Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
Starting January 1st 2024 GMT each participant will have one week to upload one finished composition. Any style of music or selection of instruments are welcomed and encouraged.
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The idea of open source music has always been very attractive to me.
It reminds me of using trackers and their open nature of song data.
What *decent* music software is out there that is at least free, if not open for the use in the creation and sharing of compositions?
Thoughts?
These are my 2 cents, Trash80:
- Milkytracker, a contemporary Fast Tracker II clone available for all major platforms (win,mac,linux... and Android!). It supports the old Amiga MOD format, Impulse Tracker's IT and XM. It's a little bit limited compared to modern things like Renoise (which is excellent and quite affordable, but propietary).
- LittleGPTracker: another tracker with an interface almost identical to LSDJ, but handles WAV samples and decent polyphony. Along with all desktop systems, it runs in the PSP, the GP32, the Dingoo and some other handhelds.
- NitroTracker, a tracker for the Nintendo DS, with no effects, but extremely portable. I use it for sketching some songs on the go
That's what it comes to trackers.
P.S.: The Ardour open source DAW is worth checking, also, but I'm quite unexperienced on it. I've seen some people here using LMMS on Linux (kinda public FLStudio)
Will add some as soon as they come to mind
Cheers!
I do all of my composition on Linux. The only non-open source stuff I use is renoise (it's my main daw).
Here's some stuff I've used
Qtractor, a decent piano roll sequencer: http://qtractor.sourceforge.net/qtractor-index.html I'll use this when I want to export a MIDI from something I've written in renoise
Seq24, another piano roll sequencer, but focused on creating smaller loops that you build a song from http://www.filter24.org/seq24/ Never wrote anything in here, but I actually use this to practice instruments by making little loops I play along with
Alib Tracker, a tracker of OLP3 http://www.adlibtracker.net/ I've written one song in this, pretty good
Plugins:
Calf plugins, bunch of stuff, I use them to master http://calf-studio-gear.org/
Hexter, DX7 emulator: http://dssi.sourceforge.net/hexter.html
Qsynth, SF2 module: http://qsynth.sourceforge.net/qsynth-index.html
Whysynth, really powerful synth, my go-to if I need some synth noises: http://smbolton.com/whysynth.html
JAMin, a tool for mastering http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html I used to use it but I've since switched to calf tools for everything
Drums:
Hydrogen, a drum machine http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/ I've never written music in it, but I'll use it like a module, I'll pipe midi into it to use their sample packs, which can be pretty good
All of the above mostly use Jack, which I recommend: http://www.jackaudio.org/
I use qjackctl to connect all my jack devices: http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net/
Last edited by leafo (January 1, 2016 11:00 pm)
For 1-bit tracks, Beepola: http://battleofthebits.org/lyceum/View/Beepola/
For a pianoroll tracker with unlimited channels + .wav and custom waveform support, pxtone: http://studiopixel.sakura.ne.jp/pxtone/
Try the pxtone collage collective for some tracks: http://pxtone.haru.gs/english/
I use Audacity sometimes when I don't feel like loading up my complete DAW. With VST support, it's actually pretty powerful.
Anyone ever used Buzz? It was my tracker of choice for 10 years; I only gave it up when I bought Renoise and started playing around with more Amiga-style sounds. It's a great tracker for experimental music though, with its semi-modular layout and independent patterns per machine. I kinda miss it sometimes!
PureData. https://puredata.info
SuperCollider. http://supercollider.github.io
Klystrack is free AND open source (an AHX style tracker)
Sunvox is free for all desktop platforms (a buzz style tracker)
Renoise is actually free for everything apart from rendering audio to disk, but you know this already 
File sharing has been encouraged more lately (instruments, songs, themes, fx chains). Of course if you use VSTs that complicates sharing.
ShcismTracker is a free implementation of Impulse Tracker
All of these are multiplatform I think.
There is no standard file format to be shared though.
Klystrack is free AND open source (an AHX style tracker)
Sunvox is free for all desktop platforms (a buzz style tracker)
I forgot about SunVox, which is also available (paid app) on iOS (and Android, I think)...
Did u tried it on a PDA, back in the day?
I've played a bit with Tidal this past year--while the current implementation is more on sample playing (and manipulation) than synthesis, it's still interesting.
The Musicradar site has this: http://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/ … ms-582934.
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