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anecdotal... I have been trying the latest windows 7 build, the synthesiser buzz would not run on vista (forgot the error message), it does run on windows 7, not sure why...

Writing music is an art, whether it's for top 40 radio, games, or theater. Most of the time you don't get hired to write music as a permanent job, though there are a few out there. If you want to get into the industry, start writing music and TONS of it. Get some games and re-write the music for them. Make some videos showing the game with your music behind it. Offer to write music for free for ANYONE who is willing. The best way to make money writing music for games is to get known as a game musician.

Another thing to do is learn how to write music on as many different audio apps as possible, as well as with physical instruments like guitar, keyboard, drums, etc. If someone asks you to come in and write music using a Jeskola Buzz Machine http://www.buzzmachines.com/, you need to already know how. You also need to understand mixing and mastering and need to know how to use analog and digital recording equipment. Mixing isn't too difficult but mastering really takes talent and skill.

Basically, he needs to shell out some cash on music equipment and software instead of on a degree. If he insists on going to school, he needs to go to a school like Full Sail http://www.fullsail.com/ that actually offers courses that would be relevant to the field.

What are the open source alternatives?

Here are some that I know:

Beast

Buzztard, a clone of the orphaned, closed source but free as in beer Buzz

Psycle

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

Apparently they didn't Google their own name, or else they would've noticed the name was already in use for a fairly popular music composition program.

I use a program called Buzz. It's a windows program, and was once the only reason I used windows at all. Buzz is a modular synthesizer/composer, and a very powerfull tool once you get used to it. I tried to get it to run under wine, but never with much success (various dlls would kill wine). Eventualy, I found a good tutorial on how to get it working under wine. Haven't used buzz on a windows machine since.

Shell scripting is the glue that keeps things together and allows easy, flexible and fast combination of different data processing programs.

Only thing I'm missing with current implementations is a possibility to have multiple inputs (pipes) for a program. I know this is a kind of hard to implement without making major changes to OS/existing utilities but it would make things much more usable.

Buzz is a modular sound synthesis program which shows power of combining simple effects to solve/create complex problems/sounds.

Jeskola Buzz is a program that allows you to create music, so usually you have 5+ sub-windows open with all the controls for your synths, samplers and effects. The most recent window was fully opaque, whereas the window that had been open for the longest grew more translucent every time a new subwindow was opened. Time was not taken into account, and when clicking any subwindow (even the almost fully translucent ones) put them on top of the stack, making them fully opaque again.

Closest thing I've seen to this.

These days trackers arent really too visible - for the sort of niche you're talking about ("fun in the spare time") the likes of Fruityloops and Reason are more popular now, I think. Shame - I still think the tracker interface is unbeatable for drum programming.

Is it something like Jeskola Buzz? (Buzz is for Win32 though, and not the most stable program around.. save often)

How about this:
Multitrack Editor/Recorder: Audacity
Music Generation: Buzz Tracker
Both free, both great tools. Although, Buzz is not in active development, but it has an active hacker community and has been extended in that way, and it has a couple bazillion plugins for it.

I use Buzz for electronic music. It has tons of generators and effects...all for free.

Yes, I read that interesting article a while ago, actually. I only listen to independent music, never anything on the radio, so I am not worried. I also don't watch movies or television, since I know popular music might be featured there. And I try to avoid shopping in stores that play music, unless it's classical. I don't usually use the mid, mod, s3m, xm, or it (how could you forget Impulse Tracker?) formats for my finished songs, though, because they don't provide powerful enough effects. I usually write songs in Impulse Tracker or MIDI format and then "reimplement" them in a program like Psycle or Buzz that will allow me to add reverb, delay, distortion, and other cool stuff.

what's really neat is the interface... being able to move sounds around in a 3d space and manipulate the samples/loops with a completely uncluttered interface. This is the main problem with vst/softsynths, being able to use them in real time w/o a midi controller. The ideas is to get as close as you physically can to the music be made and computers.Audiopad does this thru least one computer to do it's job and radio tagging of the objects being moved around the table. The reason something like this won't go commercial for a long time is b/c there are no real new ideas as far as the actual sound manipulation is concerned. See ableton live for example or jeskola buzz.

It would be a big plus if this could support Buzz machines.

I use a program called Buzz for composing and recording electronic music. It and a ton of plugins are available for free download. (Windows only, no Linux or Mac ports...yet) Also check out this site.

You can also find lots of free plugins and other apps at Database Audio.

http://www.buzzmachines.com

you can get all of teh goodness here!

it only runs under windows and anything over p2 should be fine. i just wish it was opensourced so i could run it on my g4 or under linux.

OK, for all to know. You need buzz-tracker. Its freeware, has a million simulated machines (drum machines, effects, reverb, flange, distortion, physically modelled instruments). Its completely pluggable. It can be found at djLasers site or at BuzzMachines.com. Try to download the biggest pack possible. It runs on Windows, just FYI. If you want to hear some stuff made on it, you can check out dTx Productions. Some of the songs towards the top there were made entirely in Buzz with no mastering. I wish somebody would take Buzz into sourceforge, and attach a different IDE to it. The current is very usable, but it could be better. Anyways, hope that helps.

www.buzzmachines.com

I pine for a MacOSX version.

I'm not an audiophile, but I know high-quality sound when I hear it. That's definitely the case with the VPR Matrix 200A5, thanks to the Sonopür Digital Audio system, with its patent-pending 24/192 upsampling technology. This system dramatically enhances digital music and offers very rich sound.

I've been thinking of buying a PC notebook to use with Buzz and this looks promising. However, the lack of a mac port for Buzz is the only obstacle keeping me from getting an iBook or Powerbook...but for me, that's a big obstacle.

Don't forget Buzz, which is like Modplug on steroids. It's like a tracker except it has a built-in modular synthesizer, and it's user extensible. There's already an extensive community behind this freeware product. Look here.

get jeskola buzz. It's the best free music program for pc's, and you can even write your own effects and synthsizers for it if you wish.

I believe music software is an area where we NEED large well-funded companies to create the software.

Not so: Look at (BuzzMachines). More specifically, look at all the user-made plugins. The whole buzz community relies on free plugins - vst or otherwise.

What we need is demand, or rather apparent demand. Most of us would like some kinda decent sequencer, but dont do anything about it (me being one).


I could see linux based distributions being used by linux users and hobbyist musicians, but I doubt that intermediate musicians would use it and pro ones would deffinately not use it (they are too attached to their MACS and protools!)

There is no reason why a professional would not use linux, if it had decent tools to use. Many of professionals that I know use all-inclusive packages that you can buy - ie PC/MAC+Cubase/Protools etc. Naturally, following on from producing quality linux goods, we'd need the training for it as well; Decent documentation ;)

Therefore, what we need is a load of psyched up music freaks that can program in C and that can be bothered to make something decent! Any takers? I for one would be willing to help

Technology has caught up. We now have (free) software-based synthesizers like Buzz that allow amateur musicians with modest talent to create a professional sound. Banging out sellable tracks in a home-made studio isn't possible yet for the mainstream because of education (what does it tell you about an artist if they don't know a thing about production?), but enough artists such as Alpha Conspiracy have already done it.

The real added value of the label is to provide the gloss and marketing which we could do without anyway. I hope the Kazaa-Verizon alliance (whatever it resembles) kicks the ass of a music industry that churns out little more than talentless garbage.

If you don't have the $10k to set up a Pro Tools studio, check out Buzz at www.buzzmachines.com. You can set up virtual versions of your instruments and run them through effects, etc, then run all those into the master. It's very intuitive, give it a try.

Buzz is free (as in beer) and Reason is free (as in it doesn't have full functionality) both downloads are well worth the time.

The IDE issue. Have you developed large software in Linux and using recent Visual Studio? Sure, you can use vi and man, but you do not get things accomplished as quickly or as conveniently. vi has a significant learning curve, whereas Visual Studio IDE is sit down and start typing, and man is not as quick and convenient in retrieval and cross-referencing of the information. Compare putting cursor over the API call you just typed, pressing 'F1' (or is it Ctrl+F1? some keystroke, anyway) in Visual Studio IDE and getting a documentation page, then scrolling down, clicking on a related function and getting the help for it. Think of doing the same function with vi and man. Not nearly as convenient. And does man have cross-referenced, searcahble and indexed tutorials, guides, overviews, references to obscure APIs or APIs that may not be installed on the system? Point is, developing with Visual Studio is just damn convenient, and there are very few Linux tools in development that begin to approach the quality of the Visual Studio IDE. Take it from someone who coded both on Windows, Tru64 (Digital Unix back then), Solaris and Linux.

The DLL issue. This is where you missed the point so far it's not even funny. You are talking about versioning problems (old libraries and such). Now, tell me, if Miguel makes such a big deal out of versioning problems, why isn't it even mentioned on the Mono FAQ page or the issue touched/discussed at any kind of length anywhere? I bet the answer's gonna strike you like a heart attack strikes Dick Cheney: Miguel isn't talking about versioning. There is NO DLL hell (believe me, the versioning problems are not near the hell Miguel has in mind) when you are developing libraries using a statically-typed, procedural language like C. That's because the .so and .dll dynamic library mechanisms are designed to provide procedural APIs (i.e. APIs consisiting of statically-typed functions) and they do it well.

However, if you have ever tried to use object-oriented languages such as C++ with either of the DLL mechanisms (they are for all practical purposes the same) and tried to either provide an object-oriented API or use an object-oriented API, you will learn what the DLL hell means. It means that there is no elegant, straightforward solution to having object-oriented APIs with the DLL mechanisms, everything is a kludge, a hack. And the widely-used hack of exposing the object-oriented API thru a few access C methods (and lotsa casting), means that the client of the library must use the same ABI. And what does that mean? That means constrained to the same programming language, the same compiler (compilers often have different ABIs), and even to certain versions of the same compiler if the ABIs change from version to version. So the DLL hell is when you see a gcc-2.95-built C++ library that you'd love to use in your Delphi app, but you can't. You can't use the Solaris C++ compiler with that library. You can't even use gcc version 3.0 with that library, unless you force it to use the older ABI. (I may be wrong as to exactly which versions of gcc have the differing ABIs, but the point stands.)

I'll give you a real life example. There is a fabulous, free Windows app called Buzz. The plug-ins for that application must all be written in C++ and compiled with Visual C++. In other words, poor, yet talented developers (and in smaller European countries there are plenty) who can't afford Visual C++ 5.0 or 6.0, can't use their existing Delphi or Borland C++ compiler or the win32 port of gcc compiler. Intel C++ compiler? Fogghetaboutit. Raw talent can't contribute--just because the object-oriented-API-enabling DLL hack forces that to be the case.

You don't feel nearly as much heat in the Linux environment because nearly damn everything is built with the same compiler, using close versions (and using C). But you go to some Unix OS machine where the OS and a lot of the libraries are built using the vendor's provided compiler and you taste the hell. You try using an object-oriented Pascal compiler (FreePascal) with a C++ library and you're shit out of luck. Have Python use that C++ library? Can't do directly, gotta write messy translation layers. Same goes for almost any scripting language. Should I keep going with the examples or do you get the point?

Now compare that to Mono. Mono will let you write an OO API library in C++, and use it from something like Python like a normal object, with very little syntactical moronisms.

<bitchsession>So don't label Miguel as a Microsoft cheerleader in hopes of getting the Slashdot crowd moderating your inattentive butt up. And take that 'must consider only one view, must stick to one view' way of writing "eloquent" speeches and high school essays and stick it up where the sun don't shine. Because the world is gray and while Miguel may not subscribe to your views, labeling a developer that contributes so fucking much to the Linux community as a puppet of the Microsoft marketing machine is purely ignorant and ungrateful. In fact, as an aspiring software engineer, it hurts me that you dare use words "rational software engineer" with such an ignorant, non-software engineer viewpoint, as any rational, experienced software engineer that practices object oriented programming will tell you that anything that promotes reuse, avoids having to write a ton of extra code and avoids the above-described real DLL hell, is going to look at this free, open-source initiative (Mono) and say "Thank god, I was waiting for this." You do not nearly realize the kind of freedom and the kind of time savings that Mono will yield in medium and large software projects, something that was previously avaialble only on the Windows platform and for a shitload o' money (Windows + all the dev tools).</bitchsession>