Gabriel Nordeborn (zthmusic) released a new album that he composed, recorded, mixed and mastered mostly with free software on Linux. It's also licensed under CC-BY-SA.

The new work sounds tighter than the previous album and, as Gabriel states, is more electronically influenced (which probably explains somewhat lacking use for layered drums in the intro).

For this album Gabriel completely moved to Ardour 3 for composition thus ditching OpenOctaveMidi that he had used for making all orchestrals before:

Unfortunately, this wasn't due to Ardour 3 filling my MIDI-needs the same way that OpenOctave did, but rather that OpenOctave isn't actively developed anymore, and bouncing tracks between OpenOctave and Ardour 3 just was too tedious.

Orchestrals in Ardour 3

In terms of using free software Gabriel took two steps forward and one step back. First of all, he has switched from TAL NoiseMaker to Loomer Aspect synth:

For my needs, Aspect is perfect, and synths in general is an area where FLOSS is a bit behind. Not at all saying there aren't great FLOSS synths around, but even me, an avid open source fan, needs to sometimes make a choice between easily achieving the sound that I want, and going a good 10 extra miles to achieve something almost what I want, but entirely using FLOSS.

And yet he puts it down only to his own laziness rather than the quality of what's out there.

Loomer Aspect synth

At the same time, Gabriel completely stopped using Pianoteq and moved to Salamander Grand Piano SFZ sample that he plays via LinuxSampler. He also moved from his old commercial drum samples collection to Salamander Drumkit and The Open Source Drumkit. Apparently, next productions will rely on the Drumgizmo plugin.

Mixing and processing drums in Ardour 3

Mastering is the only stage of the workflow where nothing really changed:

I did it the same way around as last time, with putting all of the tracks in the same session and from there applying the mastering FX on each one of them. Again, made more or less only with LinuxDSP plugins. There are FLOSS equivalents of some of them (Calf has a multiband compressor and a bass-enhancer, and also an EQ) but LinuxDSP plugins just sound and work great.

LinuxDSP channel plug-ins in Ardour 3

The album is also available on Bandcamp and The Pirate Bay (needless to say, legally). You can follow the musician on Facebook.