The Mana World

Hey everyone,

I thought I would open a topic on the creation of quality music using Free/OpenSource tools. I would like to know what you are using! Whats good whats bad. It might help people who want to create music but don't know how to make it sound good!

Here are my tools / resources:

Composition
- Psycle - its a modular synthesizer, much like Jeskola Buzz was. Fortuantly the source has not been lost for this one. The current version includes a graph for patching machines (which can be instruments or effects), to pipe your music through various effects before outputing, a simple sequencer, and a track editor, much like a Tracker (FastTracker / ImpulseTracker). It has its own plugins, but they're not very good for analog music. However, it has the ability to host VST plugins, which are very valueble, look at the next items.

- SFZ VST - VST plugin for playing Soundfonts. Playes soundfonts without needing a good MIDI card. I import it in Psycle and use it to play high-qualitity sound-fonts. Hard to come by, you can not download it anymore from the original publisher.

Resources
- The FreeSound project hosts thousends for free samples. Just register and you can access all these high-quality SFX. Not many good instruments though, but other than that, very usable.

- Soundsfonts.it has a nice collection of downloadable soundfonts. Beatiful instruments you can use to make your songs sound like they've been played by a real ochestra!

Sequencing
- You can use Psycle for simple pattern sequencing, but its not very usable if you wish to edit multitrack. Fortunatly Psycle has the ability to export certain channels or sequences to WAV. The next new version if Psycle will have a sequencer like Buzz used to have. Until then...

- Audacity is a audio-editor, but can also be used for sequencing. I often use it to compose my songs from the exports I made in Psycle. It takes a bit of getting used to opposed to pure wave-editors like SoundForge or Auditon, but once you get the hang of it its pretty good.

Post-editing
- See above. Audacity you can even edit individual samples, and it comes with build-in Ogg support

Well, thats it from me. Let me know what free tools you use!

Isn't rosegarden a much better choice for sequencing? There is a reason why the music notation (whatever it is called in English) is used for centuries.

I personally can't understand how audacity can be used for sequencing O_o Or did I confused sequencing with something else?

Anyway, regarding soundfonts, qsynth and fluidsynth is another good alteratives. However, it is hard to find a really professional soundfonts; I personally use Cadenza, with custom piano and violin channel.

Hmmmmm,

My experience has mostly been with Wavelab and SoundForge. As far as I know, sequencing is not really do-able as you don't have a global playback option to play all windows at the same... Unless you deal with two sound sources at a time... but as far as I know - most audio editors are extremely challenging to use as sequencers! I would say your best bet is stick to the dedicated sequencers or even think about soft studios. (Personally I think sequencers should be called Soft Studios and vice-versa - it makes a lot more sense when you think about it)

I've heard Rosegarden come up a lot as the freeware sequencer of choice due mainly to its interface which apparently mimics the expensive sequencers.

I haven't seen any so-called-expensive sequencer that is as simple/easy to use as Rosegarden. I only use notation editing (the main selling point in Rosegarden), I couldn't understand all those fancy knobs or graphs in professional sequencers. There is a reason why music notation has been used for centuries.

Well, Rosegarden isn't useful for creating "noises" people produces with strange software these days. I am quite skeptic of how people in modern days have such funny taste in music. Nothing beats a good classical music.

Here is a software oriented to doing SFX. Since there isn't a sepparate subforum for that I'm posting it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/13/sfxr-sound-effects-for-all/

There is a Linux and Win32 version (there is a MacOS version but you will have to search for it).

Hey all, (I'm alive, sorry to disappoint)

I just found out about a sequencer that you guys might really like

http://www.cockos.com/reaper/

Not used this myself, but heard a lot of good things about it!

Not sure if you would be interested in this:
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/
Basically a free FL clone.
I'm currently using it for my industrial project, but I'm very sure you can use it for many more things (ie find ambient/atmospheric synths, and create music for landscapes).

You can get a few very good and free synths from here:
http://www.vstplanet.com/
http://www.tweakbench.com/

Hopefully this was resourceful! Get composing!

I like these links, there are links to freeware, and forums about audio software, etc.:
http://www.kvraudio.com/
http://www.hitsquad.com/

I am using Linux Multimedia Studio (which runs perfectly fine on other operating systems, by the way)

And every musician knows that notation is not sufficient to transcribe what people call "interpretation" or "feeling" or "groove"... those fancy knobs or graphs allow your music to be lively ad less mechanic. There is a reason why developers and musicians sweat on sequencers. Try to play a Chopin sonata without programming the tempo or other midi parms and you will get him raise out of his tomb.

http://icking-music-archive.org/index.php
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
http://www.synthzone.com/

Note: personnally i sometimes like to hear that, when in GY :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcAJpsWWuIY

I'm no expert with sound, but I've played around with lilypond to generate scores and MIDIs, and timidity to convert MIDI to OGG. Make sure you get the fluid soundfonts, not just freepats (there is a lot of outdated documentation indicating that freepats is the only thing available with a decent license and this generates FUD about MIDI. But converting to OGG before distributing eliminates the question of end users having them or not)

I'm really disappointed that the tmw-music repository doesn't contain the source files (defined as "preferred form for editing"), not just the OGGs. This is supposed to be GPL here.

I do like lilypond wich gives nice results in sheet music. the midi files you can do with it cannot be compared to the results you obtain with a good sequencer though.(it is the case with most sheet music editors)

problem: what is a source in music? surely not an audio file even if author societies tend to admit them as an edition form.
For sheet music, commonly used formats are PdF , lilypond, MusiXTek, Finale ( )
http://lilypond.org/
http://icking-music-archive.org/software/indexmt6.html
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/musixtex
The problem with these (nice) for typesetted music is that they are not that much convivial to a lot of musicians.

Midifiles are the bare minimum which can include some interpretation and nuances. They cannot include samples though (drum loops...)

Csound would be nice for these musicians who like programming
http://www.csounds.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csound

I call FUD. It all depends on the quality of the soundfont(s) you have installed. And converting from MIDI to OGG before distributing means that only the person doing the conversion has to have all the soundfonts installed, not all the people who play it. Note, at least on Debian installing timidity only installs freepats (which I'll admit doesn't sound too good)


"preferred form for editing" has to mean "whatever format was used by the author". Since we're not dealing with sheet music, that is not relevant (though of course in some cases it is trivial to produce sheet music from the same source)


I call FUD. There is explicit support in General Midi for a percussion channel, and this is supported in lilypond. Again, whether you hear anything or not depends on whether you have the relevant soundfont.


I'll admit my interest in music is merely amateur, but I haven't yet seen a defensible argument against MIDI. Do you have a specific example of a source-to-OGG conversion "with a good sequencer" that cannot be represented in MIDI?