The Best of Best Apps For Creating Music On LInux

[thorgal]

Hej Sandsound, det lyder meget godt I shall look into this. Thanks.

[Grep]

My Favorites

Ardour
Jack
Jamin
Audacity
Sweep
Serpentine

[Claudio]

My favorites so far are:

- ZynAddSubFX
- LMMS
- Ardour
- Audacity
- Hydrogen
- amSynth
- Qtractor

I'm still tinkering with these to familiarize myself as best I can, but I can definitely say these are my faves as they're fun to play with.

[alex stone]

At the desperately humble Parchment Studios, i'm using:

Linuxsampler (the mighty sound engine that drives my little setup. Lsampler just keeps getting better and better)

Rosegarden (For fast midi drafting, at which RG excels. The new free positioning of segments when recording gave me an real jump in speed of input and workflow. Great app.)

Denemo (working with this app to get used to its features, and the resurgence in activity.As Nils succinctly pointed out to me recently, the Keystroke/midi cc/mouse combination workflow and control options really add something, and give us a real opportunity to input at speed, efficiently. More practice needed here, with this app, but the future looks bright. )

Jconv (Does a great job of giving me a viable positioning environment. Currently experimenting with Ambisonic IR's, to further develop a more realistic recorded....space. Thanks Fons, for the help, and your patience.)

Ardour (A stalwart of reliability, and the recording hub. Looking forward to V3.0.)

Jack (for running large orchestral templates with lots of ports, etc, Jack does a great job. Couldn't function nearly as well without it. Parchment Studios operates with Jack at its heart.)

Musescore (Big fan of this app, and i use it for quick drafting notation, in a short score format. I'd like to see this app go full Jackmidi and dump the RTC requirement, but it's still a powerful performer without it.)

Patchage (Since the advent of lpatchage, and combined with the tremendous work done by the LASH devs, patchage is my patchbay of choice.)

Ingen (A great idea, that works well here. Multi layered plugin and cabling windows present many options for setting up both simple and complex cabling and porting requirements. Looking forward to the day when Patchage and Ingen merge, with a main page, and multi pages underneath, feeding into the main.... )

Aeolus (An excellent Organ synthesiser, that works well, and provides a realistic instrument playback when composing. This app puts commercial attempts at the same instrument synthesis to shame.)

all on 64bit, and 32bit boots.

Alex.

[StudioDave]

Ardour + LADSPA + LV2 plugins
Csound & friends (AVSynthesis, Cecilia, blue, AlgoScore, others)
JAMin
DOSemu (because I run Voyetra's ancient Sequencer Plus Gold in it better than it ever ran under DOS)
JACK w. QJackCtl front-end
Common Music/GRACE

If I were forced to choose two programs I'd select Csound and Common Music. Not much I can't do with those two environments.

Best,

dp (who is eagerly anticipating Open Octave's version of Rosegarden minus KDE)

[autostatic]

The apps I can't go without:
- Qtractor for recording audio and Midi
- LMMS for creating beats and Midi stuff
- Smasher for some serious beatslicing
- ZynAddSubFX to relax, it's the best way to kill your time
- Calf Organ and Monosynth for icing the cake
- MilkyTracker for my old FT2 projects
- Audacity to edit samples
- QjackCtl to keep Jack from misbehaving
- Rackarrak to immerse myself in reverberation
- Virtual keyboard if I don't have a real keyboard lying around
- Hydrogen if I don't have a real drummer lying around
- Audacious to play back my creations

[autostatic]

And some more:
- Aqualung, because Audacious is nice but just so buggy
- Qsynth for playing around with SoundFonts
- LinuxSampler + Fantasia when you're done playing with SoundFonts and want to play with some other stuff like gig files

[nathan]

I really want to get into LinuxSampler, but I'm not quite sure where to start or get good gig files. I would love to make to some really nice orchestral sounds with it, if possible.

[autostatic]

At the moment I only use the concert piano gig file from the LinuxSampler site. Oh yeah, and the Sonart Yamaha C7 piano gig. And I have some vibes samples lying around but I prefer freely available sample packs or packs that I buy myself. If someone has some good suggestions for a really nice and affordable Rhodes pack or a ditto vibes pack, let me know!

[Jan]

Completely unrelated to the thread topic, but since we are speaking of LS and related apps: I am searching for a soundfont or gig-file of a Hardanger Fiddle (or Hardingfele in Norway). Didn't find anything, my otherwise strong googling power has failed me here, it seems. Or isn't there anything? I don't have a sound sample of it, but you can hear it in the Lord of the Rings movies. It is prominently featured in the Rohirrim theme.

If anyone knows how I can get my hands on a soundfont or something, please tell me!

[nathan]

Thanks for those links, AutoStatic. Very cool...I'm looking foward to digging in with LinuxSampler sometime this spring (post Master's thesis .

[Louigi Verona]

I use LMMS 0.4.6 (version is important, since this latest build is very stable, has fixed a lot of issues and added some serious functionality) for complex electronic music arrangements which require lots of sounds, synchronization and ability to go back to any moment in the tune and re-edit things if I want.
Sometimes use Ardour for some post production.

I also use modular approach for ambient music (usually a live performance), that will be Kluppe + Ardour for midi control which Kluppe lacks. Also I use external synths and Hydrogen + Ardour to record songs where I use the voice + LMMS to render melodic parts.

Of course, the more sophisticated LMMS gets, the more I switch to it for more tasks.

[laba170]

The apps I usually use:

-Zynaddsubfx (Actually using yoshimi for the time being, since it's more stable.)
-Seq24
-Hydrogen
-Ardour
-Jack

-Distro: AV linux 2. Tried AV linux 3, but it didn't like my AMD video card.

[autostatic]

Yeah, Yoshimi is cool. Goodbye crackling ZASFX.

[thorgal]

yoshimi is much more stable that zyn. However, preset sounds are not always identical.
If you try the fantasy bank - space choir 1 (I believe it is this one), you will get a different experience depending on the app you use. I have to check this again.
confirmed, Space Choir 1 - Fantasy bank. It sucks a bit because I actually base one of my synth sound out of this one. Don't have time to dig it ...