You probably won’t have a use for all ten programs, but you’ll surely find something here that will ring your chimes.Ĭsound (For: Win/Mac/Linux Site: )Csound is the graybeard of music software: Its roots go back to the 1970s. The other items in this round-up are the kind that any computer-savvy musician should be able to start using quickly. Three of my choices - Csound, Pd, and SuperCollider - line up solidly in the first column: amazingly sophisticated, but they’re brain-benders, and will require hours or days of study before you’ll even get your first sound out of them. I didn’t include this recorder in my Top Ten because the free version is limited to six tracks.Īs I looked for cool stuff to include in this article, I sometimes had to choose between programs that are extremely powerful, but not easy to use and, on the other hand, programs whose friendly look and feel make them easy to use, but that are not very powerful, and perhaps not as interesting either. If you’re using Windows, you can download MuTools Mu.Lab Free (), which is similar to GarageBand. If your computer is a recent Macintosh, you already have a very nice piece of free music software: GarageBand, which is part of Apple’s iLife suite, is on your hard drive, ready to go. Open-source software offers you some protection against that dire eventuality. As users of Opcode Studio Vision (which wasn’t open source) learned the hard way, when a company closes its doors, years of creative work in the form of sequencer files can begin to quietly rot. The big advantage is that an open-source program isn’t tied to the fortunes of any single corporate entity. Most of us lack both the specialized skills and the need to do this - but even so, open-source software is a good thing, and not just because it’s free. “Open source” means that if you’re a computer programmer, you can download the source code and modify it in whatever way you’d like. As much as anything else, the open-source movement is a cultural jab in the eye at capitalism in general and monoliths like Microsoft in particular. Computers that run the increasingly popular Linux operating system almost always use free, open-source software. Still other programs originate in the “open-source” movement. Once in a while, a talented young developer will release a program as freeware in order to show off his programming chops and develop a buzz in the industry, a move that can lead to a full-time gig.

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