Step into music production with KOMPLETE START – a curated selection of studio-quality instruments, effects, utilities, loops, and samples for the low price of nothing at all. Play over 2,000 customizable sounds – drums and percussion, bass, acoustic instruments, synths, pads and atmospheres, effects, and more. And did we mention it’s free?
www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-start/
Yoshimi is a software audio synthesizer, originally forked from ZynAddSubFX. Follow the links in the header for help with downloading and running it. You can also check out the manuals for detailed help, and listen to examples of music created with Yoshimi. Once you have it all set up, here are just some of the features you will find:
- Three separate engines, each with distinctive characteristics, can be used together or individually
- Sixteen engine kits for the ultimate in multi-layering of engines, or for synthesized drum kits
- Vector Control, manage up to four independent sounds on any channel with faders or an X/Y midi joystick
- Solo step through up to 16 sounds seamlessly while playing in real time (including vector sounds)
- Microtonal Tuning, Scala-compatible scales and keymaps
- Extensive Midi-Learn, capture almost all internal controls and many switches with ordinary 7-bit values, or NRPNs, or even 7-bit NRPNs, then edit the responses
- Command Line Access, headless operation and high accessibility, for those with sight- or motor control issues
- Rich variations of tone and timbre, Yoshimi provides the means to ensure no two notes are ever identical – just like in the real world
yoshimi.sourceforge.net
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshimi_(synthesizer)
Classic game sounds in VST form. As heard in late 80s / early 90s sound cards. Powered by DOSBox emulation.
bsutherland.github.io/JuceOPLVSTi
github.com/bsutherland/JuceOPLVSTi
Snd is a sound editor modelled loosely after Emacs. It can be customized and extended using either s7 (included in the Snd sources), Ruby, or Forth. Snd is free; the code is available via anonymous FTP as Snd tarball.
ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/
ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/snd
sourceforge.net/projects/snd
Triceratops is an analogue style polyphonic subtractive synthesizer plugin, for use with the LV2 plugin architecture, at this time there is no standalone version. An up to date version of the LV2 library is required along with a suitable host (e.g. Qtractor, Jalv, Ardour).
www.thunderox.com/triceratops
sourceforge.net/projects/triceratops
Project SWAMI, Sampled Waveforms And Musical Instruments, is a collection of free software for editing, managing and playing musical instruments for MIDI music composition. Current focus is primarily the SoundFont format, which is an open file format for digital audio “sample” based instruments.
www.swamiproject.org
sourceforge.net/projects/swami
Helm runs in GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. Run Helm as a standalone synthesizer or as an LV2, VST, VST3 or AU plugin. Comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
These are audio plugins in the LV2 format, developed for Linux. Most are suitable for live use (exceptions are noted in the description).
- Cellular Automaton Synth
- Envelope Follower
- Hip2B
- Cheap Distortion
- Stuck
github.com/ssj71/infamousPlugins
ssj71.github.io/infamousPlugins/plugs
A multi-platform software synthesiser emulating (somewhat inaccurately) pre-GM MIDI devices such as the Roland MT-32, CM-32L, CM-64 and LAPC-I.
munt.sourceforge.net/
sourceforge.net/projects/munt/
Multi Oscillator Linear Open Source Synthesizer. The purpose of this synth is to emulate various 80’s synths in a single low CPU module. It is available as a stand-alone exe or 32/64 bits VST.
sourceforge.net/projects/moloss/files
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:
timidity.sourceforge.net
- 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
sourceforge.net/projects/timidity
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.
