Category Archives: PC

Personal Computer Audioware

Beast ~ Linux Synthesizer & Music Creation

Posted by tom2tec on

Beast is a digital synthesizer and music creation system, released as Free Software under the GNU LGPL-2.1+. It has support for Linux Audio Plugins (LADSPA), multi-track editing, unlimited undo, real-time synthesis, MIDI and various audio formats like WAV, AIFF, Vorbis, Soundfont 2, Gus Patch, FLAC and MP3 files, 32bit audio rendering, full duplex support, multi-core audio rendering, SIMD utilisation, precise timing at sample granularity, FFT spectrograms and MIDI automation. The project is translated into a variety of languages.

beast.testbit.eu

github.com/tim-janik/beast

GLAME ~ GNU / Linux Audio Mechanics

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Welcome to the wonderful world of GLAME, short for GNU/Linux Audio Mechanics! The project aims to present you with a powerful, fast, stable and easily extensible sound editor for Linux and compatible systems. And best of all, it’s GPLed!

glame.sourceforge.net

AUBE ~ Sound Generation & Processing

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AUBE is a system for sound generation and processing. You can process audio on the fly by setting up arbitrary configurations of sound generators, sequencers and effects modules, through which sound is played, filtered, and recorded.

www.metadecks.org/software/aube

HippoPlayer ~ Cross Platform Old Format Player

Posted by tom2tec on

HippoPlayer is a music player for macOS, Windows and Linux that mostly focuses on music made for systems such as Amiga, C64, and gaming systems. While HippoPlayer supports MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, etc it’s not the main target.

Motivation

The original HippoPlayer is something I used a lot when I had my Amiga. Over many years I tried various players and while some of them hold up none of them has been what I been looking for. Before starting this project I looked around quite a bit for alternatives and nothing really fit the bill.

Closest is likely XMPlay, but that’s for Windows only and closed source which isn’t what I want either but feature wise it’s fairly good. I started this project roughly 7 years ago. I did some work in a private repository and had something very basic up and running. Then other things happened and the project has been on ICE for quite many years but I always had it back in my head that I wanted to come back to it.

The aim I have with HippoPlayer is “a modern music player for your oldsk00l needs” This means it should feel nice and great to use with features that you can expect from a modern player but allow you to play older formats in the best way possible.

hippoplayer

github.com/emoon/HippoPlayer

VSTHost ~ Windows VST Plugin Host

Posted by tom2tec on

It’s a VST-compatible host that’s capable of:

  • loading VST effects (aka “plugins”)
  • parameterizing / editing them
  • sound output for VSTis
  • MIDI input and output
  • loading / saving .fxb / .fxp files
  • I/O through either Windows MME or ASIO drivers
  • Wave Player / Recorder
  • MIDI Player

While the program started mainly as an aid in understanding and debugging VST plugins, it has evolved into a quite capable program by now which can be really helpful in a keyboard artist’s Live setup.

www.hermannseib.com/english/vsthost.htm

AlsaPlayer ~ Linux PCM Player

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AlsaPlayer for Linux is a new kind of player that effectively runs pulse-code modulation or .PCM files. The player uses multithreading pretty heavily and was written specifically for giving some good exercise to the new Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) driver and the library system. If you look closely, you’ll observe that AlsaPlayer has some highly interesting features that can be found only in the UNIX-based or Linux-based players. The main goal of the people who created AlsaPlayer for Linux was to develop a completely pluggable framework that could playback every type of media file, with majority of focus on the PCM audio data.

alsaplayer.sourceforge.net

www.alsaplayer.org

FFmpeg ~ Open Source Audio Video Toolset

Posted by tom2tec on

A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.

ffmpeg.org

Frontends:

Resources:

RoughRider 3 ~ Dynamics Compressor VST

Posted by tom2tec on

Our RoughRider compressor is one of the most popular dynamics processors on the planet, with well over a half a million downloads over its decade-plus lifespan, and is in heavy daily use by producers the world over. With RoughRider 3, we’ve expanded the original to include an external sidechain input, the ability to turn off the built-in “warming” filter (the FULL BANDWIDTH button), and much more accurate metering.

www.audiodamage.com/pages/free-downloads

Sekaiju ~ Windows MIDI Sequencer & Editor

Posted by tom2tec on

“Sekaiju” is free, open source MIDI sequencer / editor software for creating and editing MIDI data. You can record MIDI keyboard or synthesizer playing to the computer, and you can compose music to play with your MIDI modules or synthesizers. Since it allows editing of all kinds of events, and has an unlimited undo and redo feature, Sekaiju can also be used as a powerful MIDI editor. A real-time input which can input each MIDI channel messages into separate tracks at the same time is a popular feature .

Sekaiju4.1_en_S

openmidiproject.osdn.jp/Sekaiju

Piano One ~ Yamaha C7 Concert Grand VST

Posted by tom2tec on

Piano One comes from the Yamaha C7 concert grand, a true workhorse in the professional piano world, appearing on famous concert stages, in international competitions and in prestigious music events throughout the world.

By utilizing the Sound Magic Hybrid Modelling Engine, Piano One offers both the Realistic Sound of Sampling and the Playability of Modelling. Hybrid Modelling provides an instantaneous feeling – no delay – and a truer and richer sound than can be created with either sampling or modelling alone.

  • VST on Windows (32Bit&64Bit) and VST and AU on Mac (32Bit&64Bit)
  • Neo Piano Hybrid Modeling Engine (Limited Features)
  • Yamaha C7 Sound
  • Note duration is limited within 18 seconds
  • Some features are limited such as Sympathetic Resonance and noises

neovst.com/piano-one

AudioSwitch ~ Taskbar Volume & I/O Switch

Posted by tom2tec on

Switch between default audio input or output + change volume.

github.com/sirWest/AudioSwitch

www.facebook.com/AudioSwitchSoftware

Monkey’s Audio ~ Free Lossless CODEC

Posted by tom2tec on

Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music.  Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or wma that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music.  That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original.  Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ your music).  The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey’s Audio files back to the exact, original files.  That way, you’ll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you’ll always be able to perfectly recreate the original music CD.

monkeysaudio.com

References:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey%27s_Audio

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lossless_audio_codecs

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_coding_formats

wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison#Monkey.27s_Audio_.28APE.29