TiMidity++ ~ Synthesizer & Player


TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats.

TiMidity++ is a free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.

Features:

  • Plays MIDI files without any external MIDI instruments at all
  • Understands SMF, MOD, RCP/R36/G18/G36, MFI
  • Converts MIDI files into various audio file formats: .wav, .au, .aiff, .ogg and so on
  • Uses Gravis Ultrasound compatible patch files and/or SoundFonts as the voice data
  • Displays information about the music that is now playing
  • Various user interfaces: ncurses, gtk, Win32-GUI, and others
  • Plays remote MIDI files over the network
  • Plays MIDI files in archive files
  • Displays sound spectrogram for the playing music
  • Trace playing
timidity.sourceforge.net
sourceforge.net/projects/timidity

StudioFactory ~ Analog Modular Synthesizer


StudioFactory provides a complete virtual audio studio on your computer. It has a very powerful virtual analog modular synthesizer based on an improved version of the SynFactory synthesis engine. StudioFactory is fully compatible with SynFactory and can load all existing patch files. The synthesis engine is extended with additional modules that give access to MIDI and audio input. This makes it possible to play sounds generated by StudioFactory with an external MIDI-keyboard. With the audio input StudioFactory can be used as an standalone effect processor and provides reverb, echo and vocoder effects.

studiofactory019

syntiac.com/studiofactory

orDrumbox ~ Cross-platform Drum Machine


The orDrumbox is free drum machine software, designed to be as creative as possible with some unusual features: auto-composition, polyrhythms, custom arpeggiator, automatic sounds/track matching, custom soft synths, lo fi rendering and more … Ideal for experimentation and fast results.

  • This software can automatically compose bass lines, melodic patterns and complete songs.
  • It comes with a rhythms database and sounds database including musical items which can be fully edited.
  • … and a fully customizable soft synth section adds many synthetics sounds as presets to the sounds library.

orDrumbox-V0.9.30-Assignations

www.ordrumbox.com
sourceforge.net/projects/ordrumbox
www.facebook.com/ordrumbox

Audiotool ~ Online Digital Audio Workstation


Start making music in the cloud. Audiotool is a powerful online music production studio right in your browser. All crafted with lots of love for the small details.

www.audiotool.com

Sonic Pi ~ Live Coding Music Synthesizer


Sonic Pi is a new kind of musical instrument. Instead of strumming strings or whacking things with sticks – you write code – live.

Sonic Pi has been designed with the aim to find a harmonious balance between three core principles:

  • Simple enough for the 10 year old within you
  • Joyful enough for you to lose yourself through play
  • Powerful enough for your own expressions

Sonic Pi is a complete open source programming environment originally designed to explore and teach programming concepts within schools through the process of creating new sounds.

In addition to being an engaging education resource it has evolved into an extremely powerful and performance-ready live coding instrument suitable for professional artists and DJs.

sonic-pi.net
github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi

Cabbage ~ Audio Instrument Development


Cabbage is a software for prototyping and developing audio instruments with the Csound audio synthesis language. Instrument development and prototyping is carried out with the main Cabbage IDE. Users write and compile Csound code in a code editor. If one wishes one can also create a graphical frontend, although this is no longer a requirement for Cabbage. Any Csound file can be run with Cabbage, regardless of whether or not it has a graphical interface. Cabbage is designed for realtime processing in mind. It is possible to use Cabbage to run Csound in the more traditional score-driven way, but your success may vary.

Cabbage is a ‘host’ application. It treats each and every Csound instrument as a unique audio plugin, which gets added to a digital audio graph (DAG) once it is compiled. The graph can be opened and edited at any point during a performance. If one wishes to use one of their Csound instruments in another audio plugin host, such as Reaper, Live, Bitwig, Ardour, QTractor, etc, they can export the instrument through the ‘Export instrument’ option.

cabbageaudio.com/
csound.com/

ChucK ~ Music Programming Language


ChucK is a programming language for real-time sound synthesis and music creation. It is open-source and freely available on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. ChucK presents a unique time-based, concurrent programming model that’s precise and expressive (we call this strongly-timed), dynamic control rates, and the ability to add and modify code on-the-fly. In addition, ChucK supports MIDI, OpenSoundControl, HID device, and multi-channel audio. It’s fun and easy to learn, and offers composers, researchers, and performers a powerful programming tool for building and experimenting with complex audio synthesis / analysis programs, and real-time interactive music.

chuck.cs.princeton.edu

Surge ~ Subtractive Hybrid Synthesizer


This is the synthesizer plug-in Surge which Claes Johanson (@kurasu) previously sold as a commercial product via the company vember audio.

As he is too busy with other projects and no longer wanted to put the effort into maintaining Surge across multiple platforms, he decided to give it a new life as an open-source project.

It was originally released in 2005, and was one of Claes’ first larger projects. It is reliable and sounds great.

surge-synthesizer

surge-synthesizer.github.io

Soundgrain ~ Granular Sound Synthesis


Soundgrain is a graphical interface where users can draw and edit trajectories to control granular sound synthesis. Soundgrain is written with Python/WxPython and uses Pyo as its audio engine.

Soundgrain_screenshot

ajaxsoundstudio.com/software/soundgrain

FluidSynth ~ A SoundFont Synthesizer


FluidSynth is a real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications and has reached widespread distribution. FluidSynth itself does not have a graphical user interface, but due to its powerful API several applications utilize it and it has even found its way onto embedded systems and is used in some mobile apps.

Features:

  • Cross platform support (Linux, macOS and Windows to name a few)
  • SoundFont 2 support
  • SoundFont 3 support (vorbis-compressed SF2)
  • Realtime effect control using SoundFont 2.01 modulators
  • Playback of MIDI files
  • Shared library which can be used in other programs
  • Built in command line shell
FluidSynth

www.fluidsynth.org

QSynth ~ FluidSynth GUI Front-end

QSynth is a fluidsynth GUI front-end application written in C++ around the Qt framework using Qt Designer.

qsynth-screenshot1

qsynth.sourceforge.io

FluidPatcher ~ GUI & Automation

FluidPatcher is a performance-oriented interface for FluidSynth built using wxpython to create a simple GUI that allows live editing, selecting, and playing of patches. A patch is a collection of settings such as soundfont presets for each MIDI channel, control-change/sysex messages to send when the patch is selected, and midi router or effects settings. Groups of patches are stored in banks, which are saved as human-readable and -editable YAML files. This allows a musician to easily create complex combinations of synthesizer settings ahead of time and switch between them on the fly during a performance.

Features:

  • Live playing: Play on your MIDI controller and hear the results
  • Customization: Create your own combinations of instruments/effects
  • Extendability: Use the included libraries to design your own implementations/software

sourceforge.net/projects/fluidpatcher

SonicBirth ~ Create Powerful Audio Plugins


SonicBirth is an AudioUnit designing MacOS application. The first in its category, it allows users to build their own AudioUnit plugins, either by working with existing circuits or by creating circuits completely from scratch. SonicBirth is also a free AudioUnits package, as it comes bundled with a set of plugins designed for standalone use as plugins as well as pre-constructed circuits to modify or build upon for creating new plugins. Whether you’re looking for traditional eqs, compressors, and reverbs, or softsynths, distortion, and filters, etc., SonicBirth allows you unprecedented freedom and creativity over your sound.

sonicbirth

sonicbirth.sourceforge.net

eSpeak ~ Open Source Speech Synthesizer


eSpeak is a compact open source Linux and Windows speech synthesizer for English and other languages. eSpeak uses a “formant synthesis” method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

eSpeak is available as:

  • A command line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
  • A shared library version for use by other programs. (On Windows this is a DLL).
  • A SAPI5 version for Windows, so it can be used with screen-readers and other programs that support the Windows SAPI5 interface.
  • eSpeak has been ported to other platforms, including Android, Mac OSX and Solaris.

speak.sourceforge.net