LMMS
Free beat and melody maker with a piano roll, step sequencer and more than fifteen built-in synthesisers.
Our verdict
LMMS is the free program people point at when someone asks what replaces FL Studio on Linux, and for making beats and melodies with a mouse it genuinely gets you there. The piano roll, the step sequencer and the pattern-based way of building a song are laid out along the same lines, so the first hour is not a fight.
Where it falls behind is everything around the music. Recording a live vocal or a guitar is basic. The mixer is simpler. It cannot open .flp project files, so anything you made in FL Studio has to be rebuilt by hand or exported as audio first and treated as a finished track.
Treat it as a free starting point rather than a like-for-like swap. If you are making music for fun it may be all you need. If you are paid for this, look at REAPER or Bitwig Studio instead, both of which are paid and both of which have proper Linux versions from the people who make them.
What's good
- Free with no account, trial or upgrade prompt
- Comes with more than fifteen synthesisers, so you can make sound the minute it opens
- Piano roll and step sequencer will look familiar to anyone who has used FL Studio
- Handles SoundFont files, MIDI files and LADSPA and LV2 effects
What to know first
- Audio recording is weak, so it is a poor fit if you record singing or guitar
- The Windows plugins you already own may not load, and the ones that do can be unstable
- Development is slow and the interface looks dated
- The Flathub listing is packaged by the community rather than by the LMMS developers
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-2.0)
- How you install it
- AppImage download, App store (Flatpak)
Windows apps it can replace
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