The early days of stereo (which is what you’re talking about, the recordings of 70s which aren’t using stereo as an “effect” almost universally have the vocals panned to the center. The old way to take the vocals out of a recording was to adjust how much of the signal present equally on both channels was allowed to be played) were all about two things: backwards compatibility with mono systems and giving people with stereo systems a recognizable effect no matter what goofy system they had.
Wild panning accomplishes both goals.
Studio engineering that used the stereo format to create the illusion of a room or capture the sound of the room the players were playing in wasn’t developed yet and came from the experimental stereo recordings that sound crazy now like silver apples of the moon.
There’s a lot of people in this thread saying it’s possible, some saying it’s not and more than is really healthy saying there’s something wrong with you.
But the question I can’t help but ask is should you switch to Linux.
I don’t think so.
You’re trying to get away from the high price of Apple hardware, not out of a general unwillingness to pay for expensive things, but because the ram and storage in the computers are no longer upgradable.
To do so you’d have to find bespoke solutions based on new software and systems you might not be familiar with and which mill most likely face loss of maintainers and updates some time in the near future.
That’s not a dealbreaker really, but the general trend in laptops is moving away from replaceable memory. Sure at the moment you generally can still replace the disk, but for how long? Are you thinking that apples ahead of the curve on system on chip devices or that they’re making a misstep? Personally I think anyone your age or mine will have a hard time buying new computers that don’t have everything built into the board or processor before we shuffle off. I could be wrong though.
Let’s say it doesn’t matter though, just in dollars amortized over the life of the hardware, how much are you really saving by upgrading the memory and storage?
I tend to run five + year old macs and for the oldest ones, the 12 year old MacBooks, I got lots more life out of em by doubling the installed memory to 16gb and going from hdd to ssd. How much money was really saved though? Maybe ten bucks a month at the most.
Are you keeping em for fifteen years or cycling out every five or so?
Newer Macs which already have ssds don’t see near the stark performance change that we probably both wowed about when going from hdd to ssd.
You’re not really listing any software or operations in your post that would make upgrading the ram from the (maybe?) current 8gb minimum to anything more seem worthwhile.
It’s not that I don’t think a person could do what you want to do under Linux, just that it doesn’t seem like something you ought to pursue when weighed against the relatively low cost of just staying with the system you’re using considering the computers themselves will hold value better over time than anything you might swap out to.