2021-06-01 Music Software

I think I need to make a list of the sound-making software available via my package manager. Free software, for music making wannabes like me. A page to return to and improve as I start to understand this all a bit better.

Ardour A digital audio workstation (DAW), a program to record, mix, and master music. That is, recording multiple tracks, moving these tracks around, splitting and joining them, applying effects to them, and then creating a single file ready for distribution and playback.
Audacity A digital audio editor. This appears to be the simplest kind of DAW. It’s what I used for my podcast. There’s currently some discussion about the future direction of Audacity as it has been acquired by the Muse Group (see MuseScore, below).

Ardour

Audacity

Generally speaking, these programs have a plugin architecture, where “applying effects” involves the loading and running of plugins which then apply the effect.

But how to make the music? If you have external sources, like audio ins, microphones and the like, you can simply record them. On my laptop, however, there is no audio-in! Therefore, I need a USB microphone to record my voice, and I need an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to record the audio of my electronic instruments. This is a little box with an audio in on one side, and an USB plug on the other side.

How to make music directly on the laptop?

MuseScore A scorewriter. That is, it looks like you’re writing sheet music. It looks very fancy.
VCV Rack A software modular synthesizer. That is, it simulates modules for a modular synthesizer: you then plug the virtual patch cables into the virtual plug and it makes a sound.

MuseScore

VCV Rack

Other use cases:

Mixxx Mixing software for a DJ to do live mixes with digital files. Since I don’t plan to be a DJ at parties, I’m guessing that I won’t be needing this.
snd A sound editor, modelled loosely after Emacs, i.e. it can be customized and extended using either s7 (a Scheme dialect), Ruby, or Forth. What fascinates me the most is that it comes with a Scheme file to generate various bird calls! I was able to load the file and to run make-birds, but then I couldn’t play it. How anyoing.
libsndfile A library for reading and writing files containing sampled sound (such as MS Windows WAV and the Apple/SGI AIFF format); it also comes with a bunch of command line tools such as sndfile-info etc. On the homepage it says that the author isn’t planning on adding MP3 support.
SoX Audio editing software with a command-line interface.
SoX Tutorial

#Music

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

⁂

A couple of other FOSS music projects you may like:

Giada – “hardcore loop machine” (git)
ChucK – “strongly-timed, concurrent, and on-the-fly music programming language” (git)

– pwr 2021-06-03 03:48 UTC

pwr

---

Thanks!

– Alex 2021-06-03 20:13 UTC

---

I’ve been doing audio prod on Linux for a number of years now. Unfortunately it’s my perception that it’s one of the areas very far behind its proprietary counterpart, though things are improving.

My reccs, should you want them (all free s/w):

QTractor is another decent DAW
amsynth is a good subsynth with 2 oscs, has LV2 and VST versions. However it uses GTK which is bad for plugins so you will get crashes with some DAWs. (Unless your DAW can run plugins in separate processes, this issue is unresolvable and may plague other plugins.)
Helm is a good similar synth
Sitala is a good simple sampler pad
ZynAddSubFX is the most powerful (hence confusing) free s/w synth I’ve seen

Unfortunately, if you’re serious about being productive and developing skills, I expect a proprietary Linux or Wine DAW would be miles better. Switching to REAPER really showed me what I was missing.

Enjoy!

– Tom M 2021-06-04 19:50 UTC

Tom M

---

Thanks!

– Alex 2021-06-04 20:44 UTC

---

I’m intrigued by @paul ever since I saw this tutorial:

@paul

Live, in-browser audio and music programming environment. Based on the amazing Sporth audio programming language by Paul Batchelor. – AudioMasher

AudioMasher

It uses a specialised Forth like language:

Sporth (SoundPipe fORTH) is a small stack-based audio programming language. – Sporth

Sporth

Which in turn uses a small library:

Soundpipe is a lightweight music DSP library for musicians and creative coders. It exists to bring beautiful sounds to your projects. The Soundpipe library is built up of over 100 (and counting!) high quality modules. These modules can be combined together to build unique sounds. – Soundpipe

Soundpipe

– Alex 2021-09-15 05:33 UTC

---

Today I saw this:

Bespoke is a software modular synthesizer. It contains a bunch of modules, which you can connect together to create sounds.” – Bespoke Synth

A software modular synth that I’ve been building for myself since 2011, and now you can use it! – Bespoke Synth on GitHub

Bespoke Synth

Bespoke Synth on GitHub

My previous experience with trying to use software such as this is that I like it in theory and never do in practice, so take it all with a grain of salt. I like to turn knobs and play on a physical keyboard, and even there I just dabble.

– Alex 2021-09-17 14:12 UTC