Free audio software - Definition and Overview

Free audio software is free software that can be used to listen to, modify, create and/or author audio signals and music. There is free audio software available for Windows and Mac OS, but the largest quantity of the free audio software only runs on GNU/Linux.

Dynebolic, Planet CCRMA and AGNULA are GNU/Linux distributions designed for musicians and/or audio engineers.

Technologies

• ALSA is the sound card management system in the Linux kernel
• LADSPA is a plugin architecture for digital sound processing
• DSSI is a plugin architecture for software synthesizers and the like
• JACK is a daemon that provides low latency connections between JACKified applications. JACK runs on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. It can use ALSA, OSS and PortAudio.

Audio Recording and Editing

• Ardour
• Audacity
• Ecasound
• MusE (not to be confused with MuSE; see below.)
• Rosegarden
• Sweep

Trackers

• Cheesetracker is an Impulse Tracker clone
• Soundtracker [1] (http://www.soundtracker.org)

Programming languages

• Csound has recently been released under the LGPL.
• SuperCollider
• ChucK is a new concurrent, on-the-fly audio programming language, (just released!) [2] (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/)
• see computer music programming languages

Modular systems

• SpiralSynthModular
• Pure data
• jMax
• SynFactory
• aRts

Streaming

• MuSE is for mixing, encoding, and streaming of encoded audio, not to be confused with MusE; see above.
• Icecast is a broadcast server to serve audio signals to clients over http.

Softsynths

• ZynAddSubFX

Audio analysis

see spectrum analyzer

• WaveSurfer [3] (http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/)

External links

• Dave Phillips' Sound & MIDI Software For Linux (http://sound.condorow.net/)