Can someone advise me a good and free music composer please?
Is there also non-midi one?
Thanks
First of all: WRONG FORUM! Not AGS technical related. The moderators will sure move this... but there is the same thead up somewhere... I belive it was moved to the Chit Chat forum too...
And the best would be some Logic or WhaterverSoundStudio or something... NoteWorthy Composer is quite good for midis.
Thanks very much! And I heard theres gon be the Longest Journey 2!!!
A word of advice: stay away from anything Cubase. The interface is terrible.
A very good sequencer is Winjammer Pro. It's a couple of years old, but still very good.
Personally, I use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.
I d stay away from notationprograms such as Noteworthy composer n the likes unless you re writing for reallife ensembles. Traditional notewriting is ment to be interpreted by musicians and if you let your soundcard do it you re bound to come up with a lifeless result. In addition they re really timeconsuming to work with.
I m not familiar with freeware programs of the kind but I d recommend getting a pre-Sonar Cakewalk program such as Cakewalk 9. It s old by now so it ought to be cheap, and is, in my opinion, the best sequencerprogram out there if you re focusing on midi.
If you wanna avoid midi you could use trackerprograms such as Fasttracker.
QuoteA word of advice: stay away from anything Cubase. The interface is terrible.
Eek, that's not right at all, I find Cubase's interface productive and easy to use.
Of course, that may just be down to many years of conditioning. :)
I think the problem with Cubase is indeed the fact that it's really hard to get used to, but once you do... It's as fast as that huge an application can be.
Kind of like the same thing with Photoshop, except to a greater degree.
I'm a fruityloops diehard, and I can't think personally of anything better, though it's not freeware.
But i guess, for midi's you might be better of with cakewalk
if you're into more professional music, try Finale. It's amazing. Note by note entry on staves, but it's got so many little tricks to it...and you can make really professional sheet music. Heh.
But Cakewalk roxorz. I had a really old old version once. It was cool.
-DD
Heh, well I have Cakewalk SonorXL but never installed it. I currently like using Cakewalk Guitar Studio. :) Well it works for me, one day I will install CSXL and review it.
You know, Finale is great, but it's meant for music notation and printing.
I used to use Fasttracker like six years ago. I recently tried to get it working again, and it is incompatible. A good, free windows-friendly tracker is MadTracker.
Geof: You mignt want to try Skale Tracker.. It's only in beta right now, but it has an interface that's almost identical to Fast Tracker 2.
There's a Cakewalk Guitar Studio? I gotta check that out... I use Guitar pro, its good for tabbing guitars, funilly enough.
If you like trackers, you might want to try Buzz. (http://www.buzzmachines (http://www.buzzmachines))
It's a tracker, and a modular soft synth, sorta. Yay.
Meself, I use Sibelius (because real music notation makes so much more sense to me) and Cakewalk 9 for fiddly MIDIy stuff.
EDIT: And I do use Buzz at times for more experimental toying with noise that usually doesn't end up being good.
Try AXS v3.00. It's a free tracker/sampler/synthesizer. Heck, it can do anything!
/me also activly endorses the use of Buzz. IT IS TEH BESYETS!1one
Quote from: Auhsor on Thu 18/09/2003 14:21:10
There's a Cakewalk Guitar Studio? I gotta check that out... I use Guitar pro, its good for tabbing guitars, funilly enough.
I think it's probably old. I'm not sure you can buy it anymore, but if you can it'll be on their webpage. :) If you can't find it there, maybe look for an old review of it somewhere else.
I'm using the free version of Tuareg2 http://www.brambos.com (http://www.brambos.com) this has some extra functions deshabilited, but it's fully functional.
And Soundfoundry Acid Expresshttp://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com (http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com) which is limited to export to WMA at 64kbps (which is not professiona quality but could be enough for an amateur graphic adventure).
I've also installed the AnvilStudio http://www.anvilstudio.com (http://www.anvilstudio.com) but I only used (at the moment) to open some midi files I downloaded, it seems a good program.
I think all the material (songs) that you make with these programs could be used (probabli only for non comercial use) but I'm nost sure as I didn't readed/understood completely their licences. If someone has more info don't hesitate to correct me.
Hmmm.. for everone who is not statisfied with MIDI but ain't able to use difficult trackers, such a MODplug Tracker or Impulse Tracker, I'd suggest Sound Club.
It's a 'piano roll'- type tracker and its strong super-user-friendly is the best I've ever seen. And It's small & free! Just get it... and I don't think you're going to be disappointed...Supports its own format (.sn2 but also MOD and S3M)
www.bluemoon.ee
I make all my music with that and later add advanced effects, such as reverb and chorus with MODplug.
A word of advice for people who aren't familiar with any type of interface: Lots of people may tell you to stay away from trackers because they are hard to use. They aren't harder to use than the more encouraged piano roll, if you're not used to any of them. The reason some people recommend piano rolls is that they're familiar with them. I've used trackers since I was a kid, and I find them extremely easy to understand and use, whereas I really hate piano rolls. (For more serious MIDI work I use a combination Sibelius, which has traditional staff notation--with which I'm even more familiar than with trackers--and Cakewalk, which also has a less advanced version of the same type of notation.)
So if you're not used to piano rolls or trackers, I'd say learn the program that seems best in other respects. Of course, for non-MIDI work I recommend the half-tracker, half modular softsynth Buzz, which is just as powerful as any combination of hardware or software synths and effects, and fully modular, and completely free and with a very nice community (which also, and this is unique for a music application, tends to stick to a single place--#buzz on EFnet). http://www.buzzmachines.com (http://www.buzzmachines.com) is the place to get it, along with pretty much all of the so-called 'machines' (synths, samplers and effects) in existence. Yay. The interface might seem quite difficult at first, but it's highly worth the time it takes to get comfortable considering how powerful it is. In my opinion the only 'all-in-one' type music application that really is what it claims to be, or rather doesn't quite claim to be.
Well, that's enough advertising for one post.
Byeee.
Could someone quickly explain what on earth a piano roll is? I hear this term all the time and I've sort of seen what they look like but it doesn't seem intuitive at all to me.
Instead of lifting the piano while moving it, you utilize those tiny wheels
A piano roll....?
My local bakers sell them......heres a picture...
(http://www.agsforums.com/hostimg/fozroll.png)
If you've seen what it looks like you know what it is, I guess. And no, they're not at all intuitive. :P
BWHAHAHAH!!! Andail and foz are teh funy!!111one ;D
:P
;D
The piano roll:
(http://w1.865.telia.com/~u86517124/Downloadable/pianoroll.jpg)
I think the pianoroll is pretty much the optimal tool when editing/writing midi and very intuitive. I ve had friends try out writing some music through the pianoroll and they grasp the concept very quickly, whereas if I put them infront of a notationprogram they re clueless.
Like I ve said before, notationprograms are imo only handy when writing for instrumentalists. The control you need to create a convincing lifelike result aren t present in notationprograms, (the ones I ve tried anyway) which creates a very dull and mechanical sound. This crappy result can ofcourse be blamed on the fact that it s only midi, so the result is inevitable, an argument in the same style as people blaming their drawingprograms for their inferior results.
Yes, piano rolls are easy to understand very quickly, since they're very logical. They do, however, make very little sense in terms of harmony and melody (you can't exactly sight-read or even get a vague idea of how something sounds from looking at them), and when I try to enter something into it, I first have to think carefully (and I'm a pianist so it's not because I'm not familiar with the keyboard layout) to realize where exactly I should click, and then some pixel pushing to get it in the right place. Well, in my experience and opinion, this is. I'm not disagreeing with you. :P
I do use them for editing MIDIs for more realistic and life-like timing stuff, but for actual composition they make far too little sense to be usable for me. But I guess it depends on who you ask.
(Edit:) Ooh, I sound like I'm arguing. ;D *hugs everyone*
Wow, I've been looking for a good piano-roll program for a while. Ad Lib Visual Composer back in the CGA days was the first and last time I could make music on my own.
Let's clarify the relativity of "intuitive." To be frank, proper musical notation is a largely nonsensical code; it only fully makes sense to those who learned it in their youth like a native language. To people who can read music, piano-roll seems counterintuitive, because it's not the language they know.
To someone who never took music lessons, piano-roll is far more intuitive: you have pitch on one axis and time on the other. To know how long a note lasts, I don't have to know how whether it's the solid one or the hollow one or the one with the flag or the dot... I just look and see how long it is. And each note has its own place on the scale; one doesn't have to write "this note, but higher" as if the white keys are embarassed that the black keys live in their neighborhood and don't want them mentioned directly. Equidistant pitches are represented as such. On a piano roll I can pick out a melody, then decide I want to move or copy that melody a few keys up or down -- and the visual representation of the melody is the exact same shape at any altitude. For people who think spatially, it's a godsend.
Actually staff notation is not simply a nonsensical code as you put it--it might be if all you care about is how a melody looks like when played on a keyboard, but if you are in any way concerned with actual harmony (and please don't make this turn into another music theory vs no music theory argument) it makes far more sense than a piano roll, once you've learned it.
An example, which might be at least quite easy to relate to: Imagine a descending so-called harmonic minor scale in A. A, G#, F, E, D, C... In staff notation, the step between G# and F is clearly a second of some sort, albeit an augmented one. (Please, don't complain about the terms I use... I could equally well explain what I mean, but it's much easier for me to use these convenient words and assume that even those of you who hate 'theory' know how to google.) In a piano roll this looks like a minor third. What the hell, you might then ask, is a minor third doing in a simple descending scale? Not a darn thing. (The reason that it's important that this is an augmented second and not a minor third is this: Listen to this particular scale I just described... Does the step between G# and F actually sound like any regular minor third? (Like A-C in the same scale.) No? Then perhaps they're different from a harmonic perspective. Perhaps.)
If none of this concerns you, then you're probably happy with the piano roll. Good for you! I'm just trying to put it in perspective. And don't forget that I'm just some idiot on the Global Internetworkâ,,¢ who's bored enough to spend time on writing this. ^.^
Oh, and the piano roll does make a whole lot more sense (yes, it's actually very very good in this respect) time-wise. I've just complained a bit about harmonic nonsense... but when it comes to time, teh piano roll it teh rules. That's why I do use it for MIDI work after making some sense of the actual notes in some other notation. And yeah, to someone who never took music lessons the piano roll is a godsend. It's great. But some people have taken music lessons (or read about it or whatever) and I guess those are the only ones who'd be interested in the shit I've been talking about.
This is turning into a very long post. Whee. I'm bored enough at the moment to continue, but I'll go have breakfast instead.
Hugs, or something, EldKatt.
I'm using Fruilyloops Studio 4.1 , and the piano roll is frooty loops is amazing cool. It's pretty similar to the pianoroll of cakewalk... and fruityloops does not work with notations. Neither does it uses MIDI, but Wav, mp3, mod.. etc... You can ofcourse make a MIDI with fruityloops, but then you are limited in your creation.