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Free Music Software Overview

This section will review available free music software, stating its main features, its specialties and main disadvantages/lackings if there are any.

Music Software General Priority Guidelines

Note: this page will later feature a list of articles which would cover music, graphical and video software. At the moment this is an article on music software.

1. First of all, the world of libre software needs music tools which musicians can use to make a living - and that is music performance tools. As music distribution becomes less and less a business, musicians turn back to the roots of the musician profession - and that is doing gigs, performing. But in order to perform one needs adequate software - sequencers like Ableton Live, dj tools like Traktor. Currently the situation is disastrous - musicians are not able to use free software to perform electronic music. Moreover, using free software only means that a musicians is not able to perform live. So this can be considered an issue which requires most work and most priority. The basis is strong - JACK sound system is low latency and can easily route sound between applications - something that MacOS has too.

2. Development of free VST-like plugin standard: an interface for integrating software audio synthesizer and effect plugins with audio editors and hard-disk recording systems. Existing systems LADSPA, DSSI and LV2 have very limited possibilities or number of actual plugins due to various reasons. Those that do exist are very difficult to use and are usually slow. (For instance, I downloaded every effect plugin available from the repository and I couldn't find a delay plugin which would synchronize with the host tempo in LMMS - moreover, the only plugin that seemed to work at all gave out pretty ugly results and seemed to have no control over the feedback of the delay.) It is unclear whether it is more reasonable to start developing an interface from scratch or seriously rework and/or finish existing ones, since this might require programming insight and also understanding of the base of already available plugins.

3. Development of free DAW - Digital Audio Workstation - an application that will allow musicians to create music and allow them to use the plugin standard mentioned above. Existing DAWs are either very simplistic and don't yet offer full possibilities to create electronic music or use non-free components or have a very complex and non-friendly user interface. Serious applications include Rosegarden, MusE and LMMS. The problem with LMMS is that it is not completely free, it has non-free components and the team behind it does not seem to be focusing on free philosophy, but rather on zero price. LMMS is compatible with non-free formats like VST. Rosegarden is more focused on classical music - that is, sheet music, note music. It is difficult to use it if you want to work with sound music - which is nowadays developing into a sophisticated and beautiful form of art, composed by many musicians. However, it looks very good and I will continue testing it, additional info on my analysis will follow up in April 2009. First impression is that it is a strong tool in the free software world. I currently have not much info on MusE, review coming up in April as well.

Note: I am now in the process of research to find out in great detail what existing software can do and what it lacks from the point of view of a musician - notably, a musician who is more focused on electronic, sound music rather than the usual classical music which is note based. That focus includes djing software. However, my experience with free music software (LMMS, Rosegarden) is enough to say that we do need a higher priority for these projects - a much higher priority and support. Most notably for music performing software.

Dj Tools

1. Mixxx

A simple dj station which allows to mix two mp3 files, beat sync them, apply a flanger effect and has a pre-hear feature. The application works pretty fast, beat syncing is smooth, GUI is user friendly and clear.

However, at the moment Mixxx has only very basic features, which allows to create a dj set, but lacks a crucial feature to loop parts of a tune which alone seriously limits room for creativity, be it controllerism or just more creative song mixing. A larger number of decks is also preferable, the standard for digital djing slowly becoming 4 decks. Beat syncing is not automatic and there seems to be no beat grid editor which does not allow to use the application if one does not have a pre-hear function on his computer - which usually means either two sound cards or a sound card with multiple outputs.

• Key features:
  • beat syncing (BPM estimation, Pitch-independent time stretch)
  • Vinyl mode (including Serato CD support)
  • midi support (limited)

• Key lacks:
  • auto beatsync
  • no beat grids editing
  • no looping (neither custom looping nor tied to beats)
  • deck caching for seamless looping (or is it there?if it is implementation isn't perfect, audio clips clicking no matter what you do - click a menu, even when you change the volume slider fast)

2. KraMixer

Although heavily promoted as free software, KraMixer is a proprietary programm with no source code offered and with an advertising system installed with it. It is not possible to uninstall the advertising software without uninstalling KraMixer itself. So authors of the programm not only use "free" as meaning simply zero price, but also nastify you computer with malware.(nastify is a verb derived from 'nasty') I have contacted the authors of the software and suggested they release software under GNU GPL. So far no response and I feel it is very unlikely we'll get one.

Music sequencers

1. Rosegarden

Rosegarden so far reminds me of 1995 Cakewalk. Very difficult installation and configuring, lots of some external apps that need to be installed and started in order to make everything work. Installed Rosegarden on gNewSense, then had to install JACK server and had a lot of trouble looking for it on the system. Starting the executable did not do anything (I assume it has to be started from a command line, something that a non-programmer would not want to do at all). Finally, I could start it automatically with the help of Rosegarden itself - went to Rosegarden configuration settings and in an Audio tab pasted the command that was suggested in the hint above the input field. It worked, but I still haven't gotten any sound from the application.

Immediate suggestion would be to have at least an example song so that one can instantly see the application at work. Generally, the installation process is absolutely outrageous for a modern multimedia user, who gets most of his applications out of the box and who does not need to deal with any technical stuff. It is especially important for many musicians out there who are not very good with the technical side of computers - and that's a majority of multimedia users.

First impression from the interface is also closer to negative, the interface looks very 1995 and too technical. For instance, piano roll (matrix editor) reminds of an excel table. So does the song playlist.

Of course, it is still so very nice to be using software that is free. But we really have to do something about usability and out of the box features (like easy installation), otherwise it won't work. Further info as I proceed.

Music: things that need to be done

1. JACK server control panel - a GUI to start, stop, restart and configure JACK audio server.