Talking of features, it boasts of
- Song-Editor for composing songs
- A Beat+Bassline-Editor for creating beats and basslines
- An easy-to-use Piano-Roll for editing patterns and melodies
- An FX mixer with 64 FX channels and arbitrary number of effects allow unlimited mixing possibilities
- Many powerful instrument and effect-plugins out of the box
- Full user-defined track-based automation and computer-controlled automation sources
- Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches, and MIDI
- Import of MIDI and FLP (Fruityloops Project) files
Rosegarden, the development of which is sponsored by Typo 3, “is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments. It is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music” composition and editing environment.”
Ardour
Released under the GPL, Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. The application aims to provide a digital audio workstation suitable for professional use with features such as recording, mixing, editing and mastering. Ardour relies heavily on plugins ot get some features to work.
Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming with features such as
- Up to 64 ticks per pattern with individual level per event and variable pattern length.
- 32 instrument tracks with volume, mute, solo, pan capabilities.
- Multi layer support for instruments (up to 16 samples for each instrument).
- Ability to import/export song files.
- Unique human velocity, human time, pitch and swing functions.
- Multiple patterns playing at once.
There are dozens of others out there that easily get the job done no matter its complexity. If there is any one reason why Linux is such a force to reckon with, it’s about how hard it is to choose from lots of solutions to any given problem. Give any of the above apps a try and tell me what you think of them. If you prefer others not mentioned here, please share them with us in the comments.
