This is TJ, in this video I want to quickly share with you 5 programs that are awesome
tools for working with music and audio on your computer.
These programs are audacity, Linux multimedia student, ardour, mixx and spek, and all these
programs are completely free to download and use for both personal and commercial use.
They’re also all open source software and if you want to download them and try them
out for yourself you can find download links at my website TJ free.com.
Lets take a look at the first program audacity.
Audacity is an audio recording program.
This blue part here is actually the audio file I just barely recorded, I can play it.
Okay we can then apply different effects to this audio file I just recorded, we can for
example for dramatic effect revers the whole selection.
You can use this program for a lot of things and its pretty easy to use, has a simple interface.
You can use it for example you can take the lyrics off of a song so you have a just a
karaoke type version.
You can take an audio recording and change the pitch, the speed, the tempo, you can amplify
it, it’s just got a lot of different effects you can use and it’s great for recording
and capturing audio.
You can then export it in wave format, you can also get pluggins to export it in MP3
format and things like that.
And then you can use those recordings to work in some of these over programs we’re going
to look at.
Audacity works on windows, Macintosh and Linux, so does this next one, LMMS, it’ll work
on Linux, Macintosh, and windows.
And it is a program very similar to fruity loops studio, so you can create some pretty
cool music with it.
You can use audio samples like things you’ve recor4ded yourself or you can also create
synthesized music.
I’ll show you can example of a piece of a demo that comes with the program.
You can listen to each track individually.
Here is the bass line.
This is one of the melody parts.
This baseline editor is pretty easy to use, as far as the melodies and things you can
edit them.
This has a keyboard.
If you have a midi keyboard you can input it that way or you can just click and move
these notes around.
And when you play it, so we’ve kinda changed the way the song is supposed to be.
Lot’s of cool things, it has a bunch of built in synthesizing tools and effects and
cool stuff like that.
Fun one to play with, LMMS.
Ardour is a Linux only program and it’s an audio workstation.
it’s great for tacking recorded tracks and piecing them together like you would in a
recording studio.
You record the audio and then the drums and then the different instruments.
Here’s to guitar parts that I recorded in and tried to synch together.
It lets you drag the different parts around.
You can also apply lots of different effects similar to audacity but it’s designed for
working with multiple tracks ardour is.
Again this is a Linux only program.
I’m running windows 7, the reason I can show it to you is because I am running a virtual
machine.
That’s an option too, if you have a windows computer and want to use ardour, you can install
a virtual Linux machine to us it.
This next program Mixx is a DJ mixing tool, you can use it for live broadcasting or for
dances, clubs, parties, things like that.
I’ll just show you a sample of what it can do.
So all different kinds of effects, and you drag and drop these up to here.
Let me show you, if I pause this one i can drag a new one in over here.
And then when we start playing it we can mix over to it.
It has the disks here.
Anyway, it’s a fun one to play with.
You can export, you can save and record you music you create with it too.
You can also set it up to do an auto DJ where you put a bunch of songs and it will jump
to the next one and play and mix your music together that way.
Spek is that last one I want to show you.
And spek is a spectrogram analyzer for MP3 and a couple different formats of audio files.
So it shows you, for example, it tells you the quality, visually represents the quality
of an audio file.
That’s what I use it for anyway.
So if I go to a file here, I can throw it in here and I can tell right away that the
tops of all these audio files have been clipped off, so even though it says it’s a high
quality audio file from the specs of it.
I can tell that it’s not really that great.
And I guess in theory you can tell by listening to it too, but it’s a great tool for a quick
glance at what quality of audio you going to be working with.
Okay, well those are the programs I wanted to share with you today, I appreciate your
time in watching this video.
Check out my other ones I’ve got another video on music composition for composing sheet
music, you might be interested in that.
Yea, check out my other videos and have a great day.