I want to quickly share with you 5 software programs that are awesome tools for working with music and audio on your computer.
These programs are audacity, Linux multimedia student, ardour, mixx and spek, and all these programs are completely free to download and use for both personal and commercial use. They’re also all open source software and if you want to download them and try them out for yourself .
Audacity
Lets take a look at the first program audacity. Audacity is an audio recording program. This is free and open source audio recording software. It allow us to apply different effects to audio file. It also allow us, we can for example for dramatic effect revers the whole selection. You can use this software program for a lot of things and its pretty easy to use, has a simple interface.
You can use it for example you can take the lyrics off of a song so you have a just a karaoke type version.
You can take an audio recording and change the pitch, the speed, the tempo, you can amplify it, it’s just got a lot of different effects you can use and it’s great for recording and capturing audio.
You can then export it in wave format, you can also get plugins to export it in MP3 format and things like that. And then you can use those recordings to work in some of these over programs we’re going to look at. Audacity supported cross platform, it works on windows, Macintosh and Linux. Its my favorite open source recording software. Here is the download link of software.
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LMMS
So does this next one, LMMS, its also supported cross platform. It work on Linux, Macintosh, and windows. And it is a software very similar to fruity loops studio, so you can create some pretty cool music with it. You can use audio samples like things you’ve recorded yourself or you can also create synthesized music.
You can listen to each track individually. Here is the bass line. This is one of the melody parts. This baseline editor is pretty easy to use, as far as the melodies and things you can edit them.
This has a keyboard. If you have a midi keyboard you can input it that way or you can just click and move these notes around. And when you play it, so we’ve kinda changed the way the song is supposed to be.
Lot’s of cool things, it has a bunch of built in synthesizing tools and effects and cool stuff like that. Fun one to play with, LMMS. To download this free recording software click on this link.
Ardour
Ardour is a Linux only program and it’s an audio workstation. it’s great for tacking recorded tracks and piecing them together like you would in a recording studio. You record the audio and then the drums and then the different instruments. In their guitar parts that we can record in and tried to synch together. It lets you drag the different parts around. You can also apply lots of different effects similar to audacity but it’s designed for working with multiple tracks ardour is.
Again this is a Linux only program.It can install on Linux based OS like Fedora, CentSO. But you can use in virtual machine by on any windows. That’s an option too, if you have a windows computer and want to use ardour, you can install a virtual Linux machine to us it. You can download this open source audio recording software at this link.
Mixx
This next program Mixx is a DJ mixing tool, you can use it for live broadcasting or for dances, clubs, parties, things like that. I’ll just show you a sample of what it can do. So all different kinds of effects, and you drag and drop these up to here.
It has the disks here. Anyway, it’s a fun one to play with. You can export, you can save and record you music you create with it too. You can also set it up to do an auto DJ where you put a bunch of songs and it will jump to the next one and play and mix your music together that way. Mixx free audio recording software download link.
Spek
Spek is that last one I want to tell you about. And spek is a spectrogram analyzer for MP3 and a couple different formats of audio files.
So it shows you, for example, it tells you the quality, visually represents the quality of an audio file. That’s what I use it for anyway.
So even though it says it’s a high quality audio file from the specs of it. I can tell that it’s not really that great. And I guess in theory you can tell by listening to it too, but it’s a great tool for a quick glance at what quality of audio you going to be working with. Okay, well those are the programs I wanted to share with you today, I appreciate your time in reading this article. Overall it is also the best open source recording software
