Hip Hop Artists Developing Open Source Beat Making Software

First time accepted submitter caseyb89 writes "Beat making software is incredibly expensive, and the high price limits usage to those who can afford it. Two professors at UNC have a dream of allowing all artists access to beat making software, regardless of income level. They are rallying the community on a project to create open source beat making software. The two professors double as DJs and hip hop artists, and they recently spoke at Rio+Social."

Comments

Nice Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

But Hip Hop artists just pirate whatever software they need. The only real expense are decent microphones, mixers, preamps and speakers.

full disclosure: I am a sound engineer living in NC who works with hiphop artists.

Re:Nice Idea

[oldmac31310]

I'll get off your lawn. Yours is a really narrow minded view. The fact is, both 'real' musicians and people who can't play at all benefit greatly from the myriad of music software and hardware that have come along in the past 20 years. Using your logic (no pun intended) we should remove technology from music completely and go back to only using our voices, clapping our hands and banging rock and sticks. Think about a piano for example. It is a technological marvel. Should we ban it just because it makes it too easy and the musician doesn't even have to pluck or strike the strings? I consider myself a real musician and I am very happy indeed to make use of whatever tools are available.

Re:Please Define

[Anonymous Coward]

Hydrogen is not a pro level piece of software. We tried it, and ended up hiring a drummer instead.

The results are far superior, at least for our style of music.

LMMS

[MrSome]

Is LMMS not good enough?

IMO, that type of music is so generic anymore, I'm surprised some mathematician hasn't created an algorithm to generate hit songs on command.

You know, something like (BPM / Key + Attractiveness of Prospective Performer) = $$$

linuxsampler dropped the ball

[akirapill]

The centerpiece of any hip hop studio is the sampler. There exists a very high quality open source sampler called linuxsampler but they are not included in any mainstream linux repos because of their bone-headed, legally invalid licence. So you have to build it from source, a painful process that I've never been able to do in under 2 hours. There is a lot of high quality foss studio software out there, but as long as developers keep dropping the ball like this we're going to see more reinventing of the wheel like this and not a lot of progress. An excellent foss program for beat-making I would recommend is qtractor, but it does not come with a sampler.

Re:Please Define

[djlemma]

They are mostly talking about Reason. It's a software simulator for a bunch of real-life studio hardware that musicians used to have to purchase and hook up and find places to put. So, instead of having to spend $50,000 to outfit a studio with keyboards, synths, patch bays, mixers, effects, compressors, cables, etc., you can simulate it all with Reason for something like $450. But to the people in TFS, this is too much money still, and they would like to make a free equivalent. It's noble, but as others have mentioned there are other options that do not have nearly so polished and authentic sounds and interfaces, but are much cheaper or free.

Re:Please Define

[Megane]

I'll accept that when the machines can throw up like a real human drummer.

List of available open-sourced Beat / Drum Machine

[Taco Cowboy]

Okay, here's the list that I can find:

Hydrogen
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/?p=main

OrDrumBox
http://www.ordrumbox.com/

OpenBeatBox
Mac
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Audio/Open-Beat-Box.shtml
Linux
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Open-Beat-Box-4095.shtml

Koblo
http://koblo.com/beta

Free Cycle
http://freecycle.redsteamrecords.com/

Anymore?

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