Music Production Software

Most of you will be familiar with FL Studio, and I know many of you swear by it. Well the latest addition, FL Studio 8, has been made available, the culmination of 10 years of FLstudio development, and it looks to have a whole bunch of useful new features.

Celemony have announced that their upcoming release of their Melodyne v2 Plugin will include Direct Note Access, which allows for MIDI-like complex alteration of audio data, even when those notes are buried in chords, and even other instruments. It's pretty amazing stuff.

You can take a single audio recording or sample, and break it into its component notes - and then adjust those notes accordingly, whether it be pitch shifting, moving the notes position, or the length of a particular note within a chord being played. The list goes on.

Here is one of the examples from the video, showing a single audio recording full of chords, expanded out into all its individual notes. Each of these single notes can then be altered independantly of the rest of the notes.

The best way to see what this new Direct Note Access is capable of, is to check out their announcement video below, which contains several examples of it in action.

While the majority of home musicians and small studios use either Macs or Windows based PCs, there are a growing number of Linux users wanting to setup audio sequencing and editing software on their chosen operating system.

One of the leading audio and MIDI sequencers for Linux is, the rather oddly named, Rosegarden.

The main sequencer view of Rosegarden - similar to many sequencer layouts on other operating systems:

The notation view of Rosegarden:

There are a range of different mastering software options available these days, and one which has remained popular over the last few years is the T-Racks 24 mastering suite.

The creators of FLstudio, Image Line, have just announced their foray in the DJ software market, with their offering, Deckadance.

This looks like a handy little effect plugin, that I'm sure some of you guys doing live performances could use.

Many of you are avid FLstudio users, and some no doubt will have been trying the beta versions of the up and coming official release.

While it's still an early release, the free Vocov vocoder VSTi still sounds capable of some cool effects.

FXpansion are most known for their drum sampler software BFD, with it's premium quality acoustic drum kits, and their Guru software sampler with it's assignable MPC style banks of samples, but it turns out they also do synths.

Free synths, and excellent ones at that. They have made their Orca VST Synth available for free download at their website (linked below).

Many of you will recognize the Native Instruments name, as they've built a reputation for extremely intricate, and powerful, studio software. Even if some of it is insanely complex!

They have put out several great software synths, such as Reaktor, Absynth, FM8, and the aptly named Massive, and also have a couple of cool samplers, Kontakt and Battery.

These and several of Native Instrument's other programs and effects are available as demo software, which you can check out here.