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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?
CSound http://www.csound.net/
ZynAddSubFX http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/
FluidSynth http://www.fluidsynth.org/
Rosegarden http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
GNUMP3d is now part of the GNU project, and isn't located on sourceforge any longer.
Instead find it at the GNU site, or via gnump3d.org.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 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 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)
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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 future, but the fragmented nature of the underlying sound architecture must make developing worthwhile pro-audio software an absolute nightmare.
Given the size and low cost of hard drive space nowadays Agnula is probably the way to go - have a separate partition with a tuned, low-latency Linux Kernel and a dedicated sound architecture running the show... but having a standardised sound architecture across all distributions would probably help in the development of some decent games for GNU/Linux, which is the other big sticking point for migration away from Windows.