Samplers and DAWs

Independance 2.5.3

A sampler for your audio environment. Completely free even for commercial use. Comes with a 2.5 GB sample library (very nice natural sounding electric guitars inclusive). Run standalone, VST, AU, RTAS. I experienced a few glitches but overall a wonderful sampler.

E-mu Proteus VX

Nice sample based instrument with a wide variety of sounds for almost any need. Completely free.

DarkWave Studio

A simple DAW offering 8 tracks and VST/VSTi support. GPL licensed. Uses the older pattern based principles, modders should have no problems handling it. Outputs .wav only, but that's no big deal as there are tons of converters out there.

Macaw

Just saw this one but never tried it. VST/VSTi support, exports to mp3 or ogg. MIT licence (open source, completely free)

Ok, that first one sounds a bit too good to be true

Still, if you have some money to forkout (I think its between $75 to $100) I reccommend FL Studio. Simply the best (in my opinion) DAW around.

Still, if you have some money to forkout (I think its between $75 to $100) I reccommend FL Studio. Simply the best (in my opinion) DAW around.

yeah, even despite it's great reputation, I still think FL Studio is one of the most underrated and underestimated DAWs around

it can do ANYTHING you'd want sonically. And everything is so intuitive with FL Studio once you learn it. The way you add effects, route tracks, arrange or record midi notes and controls, create beats, split audio, make loops, arrange songs. Everything is perfect. People put it into this loop creation category along with ACID. It's much more than that, although I haven't used anything that can hold a candle to FL Studio's loop creation interface.

but being loops to music creation and recording:

I've used everything from Cakewalk Sonar to Protools. FL Studio is what I use for everything, from Drum N Bass, to recording actual Rock Bands, to remixing songs, to straight Classical Music.

The plugin architecture is beautiful, and it's insanely fast.

I can have a track with hundreds of samples triggering together, along with DirectX instruments, EastWest simulated orchestral sounds streaming off the hard drive, all with their own individual dx effects on them, with nary a stutter in performance. The experience is exquisite. It's like pure music creation with no interference from the interface.

I thought it was perfect back in version 3, it's on 10 now, and it's been improved vastly with each new version.

as an added bonus. When you buy it you automatically get all future versions for free.

It's a beautiful thing.

I like Cubase 5 (mainly because I learnt how to use it in school and stuck with it due to inertia), which isn't too expensive either, if you get the basic package. Runs VST too. Great for recording a band as a home recording or such.

I'm from the old days where digital audio recording was not possible with computers. I got a few synthezisers along with Atari 1040 ST, Notator and a 4-track-tape-recorder. The real recordings were done in a studio (per recording session we had a budget of 300. The studio took 100 per hour ). Later I heard of Steinberg and that they invented something they called virtual studio technology to enhance their Cubase. I turned to Mac (an insanely expensive 8600/250), Cubase VST 3.5 and the Waves bundle (professional audio processing effects like limiter, compressor, maximizer, reverb etc. No open source/freeware effects those days). Nowadays I use Reaper the most, which is an extremely flexible DAW.

I kinda doubt this thread is anti-necropost, so I figure I'll share a little utility a buddy of mine pointed out a while back. I'm not exactly sure how well-known it is.

sfxr

(Now that I posted the link, I noticed he's also the guy who made Sculptris, which I just discovered from a few threads upward. He's got a few nice little proggies actually...)

His original announcement of the project sums it up best:

[quote:2qo0kdev]What I present here is, if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects? or something along those lines. It?s meant to make it dead easy for anyone to whip up a few simple sound effects and save them as .WAV files for playback using most game/media libraries like SDL or pygame.

Basic usage involves clicking the left-most buttons to automatically generate random sounds loosely targeted at certain categories. For more advanced users it?s possible to spend some additional time to manually create fairly varied and interesting sound effects.

The interface is based entirely around sliders for controlling sound parameters, along with a few buttons. Even if you don?t want to spend time learning about all the sliders you can still have some fun just hammering away at them and listening to the various sounds that come out.

Oh yeah, and it's free. Go grab it and enjoy the Random button for your 8bit creations.

Edit: Sorry, this post was so needless. Just noticed a thread on this from a while back. Oops!)

Sorry to resurrect this one, but I thought it was worth mentioning Reaper

http://www.reaper.fm/

An absolutely fantasic DAW and probably the best I've used, it's not strictly free but it uses a nag screen if I'm not mistaken - a university lecturer told me it doesn't strictly imply any limitations. Still, it has a great audio engine, can use VST's, has full MIDI support and tons of great features

Here's my 2 cents

�� energyXT (DAW)

Dirty cheap and very capable Daw do check out.

� http://www.energy-xt.com/

�� The Maestro Concert Grand (free!)

First here's a completly free piano library to get anyone started with a decent Grand Piano with a super tight budget (it's FREE!). It's in giga format but i think the free kontakt player

might play it.

� http://sonimusicae.free.fr/matshelgesso ... ro-en.html

�� My VST - VSTi/Effects Reviews & Demos (mostly free!)

Finally for all your Virtual Instrument & Effects needs do check MyVST, a very cool site constantly updated and full of reviews on many freebies!

� http://www.myvst.com

So there it is, i hope it can help some one out there! (btw i'm not involved on any of these sites whatsoever just wated to spread the good word to the community!)

I have one to add here.

Renoise

A very powerful tracker. I've played around with the demo for a while now and I must say this program fits me pretty darn well. Earlier I've been switching between Madtracker 2 and FL Studio for music, Renoise is like if you slapped both together.

It's still a tracker, and functions like one, i.e. hexadecimal effect system. However, it comes with a slew of tutorial files and the online documentation is really good (unlike many other trackers).

I highly recommend trying it out. The license costs 58 euro which is dirt cheap for what you get.

Hello there.

I searched LMMS in "this" forum (Tools/resources) and had no results, so for the sake of documentation...

LMMS - Linux MultiMedia Studio (Don't worry, it's cross-platform!)

[quote:2o4kajbn]What is LMMS?

LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio?, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

Features

* Song-Editor for composing songs

* A Beat+Bassline-Editor for creating beats and basslines

* An easy-to-use Piano-Roll for editing patterns and melodies

* An FX mixer with 64 FX channels and arbitrary number of effects allow unlimited mixing possibilities

* Many powerful instrument and effect-plugins out of the box

* Full user-defined track-based automation and computer-controlled automation sources

* Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches, and MIDI

* Import of MIDI and FLP (Fruityloops? Project) files

I am getting started with it, but some experience I can share: I first installed the 64 bits version on Windows and had problems loading VSTs. I remember I read somewhere something about a path issue on 64 bits, so I uninstalled it and installed the 32 bits version and VSTs loaded correctly.

Arkman

There are a few VST's it wont load yet, but that goes for just about any tracker out there.

Its not bad really. Its a lot like Fruityloops.