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It's the tiniest violin playing DoS attack concerto no. 3

In all reality, I'd love to do a Brian Eno-ish sort of "found art" album with music like this. http://www.fruityloops.com/ has a pretty cool function that turns pictures into ambient music, I'd love to hear server traffic in a similar manner.

I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but from the looks of the screenshots it reminds me alot of Fruity Loops (aka FL Studio now), but with real music notation options... I imagine with this and audacity you could do some really cool stuff.

I've just started to dabble with music creation on the PC. While I was looking for apps to start with, I found this excellent windows app called FruityloopsM (FLStudio now). IMO, it is very polished and excellent to use. And, like a good game, simple to learn and hard to master. I'm not advertising, I'm just blown away by this things quality.

Now, FL is pay software, and I have the 30 day demo (*hangs head in shame*) and it's one of the things keeping me on Windows (the other things being the games :).

I've been looking for a decent app for linux which resembles fruity loops. Does anyone know of one which can hold a candle to FL? I've been informed by various sources that FL is a point and click tracker, a VST interface (whatever that is) and various other scary sounding terms :/.

Besides, if any of you 1337 developer gods out there are interested in making music software, this is one app worth cloning

rant

This is getting ridiculous. Since when did anyone have a RIGHT to make money from anything? Just as in any profession, the easier it is to duplicate the results, the lower the pay. Just ask Doctors, Engineers, IT professionals, Accountants, etc. who have seen their salaries drop due to ever increasing competition, computers, automation, spreadsheets, etc. Think about when (long long time ago) when to calculate something we now take for granted, took days or months or even years. But the RIAA complains it can't maintain lavish lifestyles because their product is easily copied - Boo F*cking Hoo.

Hell, it's so ridiculously easy to make "music" nowadays, and they are still B*tching. Wait till things like Reason, Sonar, Cubase, Fruityloops, become widely known about and start dropping in prices - hell they really aint all that expensive now for what they can do (like reason being a rack of studio equipment for 600 bucks) - especially when sound cards and DSP become of higher and higher qality

/rant

working on crazy new things for iLife (like GarageBand).

I can't see GarageBand being a reason to switch to the Mac. GarageBand is a toy for people who are already Mac owners. Windows owners would have to give up the following (better) software packages when they switched to the Mac:

Reason 2.5
Sonar 3
Vegas 4

As well as loop software like:
Acid 4
Fruity Loops

I think far more people would use OpenOffice on a mac than GarageBand.

Fruity Loops is a good starting point because it teaches the basics of step sequencing (beat-box style programming) and lets people start making good tracks right out of the box.

Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and Acid are also good programs for loop recording arranging -- the best I've seen in the low-end home user market.

Reason is the ultimate in soft-synth sound generation. I don't know a single producer who uses software who doesn't love Reason. It's pricey, but worth it.

There is also a lot of good high-end music production software out there, many of it with great MIDI controllers like the Oxygen 8 or the Ozone. I use a combination of direct-recording hardware tools (a nice, high-end sound card, Line 6 direct recording equipment) to hook up my instruments (guitars, synths, beatboxes, etc) and a combination of Sound Forge and Reason to generate my loops. I can then arrange and mix them in Acid or Fruityloops. Fruityloops serves as my backup generator for certain drum and bass parts, but overall, my setup is pretty stripped down.

But if you really want professional studio quality digital recording, MIDI sequencing and mixing, get ProTools. It's like God.

I have dabbled with Fruity Loops for a while, but my greatest complaint, while trying to create/remix music has been it's immense complexity.

True, it has an infinite number of features, and is supposed to be an all-in-one music studio, but as a novice at music, I found it extremely difficult to learn. I know it was designed for expert musicians in order to produce commercial-grade music, but I, for one am happy to know there's something out there, capable of producing "complex and fantastic" music without being fantastically complex and difficult to learn.

As somebody who uses Acid a lot for creating music, I'd have to say that it's more of a production tool than a recording tool. Not to harp on Acid, but composition, rather than recording, is where it really shines.

Typically, when laying down tracks, you're recording a live artist, where something like Acid works really well with loop-based arrangement; the two functions are really hard to mix together and still have a usable interface.

Personally, I use Acid for most of my mix-down and rearrangements, as well as final post mix. I also use a simple USB-controlled 8-track mixer and Cubase to to my track layouts. In a pinch, since I'm the only person ever playing in my stuff, I'll use something like SoundForge and then go back and sync the tracks up manually with Acid.

I'd recommend something like Cubase ($150 to $500, depending on your local music stores) or the Digi-01 pack from the makers of Protools ($450 to $700, again depending on the music store.)

If you're looking for an all-in-one type solution, then the Digi-01 pack is probably the way to go. For the price, you get a very good quality professional (read: 96kbit, 24-bit sampling) four track (I think, it might be 8 tracks) with a variety of inputs. In addition, it comes with a Protools "lite" package of software that should be good for most of the home recording junkies out there.

Another package to consider, although it's not out yet, is FruityLoops4.0. Their new package has the sequencing, MIDI and, added in the 4.0 version, track recording capability from an ASIO source like the Digi-01 or Gina cards.

I use FruityLoops 3.56 currently and, while it's a great music creation tool, it's really lacking in the track recording arena. Hopefully, this month's release will remedy that. Perhaps I'll review it in my /. journal when it comes out at the end of this month.

Hope that helps!

If all you're looking to do is some sound tracking and live playing, you'd probably be better off with something like FruityLoops. It's a $99 software package (without all the frills) that does a excellent job as a production tool and a decent job at MIDI.

My setup consists of a bunch of effects modules, some tone modules, a professional-grade sound card, Fruity Loops 3.56, ACID 4, Sound Forge and Cakewalk.

If you're really into the MIDI playing, an actual sequencing package will probably be better. Cakewalk can't be beat for the price. It's also getting better in the digital audio handling, though it's still not up to snuff with Cubase or ProTools for recording.

If you're curious to see the type of sound you can get using the lower-priced solutions like Acid or FruityLoops, check out the FruityLoops forums or Acid Planet

There's a demo version of FruityLoops available that you can use to play any FLP files from the forums.

Good luck!

• Photoshop and Painter - and yes, I use the GIMP too, but they're not the same.
• FruityLoops - best damn drum machine I've ever seen.
• Games - particularly MMORPGs. Windows does game graphics better. Now, there are a lot of games I play on *inx (I'm a FreeBSD man myself), but Anarchy Online isn't one of them.

• That's all I've got to say. I don't like Microsoft as a company, but one or two of their products are pretty decent. Office isn't one of them, and I use VIM and CodeWarrior for development on Windows and Unix both.

Whether you have a Mac or a PC, and assuming you are making techno/electro, you may want to take a look at Propellerheads' Reason. Another cheaper alternative is Fruity Loop.

I occasionally do "live" music improvisation with Fruity Loops and other packages.

I'm too cheap to use a laptop like many other electronic musicians, so I'm building a case out of wood. The original case is too much of a pain to carry, so I just used a plain motherboard on a board last time.

Now I'm making a proper case, out of wood, to be painted black. This plexiglass project looks really sweet, though!

Why wood? Where do mere mortals get Plexiglass and the tools to cut/shape it anyway?

When I finish my box, I'll post pictures and submit it - this story was accepted, right? :)

• It would be a hideously expensive system. Just the words Pro Audio on the case alone would cost a whopping USD 1000. It's no longer a commodity product you can buy at any supermarket (yes, over here in NL they sell computers at supermarkets) but a specialty item that'll be priced accordingly.
• You could no longer take advantage of the openness that is inherent in the PC/Mac platform. The way things work now, if someone comes up with a whacky soundprocessing idea and they have the skill, there'll be a share/freeware app you can download that could really spice up your mix in certain oddball situations. You'll also minimise the chance of the odd group of hackers coming up with an entirely new essential product, such as the aforementioned FruityLoops or stomper. You'll always be locked into what the proprietary vendor cooks up for you.
• Suppose newer and better hardware comes out, it will take a while before it's added to the system.

Allow me to respectfully disagree with you:

Comparing MacOS Rebirth to Windows Rebirth simply isn't fair, as the program originated on a Mac, was finetuned for a Mac and never quite adapted well to Windows/Direct X. Compare it to FruityLoops instead. It packs way more functionality in the drum department, a huge number of 303-like devices (pretty good clones, and the amount you can use is only limited by your hardware and eight groups of effects together (plus master group) in realtime, without *any* latency problems.

I dislike Windows as much as the next guy (really!), as it's unstable, messy and a product of the Evil Empire and all that, but the awful truth is that it's plain better for realtime audio than MacOS. Possibly OS X will put Apple back on track, but for now, they're being surpassed.

I'd love to use BeOS, though, but I'm not aware of any *serious* *good-quality* music software for it.

There's Stomper, a fantastic drum synth that comes absolutely free, except that you have to send a copy of the music you make with it to the programmer. Sounds fair to me.

Or try FruityLoops, granted, it's not free, but it's cheap and exactly what musicians like: buttons to push and a lot of blinking lights. That seems to be what a lot of programmers seem to forget: musicians (myself included) are stupid. They don't like to involve themselves with technical stuff when they're doing music. Which is why FruityLoops is so popular-it's a drumsequencer that behaves just like you'd expect.

The guy who makes Buzz apparently seems not too thrilled about porting. Too bad, but then, speaking from experience, a lot of musicians find that program to be too complicated anyway. That doesn't mean, though, that the people who make the programs above won't be either. At the very least, looking at their software, Linux programmers may learn a little bit about musicians and their preferences. Sure, a few topnotch studios only work with pro-tools on a Mac, but the vast majority of musicians use much less elaborate, much cheaper software. Why do you think Acid is as popular as it is?

If linux music tools become simple and musicianly, a lot of musicians will make the transition, if only because linux is free and musicians are cheapskates.