Music Related Free and Open Source Software?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm going to a demonstration of some music software products tomorrow night. The music store hosting the event may be attempting to start a users group of music software. This seems like a job for open source advocacy! Anyone know of any good F/OSS for working with music and audio? I am already aware of Audacity and (Free as in Beer) Jeskola Buzz, but what else is there in the realm of sequencers and audio manipulation?" We did another helpful article back in 2001, and another from last August. What musical creations have you put together with any of this software, and others we may have missed?

Jingle Bells

[Muda69]

I once used Music Construction Set on my C-64 to play Jingle Bells. After that I played Bach's Fugue in D-minor........

Linux Journal

[mapMonkey]

Linux Journal [linuxjournal.com] has an article [linuxjournal.com] in the most recent edition entitled "The Linux Soundfile Editor Roundup". Check it out! Audacity is reviewed, along with several other audio file editors.

Re:Linux Journal

[Zappa]

I especially like the date, this article was written :


Posted on Tuesday, June 01, 2004 by Dave Phillips

Free audio tools worth mentioning

[ion_]

• Ardour [ardour.org], a digital audio workstation (DAW)
• JAMin [sourceforge.net], a mastering program

Gramofile

[matt_morgan]

I haven't tried this yet, but I am starting to get desperate for a way to digitize my LP's, and it can do that job:

http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/

Looks pretty good.

Re:Gramofile

[croddy]

many of them you can simply download from P2P services.

Linux Music & Sound

[notjonny]

http://www.linux-sound.org/

DeMuDi !!!

[jacksonscottsly]

check out the agnula/DeMuDi (http://www.agnula.org/) collection of software; they have everything in that distribution! download the livecd iso, boot it, check out the software. everything from synths to drum trackers to recorders, the whole sha-bang. oh, and the dynebolic (http://www.dynebolic.org/) project has a good livecd for audio, too!

scratching

[guinnessnwhiskey]

Show them terminatorX [terminatorx.cx]
A friend of mine installed Linux, just to be able to run this app.
And it's a lot of fun to scratch on some Steve Ballmer samples!

Csound

[kenl999]

The grand-daddy. www.csounds.com among others...

Re:csound is not free software

[KevinDumpsCore]

> csound is only free for non-commercial use

No, this was changed recently. It's now LGPL: http://lwn.net/Articles/31840/ [lwn.net]

Its documentation is also under the GFDL now.

Linux Audio Development

[slashflood]

You definitely missed the Linux Audio Conference [www.zkm.de] in Karlsruhe/Germany. There is a lot of development going on at the moment. Even commercial companies like Lionstracs [lionstracs.com] and Native Instruments [native-instruments.de] are getting more and more interested in Linux.

Claim your pizza here!

[a whoabot]

CSound http://www.csound.net/ [csound.net]

ZynAddSubFX http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

FluidSynth http://www.fluidsynth.org/ [fluidsynth.org]

Rosegarden http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ [rosegardenmusic.com]

Open Source Audio programs for Windows

[JaF893]

I tired posting these as proper hyperlinks but apparently I had too few characters per line.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net - CDex
http://www.vorbis.com - Ogg Vorbis
http://audacity.sourceforge.net - Audacity
http://xtractor.sourceforge.net - CD-DA X-Tractor
http://www.audiocoding.com - AudioCoding
http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net - Mp3splt
http://mp3wrap.sourceforge.net - Mp3Wrap
http://alba.sourceforge.net - Alba Extractor
http://www.peercast.org - PeerCast
http://gnump3d.sourceforge.net - GNUMP3d
http://massid3lib.sourceforge.net - Mp3 Tag Tools
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/%7Ecostar/gramofile/ - GramoFile
http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net - FFmpeg
http://www.jazzware.com - JAZZ++
http://osw.sourceforge.net/ - Open Sound World

Re:Open Source Audio programs for Windows

[stevey]

GNUMP3d is now part of the GNU project, and isn't located on sourceforge any longer.

Instead find it at the GNU site [gnu.org], or via gnump3d.org [gnump3d.org].

VSTs

[Miriku chan]

your most important tools are VSTs

check here: kvr-vst [kvr-vst.com].

you can load them into buzz and then run them like virtual synths. the quality varies, but some of the free ones are actually better than my real hardware synths, notably the killer series, like MindKiller, SoulKiller, etc, or TriangleII, or Crystal...

look around, dont cost nothing and they're fun.

Re:VSTs

[croddy]

additionally, you might be interested in the many hundreds of LADSPA [ladspa.org] plugins [plugin.org.uk]

Ardour looks good

[olrs]

Check out http://www.ardour.org. From their site:

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. Produce your own CD's. Mix video soundtracks. Experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Generate sound installations for 12 speaker gallery shows. Have Fun.

Re:Ardour looks good

[KevinDumpsCore]

Warning, its manual isn't free: http://ardour.org/manual.html [ardour.org]

Lilypond & Rosegarden

[brendan_orr]

Lilypond [lilypond.org] is a program, IMHO, generates scores & sheet music that aesthetically look better than anything that Finale can do. Though the format used isn't too user friendly. However, there are plenty of front-ends and programs capable of exporting to the lilypond format. One such program, Rosegarden [rosegardenmusic.com], which not only is a music notation program, but a full suite of music editing funness (does audio recording). But like a brother post simply stated, linux-sound.org [linux-sound.org] is a very usefull site with many many FOSS projects regarding audio.

Midi file generator

[jefu]

I have a genetic programming based midi file generator that allows a user to build, rate and breed (so to speak) grammars that generate midi files. It is written in java and uses an external midi file player (in linux it defaults to timidity) to play the files. Find it here [sourceforge.net].

As the page shows it also can be used to generate pov files and other kinds of oddness. There is a current running version at this page [ewu.edu] that is generating "plants" and selecting them for "how well they compete for sunlight" (sort of).

Don't tell me the UI is terrible. I know. I'm more interested in what I can make it do and playing with the innards. Currently I'm working on "poetry", event generation for testing java programs and finding a way to import grammars that generate other music - so I could possibly produce music(???) that is the b-st-rd offspring of Mozart and Madonna (say).

OBB

[YGingras]

You might want to check OBB [openbeatbox.org] for an impressive looking drum machine. The developers are a bit lazy *ahem* so it's less usable than Hydrogen [sf.net] but I heard that they were planing some major release in a not so distant future.

; )

MOD PARENT UP

[whiteSanjuro]

the truth hurts, but the only reason i keep a windows pc around is for digital audio software. existing software has the following problems:
1) not compatible with pro hardware
2) not feature-complete/competetive
3) beta/unstable/under-developed

MP3Split is where it's at

[bensin]

I use Mp3Split on my website http://www.myglobalsound.com [myglobalsound.com] and it's great. I use it to allow users to upload their music to my site. When a user uploads a track it gives them the choice of choosing which 40 seconds of the track should be streamed. It works great. Linux and PHP is a killer combo.

Linux Sound

[JGski]

Didn't see this link but it's excellent: http://linux-sound.org/ [linux-sound.org]

Modplug Tracker

[yRabbit]

I've used Modplug Tracker [modplug.com] (Windows) for years, to create .it files. It can also load mod files, s3m, it, xm, midi files, and some other mod variants (mtm, okt, mdl, 669, far, psm, and others I've missed).
(As far as I remember, you can also edit and re-save mod/s3m/xm back to their original format)

It's another "free as in beer" one.

Close but no cigar.

[polyp2000]

Linux has several promising projects on the cards, however I havent found any that I have been able to use to compose tunes. Ardour for example is a very promising hard disk recorder with a few nice bells and whistles, however instability and regular crashes rendered it useless. Same goes for Rosegarden (Cubase VST-esque) which suffers similar stability problems. This is seems to be exacerbated by the variety of audio drivers / audio subsystems required Arts, Jack, Alsa (which is now part of the kernel) OSS, esd, GStreamer and whatever else i've forgotten. The latest build of Arts on my Gentoo box is less stable than the previous build and VBR MP3 playback is so bad I've had to change my audio backend to GStreamer and use non-arts players instead. (Clearly not a happy state of affairs)

Most of the soundtrackers are pretty damn inferior when you've spent a lot of time with Med Soundstudio [medsoundstudio.com] a clone of which id love to see under linux. There are some good sample editors I've found though , really that is about it.

My comments probably sound rather negative, but the sad fact is this is an area in which linux is sadly lacking. I switched to linux around 4yrs ago. Since then I havent used my computer for music making purposes, not for want of trying but there simply are not any tools that I have discovered that come close to windows / mac counterparts. Rosegarden is probably the closest we have but its not really viable for anything serious yet.

I've tried many of the tools but most of the time the interface gets in the way of creativity or stability is poor.

Im not sure what the real solution is, Id like to see an audiosubsystem/backend standardised for a start. It looks like Alsa is going to be the replacement for OSS, but the additional layers Arts (KDE) seem to interfere and get in the way. I think these guys [agnula.org] might be on the right track in creating a dedicated music distribution. Ill be keeping an eye on these guys and maybe the day will come when I can use my computer to write tunes again.

Nick (who would really like to use linux for music composition, but remains without tools)

Planet CCRMA

[Chilltowner]

An amazing array of many of the apps listed above and lots more, all bundled up nicely in RPM format: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/so u ndapps.html You can even use apt-get to pull them all down at once, like a distribution. It's pretty well maintained for updates and compatibility. If you're using Linux, I highly recommend this site. One of my personal favorite weirdo sound apps is Timemachine: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/sou ndapps.html#SECTION00032420000000000000

Re:Planet CCRMA

[Chilltowner]

Curse my clicky finger, I hit submit before previewing:

An amazing array of many of the apps listed above and lots more, all bundled up nicely in RPM format: Planet CCRMA [stanford.edu]

You can even use apt-get to pull them all down at once, like a distribution. It's pretty well maintained for updates and compatibility. If you're using Linux, I highly recommend this site. One of my personal favorite weirdo sound apps is Timemachine [stanford.edu].

By the way, check out Rosegarden (mentioned above) but also take a good look at MUSE [stanford.edu]. I

Fruity Loops

[BinLadenMyHero]

Anyone knows a Linux program that looks like Fruity Loops?
I had fun with Fruit Loops 3 once (made a song out of QuakeIIIArena sound samples [9hells.org]), but when I tried to do the same with Linux I coundn't find a program I could understand (I'm not used to trackers).

Two programs that weren't mentioned

[klaws]

If you're going to mention CSound (or FluidSynth), you should mention its complement (or uglier relative) PureData [ucsd.edu] . PD is a Max/MSP clone, and one of the earlier programs to support JACK. By now, between PD, JACK, and ALSA's MIDI layer, you can basically do everything you can do in Max/MSP (OS9 and only recently OSX) under linux.

This is not to say that PD is necessarily a good introductory sound program -- after all, it is rather strange to right music using flowcharts.

The other I know of and think highl

Music trackers rule!

[zonix]

If you like good old music trackers, I can recommend Soundtracker [soundtracker.org].

It uses a Fasttracker 2 like interface, it plays XM and MOD, and it's GPL'd.

z

My donut is purple. Purple is a fruit.

[zenmojodaddy]

I use Fruity Loops on Windows XP for writing crushingly heavy industrial metal and, much as I'd like to migrate everything to Linux, I've pretty much given up for now. I've looked up Rosegarden, Hydrogen and Audacity and located RPMs for Mandrake 9.2, which I'm running as a dual boot... all very well, but everytime I try to install a program I get half a dozen obscure dependencies fouling everything up.

This might just be a problem with RPMs in general, which is why I intend to try Slackware in the near