I recently got fed up with spending hours making my MIDI devices work in Windows. Everytime I plugged the USB hub with my controllers into Windows, it would reassign the ports and I’d have to use the ancient Korg utility to remove dead ports. This is a really old issue that Microsoft claims was fixed ten years ago, but never was. So I decided to test if Linux can handle MIDI devices better.

It seemed to work fine on an old Mint laptop that I have around, but since I’d rather use the newer laptop and since I still need Windows on that for work, I decided to try out putting everything on a USB stick for portability. Also, the old laptop which I might use sometimes is a bit too slow for Mint, so I needed something smaller.

So, the idea is to put the OS, the DAW, the plug-ins and samples on one single stick. I happened to have a 8gb USB that I found on a parking lot. It’s kinda dirty and broken, so I figured it was perfect for the experiment. Yes, I do know that flash drives aren’t good for this, and when I’m done playing around, I will probably get an external SSD for this purpose instead.

8gb is not a lot for this, but I like the challenge.

At first I wasted another evening trying to make Slax boot. I gave up and found Poppy Linux instead, since I do want the tiny and persistent kind of installation. It’s a bit slow to boot into ram, but it’s nice and quick once at the desktop.

For a DAW I got Reaper working just fine simply by extracting the files from the official webpage. No install required.

It recognized my MIDI devices and audio interface instantly. No issues at all, no missing dependencies or drivers or whatever, and better yet: It’s still works after rebooting. I made a setup of the devices to control mixer actions in Reaper and that also saves fine as expected.

Now getting plugins is a bit of an issue. It seems that most people run Wine to use VSTs, but I decided to stick with free native Linux plugins and those are somewhat more difficult to find.

So far I’ve found Helm for a synth and LSP for a samples. I plan on recording real instruments mostly, so I only need the essential stuff.

I was pleasantly surprised that the linux download for LSP also ships with a bunch of effect plug-ins. Highly recommended: https://lsp-plug.in/index.php

I have yet to make any music other than test tracks, but it seems that my idea works so far. The installation is completely independent of which computer I have available, so I guess I will be using Linux in one way or the other to make music going forwards.