I did mention this somewhere in the old forums, but this is a gem worth mentioning once more.
Soundation is a flash-based online music studio for free. You only have to subscribe if you want to save your songs on their webspace or use your own loop samples. But without that two services it still is a fully functional music studio. Instead of saving your song on their webspace, you export it to your harddisk, and you can also export wav files of your song to your harddisk.
I'm excited about it not because of the usual loop samples and their easy arrangement with pitch- and time-stretching, but because of the virtual instruments and the powerful effects, that gives you total freedom over your song creation - all within a browser, no need for installations and audio driver issues and such.
Although I have some professional DAW and VI software that I usually work with, I find myself playing around with Soundation again and again.
I thought, instead of words I could as well use Soundation itself to describe its usefullness, and quickly created to song-files. All you have to do is downloading those files, visit soundation.com, launching the studio, and from the studio's menu selecting File->Import .sng File
I hope, one or another will also find it useful.
bitmusic.sng
Some classic 80s 8-bit music
90sPop.sng
A 90s pop style draft
Now listen, click around, and create your ultimate game music <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle">