About
Ubuntu Studio is a free and open source operative system, and an official flavor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is the most widely used multimedia orientated GNU/Linux distribution in the world. It comes preinstalled with a selection of the most common free multimedia applications available, and is configured for best performance for the Ubuntu Studio defined workflows: Audio, Graphics, Video, Photography and Publishing.
A community project
Ubuntu Studio is a community effort, created by volunteers, targeted towards all skill levels, from beginner to pro, and aims to be easy to install and easy to use, as well as provide all the tools nessecary for any type of media content creation.
What we do..
We aim to be an example on how to configure a Debian based operative system for our workflows, contributing in bringing improvements upstream to Debian, and communicating with developers directly, by doing testing, fixing bugs and providing feedback.
Our goal
We aim to be a the gateway for users coming into the Linux world, wanting to use Linux for multimedia content creation, by providing applications and documentation, as well as being a portal to other GNU/Linux and FLOSS communities in the world.
Want to contribute?
Contributors of any skill level are welcome to join our team.
Please check out our Contribute page!
Tour: Audio
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.
Tour: Graphics
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
Tour: Video
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
Tour: Photography
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.
