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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?
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 has an article in the most recent edition entitled "The Linux Soundfile Editor Roundup". Check it out! Audacity is reviewed, along with several other audio file editors.
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.
http://www.linux-sound.org/
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!
[ you and I are ugly ]
Show them terminatorX
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 http://www.csound.net/
ZynAddSubFX http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/
FluidSynth http://www.fluidsynth.org/
Rosegarden http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
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
your most important tools are VSTs
check here: kvr-vst.
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.
shaolin punk, activist post-industrial
Lilypond 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, 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 is a very usefull site with many many FOSS projects regarding audio.
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 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).
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.