A Journey through OSS Music Editors

Lately, I've been playing around with different open source software (OSS) music editors, as well as freely available for personal use editors. I've had an itch for a while to get back into composing again, so I figured now would be a good time.

I experimented briefly with Windows-based editors. They seemed to be in the categories of either wave-based mixing programs or MIDI-based. A few of the MIDI ones allowed for limited, proprietary addition of wave channels, but they were fairly limited in their abilities.

The next thing I tried were MIDI-based programs for Linux, since I happen to run a Gentoo distro on my primary PC at home. Rosegarden looked the most promising, but all attempts at getting MIDI to work correctly failed me. Maybe I just don't know enough about it to get it working correctly.

So, finally, I settled down to learn a tracker. Some old school PC users out there may remember the old MOD files that played samples instead of FM synthesis for music. Anyway, for what I'm wanting to do, which includes possibly remixing songs, this looked like the best answer for my needs. Also, with the availability of free-for-use high quality sampled sounds on the Internet now, this is definitely a good way to go.

I'm using Milky Tracker right now, which is based on the old FastTracker 2. The tech behind creating tracker songs doesn't seem to have advanced much since the mid 90's, so I'm pondering developing a studio for music to try this out.