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Comment by bitwisebob | Hacker News Reader

What other free-as-in-beer software do you use to produce music?

Ardour (https://ardour.org/) and LMMS (https://lmms.io/) are probably the two most popular open-source DAWs. I also really like MuseScore (https://musescore.org/) for composition.

also hydrogen is ok

All three of these are Free (as in freedom).

technically Ardour is free as in free speech, but not as in free beer. They do not have official binary downloads for free. If I remember correcyly its more involved than ./configure && make && make install Though Ubuntu Studio has a version ready to go.

Lots of software that's considered free-as-in-speech-and-beer doesn't have official binary downloads at all. Ardour additionally provides the option of paying to download an official binary. Building from source is pretty much the same as anything else, although there are quite a lot of dependencies. If you're used to installing from source there's no reason Ardour should give you any great difficulty (unless you're unlucky and your distro doesn't supply the required dependencies or something).

It is waf configure/build/install.

Ardour is also available as binary packages on every Linux distribution.

MuseScore is great, I have used it to produce lead sheets professionally on several occasions and it does not disappoint. I grew up on Sibelius but prefer MuseScore for simpler tasks. They have done a great job.

Hey,

I have a score for a choir in musescore and want to create practicing files. For example in the soprano file the soprano voice should be louder than the others. Do you know of an automated way to achieve this? Maybe via midi then ardour? I looked at some other tools like timidity but none seem to have the required api.

Thanks :-)

Though there's no built-in functionality in MuseScore to do this, you can write a plugin that controls the mix for each voice. See this forum topic, which is quite similar to what you're trying to do: https://musescore.org/en/node/56916

Not for producing as such but there's also Mixxx DJ software where you can write your own controls and effects in Javascript.

Have you used it? How does it compare to commercial DJ software? Iyho

Yes I use it regularly. It has more or less the same features as the commercial software. Where it falls down is with the quality of the audio effects which are nowhere near as good as the ones you find on Serato or Traktor, but they're getting better all the time. On the other hand, you can customize almost every aspect of Mixxx. I have an unconventional controller setup so created my own skin (XML and CSS) and MIDI controls (Javascript) and that has really helped my 'creativity'.

Compared to digital vinyl with Serato, I found Mixx to be laggy (and more importantly, lacking of a dedicated next/previous track keys) with a low-end Pioneer DDJ SB. Track controls are replaced with a "hot cue" function, which makes beatmatching without cuepoints unnecessarily cumbersome. Don't recall if the UI had a dedicated next/prev track button but remapping the control scheme meant diving into some javascript datastructure that I wasn't in the right mindset to do at the time. Really wanted to like Mixxx but I could not see how I could perform with it

I've been using Mixxx for years, but I've never tried Serato. I'm curious, since I can't imagine what the point of "next/previous" keys would be - what do you do with them? Next/previous relative to what, exactly?

I use the 'prev' key to fast-rewind to the beginning of a track, for really quick needle drops on a downbeat. I don't use a lot of cue points and usually find it easier to start my mixing into the feed from the first downbeat.

Workflow is: drop from beginning, play+tweak til roughly beatmatched, rewind to beginning and needle drop on first beat again, then begin fading into the mix

Ah, gotcha - I had been imagining you meant prev/next with respect to a playlist.

I think you can do that in Mixxx using the "cue" button. While playing, tapping "cue" will rewind to the beginning of the track and pause; pressing "cue" and holding it down will preview from the beginning. While previewing, you can press "play" before releasing "cue" in order to continue playing; otherwise, releasing "cue" will rewind to the beginning and pause.

So, you'd use a similar workflow: play from the beginning of the track and tweak until beatmatched, then press and hold "cue" to rewind to the beginning and start playing from the first beat. If it works, press "play", release "cue", and bring up the fader; if it didn't work, just release "cue" to rewind, then try again.

I tried to get that working with cue but the modailty of it would mess me up. I suspect with practice it'd be easier. Wish the 'set cue' and 'play cue' buttons were different though

Thanks though! I still like Mixx, no hate here. I just need to spend some more time with it

I used it semi-professionally (I was a paid DJ, but not as my primary source of income) for a couple years. It's solid. 2.0 brings it very comfortably into competition with the best proprietary software, IMHO. That's when it got timecoded vinyl support, good pitch shifting, and better beat-matching.

Pros are probably still mostly using Serato or Traktor, but I don't think it's necessary. I used Traktor for a while but like Mixxx better. It's very good software. It had a lot of shortcomings in the 1.x releases, including stability issues, but I would definitely trust it for pro work today.

Great input. Thx. I've done a lot of proper DJing in my past. At this point it would mostly be for fun. Ideally get a lounge / chill gig just playing good choons for mood with no concern for a dancefloor.

DJing is fun as hell but isn't a great job. I mostly did it for free for charities and stuff that I support, but that ended up getting people requesting I do it for real and the money was actually pretty good (I mean, $600 to spin records for a few hours is great, in my book, though moving a few hundred pounds of speakers and lights in and out was less fun).

I never minded setting up. It was breaking shit down at 2am or later, plus a drive home, that always drove me nuts.

But i always loved, and still do, finding good tunes and then curating a vibe and a night. That's a great feeling. Free drinks help as well ;)

Not OP, but there's Ardour, Rosegarden, or Audacity

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