Music software

November 11, 2014 — December 17, 2023

making things
music
signal processing

A list of things that I have used or wish to try using to make sound come out of my computer. NB, this area is rapidly moving as AI moves into music; I have not updated it as much as it merits, given how interested I am in this topic, but I keep my musical activities and my textual ones somewhat distinct.

See also automated composition for some ideas about the structure of the harmony/melody/bassline and all that compositional stuff.

1 DAWS and trackers of note

Figure 1

DAW=Digital Audio Workstation, the toolkit of digital audio production.

  • Ableton Live is the paradigmatic modern performance-oriented, electronic-music-focused option.
  • Bitwig (Windows/macos/Ubuntu) is an even-more-modern Ableton competitor with most things done better, IMO. This is what I use at the moment.
  • Renoise (Windows/macos/Ubuntu) is weird but good. Recommended for its scripting interface (using Lua) and consistent design quirk. Not open-source, but cross-platform and cheap.
  • Sunvox is also a closed-source tracker. Its USP is extreme cross-platform compatibility, running on nearly every phone or computer platform that I have heard of. Useful emergency fallback. Even weirder UI than Renoise.
  • Traktion (Windows/macos/ARM/Ubuntu) is another DAW that works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is also rather cheap, considering the freebies it comes with; there is an older version that is completely free. It is made by the creators of JUCE, a handy C++ music software framework.
  • Reaper (Windows/macos/ARM/Ubuntu) is a cheap, simple, classic-style DAW.
  • Non looks interestingly designed, and if I want my project to work on Raspberry Pi, it fits the bill. The author is renowned for being grumpy.
  • blue is the oddball DAW for csound.
  • Qtractor is one weird solo DAW that runs on Linux.
  • LMMS is a macOS/Linux/Windows open-source DAW.
  • Many more I don’t use enough to care about. Logic, Protools, Acid, Fruity loops, etc.

Some of these I use a lot; let’s drill down.

1.1 Ableton

The default all-purpose stage-n-studio tool.

Full of irritating limitations, but then the competitors are historically full of even more irritating limitations. It is scriptable, in a half-arsed sort of way. That irritation can be soothed by certain hacks. See Ableton Live.

Also the rather improved sibling…

1.2 Bitwig

A derivative of Ableton Live that attempts to remove the irritations and bloat while addressing certain long-standing annoyances. It’s cheaper and IMO better, although the community of fancy libraries and patches is smaller. I’m trying to reduce the number of moving parts in my audio setup, so this is not a problem for me. I think I can. See Bitwig.

2 Collaboration

How to collaborate on music? There are various systems that more or less can be described as DAW-optimized Dropbox workalikes.

AFAICT these all work with various DAWs such as Bitwig, Ableton Live, etc.

  • Splice: Our desktop app syncs all of your projects, samples, and presets with the cloud — no need for “Collect All and Save” and up to 10x faster than Dropbox.
  • Blend: Publish your projects on Blend to get feedback and invite fresh collaborations.

Realtime collaboration: Studio-link looks interesting and claims to connect many different software tools together over networks via standalone apps and VSTs.

Browser-DAW soundation now has live collaboration.

audiomass is an in-browser audio editor.

3 Editors

3.1 Izotope RX

Noise-removal-focused. Expensive but useful; as such, my primary go-to tool.

3.2 Audacity

Audacity is the original open-source audio killer app. General-purpose, open-source. Has a bunch of surprisingly deep functionality behind the clunky interface.

3.3 Amadeus

Amadeus is the only one written by a Fields medallist.

3.4 Regroover

Accusonus regroover is a demixer/audio source separation of audio (USD219). Works ok for standard western drum loops, but is not brilliant at much else so far.

UPDATE: their website doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Wikipedia says they were bought up by Meta and all their software was discontinued. That was a waste of a week’s rent. Fuck you, Meta, you take my time and money and give me nothing back.

4 Live loopers

See music loopers.

5 Converters/transcoders

See transcoding.

6 Patchers

See “patchers” in music software frameworks.

7 DJing software

See DJing.

8 Libraries, frameworks, musical-domain-specific-languages

See audio frameworks.

9 Sundry synthesizers

  • Fluidsynth is an open-source Sound Font synthesizer. Which sounds boring but is splendidly useful, producing audio with no fuss whatever. You will need SoundFonts.
  • Helm is an open-source very-modulatable synthesizer.
  • Usuriously expensive, but cool: Kontakt, a de-facto standard for sample-based instruments.
    • If you want it to build new sample ambient libraries you might want to use in addition photosynthesis.
  • polyphone is an editor of Sound Fonts, which you might want to use with Fluidsynth.
  • And DinIsNoise, the wonderful, quixotic, idiosyncratic project of peripatetic waveform genius Jagannathan Sampath, who is good value and deserves your support. I have no use for it personally, but my life is made more wonderful by knowledge of its existence.
  • STEIM’s RoSa is a freaky sample-based synth which only the Dutch can ever truly understand.

10 Reverbs

  • SIR sounds OK. Free: SIR1