
Open-Source Music Production Tools - puranjay
https://midination.com/free-music-production-software/
======
racl101
Here's a chance for a content maker to make a YouTube channel to show people
how to use these tools.

I know that a lot of people's apprehension with these kinds of open source
tools is they're afraid of investing their time into a tool that might not be
widely supported because if they get stuck there will be little to no support
in figuring out the software. And also, if the project is not popular enough
then it won't get updated enough and, thus, remain not competitive with
commercial software.

~~~
ttctciyf
There are a couple of yt channels out there, for example
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYKj_peyESIMDp5LtHlH2A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYKj_peyESIMDp5LtHlH2A)

But nothing like you might expect compared to FOSS creative software in other
fields, like Blender or Gimp.

------
ryan_midi
Hello! I'm the author of this page.

I realize that a few tools might be missing. Happy to hear all suggestions.

In the meantime, if you want this list in Google sheet, you can make a copy of
this one:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YfVyZHy83WHIiZmQJwHh...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YfVyZHy83WHIiZmQJwHhwPTXomc188VcIwhZJB0P8ro/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
mrob
You have LinuxSampler listed as GPL licensed, but it's actually source-
available proprietary software.

From
[http://www.linuxsampler.org/downloads.html](http://www.linuxsampler.org/downloads.html):

"LinuxSampler is licensed under the GNU GPL with the exception that USAGE of
the source code, libraries and applications FOR COMMERCIAL HARDWARE OR
SOFTWARE PRODUCTS IS NOT ALLOWED without prior written permission by the
LinuxSampler authors."

This directly contradicts the GPL v2.0 (the relevant version): "You may not
impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights
granted herein."

Of course the copyright holders have the right to impose whatever self-
contradictory license they like, but this combination isn't GPL and it isn't
Open Source.

~~~
hoseja
Well, if anything, it's more honest than GPL.

------
myself248
VCV Rack, anyone? [https://vcvrack.com/](https://vcvrack.com/)

~~~
duncanawoods
Sadly running it as a DAW won't be open source.

~~~
ttctciyf
Though running the FOSS version on linux allows to route audio back and forth
between Rack and external recorders, hosts, plugins, etc with ease via JACK.

------
keeblers_n_bits
One of the reasons I haven't been able to fully commit to Linux on the desktop
is that I haven't been able to find quality music production tools. I always
end up going back to macOS because I miss Logic Pro X and Ableton Live too
much. Also the audio routing in macOS is so much easier than any other
operating system I've encountered. I would love to hear about music studios
using FOSS.

~~~
amazing_stories
I agree, it's difficult to do music on Linux. I almost punched my computer
last weekend because it's so hard. However, two things I can say for sure is
that the Linux native of Reaper works great and Ubuntu Studio presents a
pretty good OOBE with Ardour. Nothing running on Linux compares to Ableton, so
if that's your preferred workflow, just stick with that. Now, if someone could
just write a good audio editor that works on Linux... (Audacity is complete
garbage).

~~~
avhon1
As somebody who has only used Audacity and Pure Data, what's an example of a
good audio editor?

~~~
SyneRyder
A long time ago Cool Edit Pro was the definitive choice on Windows. It became
Adobe Audition and 'disappeared' into their Creative Cloud subscription bundle
- it's still actively developed but I no longer hear of people using it.

iZotope RX is meant more for audio restoration (and is the industry standard
there), but you can also use it for many audio editing tasks.

I've personally switched to Acustica by Acon Digital. The GUI isn't perfect,
but it's very fast, and has an impressive audio separation tool based on
Spleeter.

All those tools seem to have taken some influence from that Cool Edit Pro GUI.

~~~
dr-smooth
Cool Edit Pro. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

I used to love that program for its simplicity. I will cast my vote for
ocenaudio as the fastest, most intuitive audio editor for basic tasks (and it
does a great job with batch jobs, too, like running the same noise reduction
on 10 clips at the same time).

[https://www.ocenaudio.com/](https://www.ocenaudio.com/)

------
mastazi
I can’t speak well enough of qTractor: it has a nice and intuitive UI, it does
MIDI and Audio, it supports many different plugin formats, both instruments
and effects (VST 2/3, LADSPA, DSSI, LV2), and it supports many forms of audio
manipulation including time stretching and pitch shifting. If you’re looking
for an open source DAW in my opinion it’s the way to go
[https://qtractor.sourceforge.io/](https://qtractor.sourceforge.io/)

------
rogerclark
One thing missing from this list -- and pretty much any mention of open source
music tools for some reason -- is OpenMPT: an open-source Windows-based
tracker with full VST support. It runs great under WINE.

It's a tracker, and not a sequencer-style DAW, but unlike every other open
source DAW, it is battle-tested, non-beta non-alpha post-1.0 release software,
and capable of producing commercial-quality music.

[https://openmpt.org/](https://openmpt.org/)

~~~
bane
It also happens to have pretty great compatibility with various tracker music
formats like .mod, .s3m, .it and so on.

------
sah2ed
It’s missing AudioMass [https://audiomass.co/](https://audiomass.co/)

AudioMass was well received in a recent feature on HN.

[0] Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091)

------
mxmilkb
Carla, LV2 etc host, LV2/JACK patchbay, sound bank support, etc., by falkTX,
maintainer of JACK and MOD Devices developer.

[https://kx.studio/Applications:Carla](https://kx.studio/Applications:Carla)
[https://github.com/falkTX/Carla](https://github.com/falkTX/Carla)
[https://user-
images.githubusercontent.com/108225/87578308-26...](https://user-
images.githubusercontent.com/108225/87578308-26837980-c6cc-11ea-8ca8-3a7f684567ab.png)

------
richrichardsson
Surge Synth[1] has been FOSS for a while now and is being actively developed.
It's _very_ good to boot!

[1] [https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/](https://surge-
synthesizer.github.io/)

------
rzzzt
Schism Tracker is an SDL-based reimagination of Impulse Tracker [1]. Jeffrey
Lim also made the sources of the original project available [2].

[1]
[https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker](https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker)

[2]
[https://bitbucket.org/jthlim/impulsetracker](https://bitbucket.org/jthlim/impulsetracker)

------
pmoriarty
One of my favorites, not listed there, is qmidiarp.

[http://qmidiarp.sourceforge.net/](http://qmidiarp.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
3131s
Looks like this one is in the Arch official repositories as well, I'll have to
try it.

Two of my favorites are in the list, Hydrogen and ZynSubAddFx.

------
exikyut
Naive, under-researched :) question: what Linux-native program lets me import
a bunch of audio tracks, arrange them in a timeline with subsample-level
resolution, apply nondestructive edits such as crossfades...

...with a fast, simple UI? :)

So far I've poked at Ardour, but

a) I was pretty sure it was absolute overkill for my simple purposes,

b) The program felt kinda clunky, like if I moved wrong it would crash, and

c) I wasn't sure the program was subsample-accurate.

\--

I've pretty much never pursued playing around with audio or music because all
the software out there is either undiscoverably obscure, or firmly out of my
price range (which is $0, since I a) have no idea if audio editing will even
be interesting, and b) don't know what program would be the most appropriate).

After throwing my hands up in the air for the 20th time at Audacity's
remarkable sluggishness I stumbled on ReZound
([http://rezound.sourceforge.net/ss.shtml](http://rezound.sourceforge.net/ss.shtml))
a few years ago and discovered a refreshingly fast tool with VUs that would
happily run at 60fps on the ~20 year old machine I was using at the time.
(2014 was interesting. I was using an 800MHz AMD Duron with 320MB RAM. And to
reiterate, ReZound was completely usable on that machine.)

Sadly, while the most-recent SVN of ReZound does compile on modern Linux,
project saving has been broken since the paleolithic era so you have to
(re-)export as FLAC to save... and sometimes the edit process subtly injects
single-sample gaps of silence which sound like clicks/pops (!), making the
program unusable. Not to mention it uses the destructive edit model.

Wish it was in better shape, it's a fairly excellent program.

~~~
vbsteven
It's not open source but for your purposes of figuring out if audio editing is
for you Reaper could be a nice introduction. It runs on Linux and works pretty
similar to most commercial DAWs. You can run its evaluation mode for free
indefinitely with a nag screen at startup. I started with that and then
graduated to Cubase when I decided I wanted to pursue further.

~~~
fit2rule
REAPER runs really very well on Linux, it has to be stated, and is one of the
easier DAW's to learn thanks to things like "The REAPER Blog" and "RAPER
MANIA" channels on Youtube that really make REAPER great. It is one of the
best values for money in the DAW world as well. VERY, very powerful software,
great price.

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/user/audiogeekzine](https://www.youtube.com/user/audiogeekzine)

[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq297H7Ca98HlB5mVFHGSsQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq297H7Ca98HlB5mVFHGSsQ)

------
spookybones
This is great. Does anyone have an equivalent list for design and illustration
software?

~~~
mastazi
I don’t have a link to a comprehensive list but my personal suggestions are:

* GIMP for photo editing

* Krita for freehand drawing and for CMYK support

* Inkscape for vector images

* Scribus for desktop publishing (booklets, flyers etc)

* Blender for 3D graphics (modelling/rigging/animation) [1]

* Blender for 2D animation [1]

* Blender for video editing [1]

* Blender for compositing [1]

[1] Basically Blender is expanding in fields that are outside of 3D graphics
and I believe that over time it became the best alternative in those fields.

~~~
totetsu
I did some video editing in Blender a few years ago. I was surprised how solid
and featured it was compared to other actual video editing suits on linux at
the time.

------
pabs3
Another DAW:

[https://www.zrythm.org/](https://www.zrythm.org/)

------
tony
I witnessed a supposed open source music app "in the wild" on YT recently:

[https://youtu.be/U6Og9wtO9jE?t=640](https://youtu.be/U6Og9wtO9jE?t=640)

Context: Someone was using fiverr to get people to play a tune on bass guitar.
The supposed "pro" player was hooked directly into Ubuntu (it looks like
Unity)

Anyone know what app in the background?

~~~
rzzzt
The application icon is Ardour's.

------
pabs3
This is a list of different multimedia related tasks that you can do with
Debian, from DAWs to animation:

[https://blends.debian.org/multimedia/tasks/](https://blends.debian.org/multimedia/tasks/)

------
spankalee
I'd love to see more synthesizers on the list, and more open-source synths in
general. MIDI controllers and SBCs are plentiful and cheap enough that you can
do some really amazing custom rigs, but the sound generations options aren't
there yet.

~~~
lioeters
> MIDI controllers and SBCs

I recently discovered this niche, of building/using portable "digital
instruments" with a heart of Linux, in my case running on Raspberry Pi with
audio interface.

It's so exciting how affordable and practical this is, I feel like it's an
area of exploration worth more attention.

A couple of related open-source/open-hardware projects:

Pisound -
[https://www.blokas.io/pisound/docs/](https://www.blokas.io/pisound/docs/)

Zynthian - [https://github.com/zynthian](https://github.com/zynthian)

In the latter's wiki/documentation, there's a big list of open-source synths
bundled with their Linux distro.

[http://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Zynthian_Supported_Synth_...](http://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Zynthian_Supported_Synth_Engines)

The above link is down at the moment, I think they may be switching CMS
backend. Here's an archived page:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191020093102/http://wiki.zynth...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191020093102/http://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Zynthian_Supported_Synth_Engines)

\---

Edit: Here's a good one, from another comment:

[https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-
linuxaudio#synthesizers](https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-
linuxaudio#synthesizers)

------
geff82
I have only experience with Propellerheads Reason and what I like there that
lots of instruments and synthesizer settings are available. Where do I go for
instruments when using open source software? How is this topic being handled?

------
ryanmcdonough
Having followed the development of one back when I used to listen to LUGRadio:
Jokosher hasn’t been updated in over 10 years, yes it’s free and open but
doesn’t seem like it’s worth the hassle including in the list.

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ris
Comprehensive? No PureData.

~~~
ryan_midi
Hi, author here. I aimed this list at non-technical people who wanted to make
music for free. I avoided things like PureData and Sonic-Pi for this reason.
Though if I'm honest, the learning curve for something like Sonic Pi isn't
necessarily steeper than that for Ardour :)

------
ordrumbox
[https://ordrumbox.com](https://ordrumbox.com) Gpl2 free open source drum
machine

------
o-__-o
Phasex is money and not on this list.

------
RikNieu
This is awesome, thanks!

I wish I had time to play with stuff like this more

