Music programs

[Submeg]

midi equipment is cool, but you can get a program called Reason which does all that for you! You dont even need the equipment, but it sounds exactly the same! It is an excellent program, but alas $1000 AUD to buy :P I think I'll get some turntables first!

About the unprotected tracks: I won't be downloading/uploading my music onto p2p networks anyway...so I wont be worrying about that.

Fruity Loops I have heard before, but the program Harrison mentioned first was perfect! It is capable do doing all that stuff as well! It's excellent!

Cheers for the help people!

[Harrison]

I've heard of reason. There are many other programs similar to that that utilise the abilities of the sound card in the computer rather than requiring external midi devices. Some even emulate some of the best hardware from companies such as Roland and Yamaha such as drum machines and sequencing units so are great for a small studio without much room, or anyone on a tight budget.

But saying that, you still wouldn't be able to quite achieve the same quality or results as dedicated hardware.

As for programs like fruity loops, even for non-musicians like myself they are great fun to play around with. The best of this type has to be Adobe Audition 2. This used to come bundled with the Adobe production bundle, but with the latest CS3 studio release Adobe have dropped in in favour of a new package called Adobe Soundbooth with doesn't contain the power of scope of Audition, but is instead tailors for production designers who want to be able to easily clean up audio and combine sound tracks with music and other tracks in sequence with video and other visual sources. For this it is very good.

If you are interested in trying out any of this software give me a PM.

[Submeg]

So what was Audition 2 like? What were its uses?

[Harrison]

Audition is a professional audio production application that is designed for sound designers, recording and mastering engineers and musicians to use.

It contains a lot of features including multitrack mixing, as well as music loop editing with thousands of included loops ready to use. It also supports batch processing and scripting along with audio burning, extraction, and conversion. Out of all the music applications I've used over the years it is the most complex and contains pretty much everything audio based you could think of except for midi sequencing.

I had a look and it seems that Adobe will be continuing the development of Audition as a standalone product alongside Soundbooth. The official Audition site gives a lot of details about audition if you want to see what it can really do and there is a comparison of Audition against Soundbooth if you want to see what the differences are. Looking at the comparision it is easy to see why Adobe changed to Soundbooth for their production bundles that is aimed at video and flash developers who don't have a background in audio. Audition has also been renamed from Audition CS2 to Audition 2, showing it is now a standalone product instead of integrated into the rest of the Adobe CS suite.

[Submeg]

Ah, cheers for that. seems I will hold off on that for a while...Reason is complicated enough :S