Schism Tracker is a free and open-source reimplementation of Impulse Tracker, a program used to create high quality music without the requirements of specialized, expensive equipment, and with a unique “finger feel” that is difficult to replicate in part. The player is based on a highly modified version of the ModPlug engine, with a number of bugfixes and changes to improve IT playback.
Where Impulse Tracker was limited to i386-based systems running MS-DOS, Schism Tracker runs on almost any platform that SDL supports, and has been successfully built for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, and even Wii. Schism will most likely build on any architecture supported by GCC4 (e.g. alpha, m68k, arm, etc.) but it will probably not be as well-optimized on many systems.
Incudine is used to design software synthesizers or sound plugins from scratch, exploiting the expressive power of Common Lisp, without the constraints of using pre-built unit generators. It is also a compositional tool that produces high quality sounds, controllable at the sample level, while defining and redefining the digital signal processors and the musical structures on-the-fly.
JJazzLab is a Midi-based application dedicated to backing tracks generation. You type in chord symbols, select a rhythm (style), then the application generates a complete backing track with drums, bass, guitar, piano, strings, etc.
The objective is to generate intelligent and interesting backing tracks, i.e tracks which are:
Buzztrax aims to be a music studio that allows one to compose songs using only a computer with a soundcard. If you’ve used tracker programs like FastTracker, Impulse Tracker, or the original AMIGA SoundTracker, that will give you an idea of how one can sequence music in Buzztrax.
The Buzztrax editor uses a similar concept, where a song consists of a sequence with tracks and in each track one uses patterns with events (musical notes and control changes). In contrast to other Tracker programs, tracks are not simply sample players: a user can make a song using an arrangement of virtual audio plugins that are linked together to create different effects. Each of these machines can be controlled real-time or via patterns in the sequencer.
Efflux is an application that allows users to create music inside their browser. Efflux is a tracker and follows conventions familiar to those who have used anything from Ultimate Soundtracker to Renoise. All sounds are oscillator (or wave table) based and can be routed through an effects signal path, making Efflux a modular synthesis environment, where the synths are driven by the tracker.
JJazzLab-X is a Midi-based framework dedicated to backing tracks generation -some people talk about “play-along songs” or “auto-accompaniment applications”. You type in chord symbols, select a rhythm (style), then the application generates a complete backing track with drums, bass, guitar, piano, strings, etc.
The objective is to develop a jam buddy able to quickly generate intelligent and interesting backing tracks: realistic and non-boring backing tracks which you can easily adjust to a specific song.
SuperCollider is a platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, used by musicians, artists, and researchers working with sound. It consists of:
scsynth, a real-time audio server with hundreds of unit generators (“UGens”) for audio analysis, synthesis, and processing
supernova, an alternative server to scsynth with support for parallel DSP on multi-core processors
sclang, an interpreted programming language that controls the servers
scide, an editing environment for sclang with an integrated help system
sclang comes with its own package manager, called Quarks. scsynth and supernova both support third-party plugins via C and C++ APIs.
In 1992 Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion developed a simple text file format to write lead sheets, songs with lyrics and chords, and a tool to create neatly printed lead sheets out of these text files. The tool was called chord, and the text files were called chord files. It soon became a popular way to write lead sheets and many users and tools adopted this format for similar purposes. For still unknown reasons people started calling the files chordpro files.
The ChordPro (also known as Chord) is an ASCII text file format for transcribing songs with chords and lyrics. The format was originally used for guitar, but is used for variety of other string instruments, such as ukulele, bass guitar or mandolin. Although this format is legible as it is, there are many popular programs for displaying, transposing and printing. Files in this format often have extensions such as .crd, .chopro, .pro, .chordpro or .cho.
The Audio File 