that says master.
At the bottom where is says Audio, there’s a selection for number of channels.
We’ll set this to 4, so it can record 4 inputs at once.
After you’ve created the track, we can adjust the connections for what inputs the interface
connects to each channel.
This can be done from the connections window.
To open the connections, go to the track menu and select Inputs.
You can also press the connections button at the top.
Use the mouse to select a system audio input on the left, and a Qtractor channel on the
right.
Press the connect button to link them together.
You can also link the tracks together by dragging between them.
Once the tracks are connected, press the R button on the track and the big red record
button next to play.
When you hit the record button, you’ll be asked to save your project in a file on your
computer.
Then, press the play button to start recording.
When you’re finished, press the play button again to stop.
To do some editing, you can click and drag the end of the tracks to trim it.
You can also click and drag the entire track to slide it around in time.
While you’re sliding the tracks, you can even drag it onto another track.
Plugins can be added from the track properties.
Right-click on the track and select track properties.
Then go to plugins and add your effects to do some mixing.
Your experience with effects will vary based on how many channels you recorded on a track.
Not all the plugins will work on multichannel tracks, and if you try and apply them you
might not get any sound produced.
The final set of audio tools we’ll discuss are the mixing tools.
Beside the connection button, you can open the mixer.
Here you can adjust panning, levels, arm recording, mute, and solo tracks.
There’s also the fader to adjust the level of each track.
One of Qtractor’s strongest features is the MIDI sequencer with the piano roll.
To get started with this we’ll first create a new midi track.
Then click this button to make a new midi clip.
This will pull up the piano roll and we can use that to do all our editing.
We’ll use Hydrogen as our midi instrument, so make sure that you open that first.
Before we get started using midi, we need to do some signal routing through jack to
connect our midi device to our midi instrument.
A quick and easy way to do this is with qjackctl.
Once it’s opened, there will already be a session running from Qtractor.
Click the connect menu, and select ALSA or MIDI depending on how your programs are configured.
Then select master under Qtractor and MIDI-In under Hydrogen.
Press the connect button to link them together.
You can also link them by dragging.
Now when we click notes in the piano roll, we can hear the sound coming through Hydrogen.
Now all we have to do is add our notes with the draw button and create a beat.
Instead, you can also download midi sample files online, or create them in Hydrogen itself
and import them to your Qtractor project.
The same general principles apply if you use a synthesizer with the midi connections instead
of Hydrogen drum machine.
Though the sequencing controls in Qtractor are decent, the overall program is less stable
than Ardour, and can get hung up on simple tasks such as adding an effect.
I’ve had it not respond to commands such as changing a slider after adding a plugin,
which could only be fixed by pressing the Escape key on the keyboard.
Overall, Qtractor is an ok digital audio workstation to experiment with, but it’s nowhere near
ready for recording large projects.
Due to its lack of stability, we wouldn’t even recommend Qtractor over Audacity if you’re
doing audio recording, even though it does have support for MIDI.
If you’re looking for a good program for audio production on Linux, we highly recommend
using Ardour instead.
If you’re interested, we’ve already created a tutorial on compiling it, as well as a separate
tutorial on how to use the DAW.
Thanks for watching this tutorial on Qtractor for Linux.
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