Sound Bytes

Sound advice on the best audio engineering freeware.

Ever heard of a lassie called Euterpe? No na? Not surprising. She was one of the nine Muses in Greek mythology, million of moons ago maybe. The daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Euterpe (bolo "you-TER-pee") is the mellifluous muse of music who has always inspired mankind to weave harmonic waves of acoustic melody through the ages.

Be that as it may, for you audiophiles who itch to tune and tinker with audio files on your PCs, queued up here is some freeware that’ll be real music to your ears…

Audacity
Audacity is an awesome cross-platform digital audio editor for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux. You can use this free Open Source programme to record, edit, mix, convert et al. It records from microphone, line input, etc., dubs, creates multi-track recordings, handling upto 16 channels at once. It records and edits 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit (floating point) samples at up to 96 KHz. You can import and edit files, combine them with other recordings and export your recordings in MP3, WAV, AIFF, AU, and Ogg Vorbis. However, it doesn’t support WMA, AAC, and other proprietary formats yet.

Apart form standard editing features Audacity allows unlimited undos and redos, as well as editing and mixing an unlimited number of tracks. Altering pitch and tempo, and removal of static, hiss, hum, or other constant background noises is also possible. You can alter frequencies with equalisation, FFT filter, and bass boost effects and adjust volumes using Compressor, Amplify, and Normalise effects. Free lunch? That’s more like a free feast, Mr. Wannabe Soundman!
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Gungirl Sequencer
Never heard of that one, have ya? Well, Gungirl is an audiosequencer. A sequencer is a hardware device or software application used to “sequence” timed events into a certain order. In digital audio and music, a sequencer is the core of virtually every computer-based recording studio used to record and arrange MIDI and/or audio events into patterns and musical compositions.

Yet, unlike most sequencers, Gungirl is not a MIDI sequencer. And this makes it even more Gungirl is ideal for beginners with any additional complications. Also, it has an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface and an uncomplicated, idiot-proof file manager. It can handle eight audio tracks. It supports 16-bit, 44,100 Hz audio and exports to WAV format.
http://ggseq.sourceforge.net/

Hydrogen Advanced Drum Machine
Amit Kilam, Shivamani, Ringo Starr, Billy Cobham… and other Papajis of Percussion, hear this: Hydrogen is an advanced Windows-based drum machine out to challenge your ilk! Created by Alessandro Cominu, an Italian programmer, Hydrogen aims to bring professional--yet simple and intuitive--pattern-based drum programming to involved drum aficionados.

It features a pattern-based sequencer, with an unlimited number of patterns and the ability to chain patterns into a song. It claims to “generate up to 64 ticks per pattern, with individual levels per event, and variable pattern lengths.” Hydrogen has 32 instrument tracks with volume, mute, solo, pan capabilities and multi-layer support for instruments (16 samples max for each instrument). It can import and export song files and has unique human velocity, human time, pitch and swing functions. No hum-drum affair this, eh…
www.hydrogen-music.org/

Kristal Audio Engine
A modular multitrack recorder, audio sequencer and mixer for newbies. You can pick up all required nuances of recording, mixing and mastering digital audio here. The mixing console is the main app; the audio sequencer, live audio input, effects modules etc. can be loaded on as plug-ins as and when you are up to handling them.

The app does 16 audio tracks and has a 32-bit floating point audio engine which can handle 44.1 to 192 KHz sample rates and 16/24/32 bit audio files. It has a triband parametric equaliser and supports WAV, AIFF, FLAC, OGG Vorbis formats. It also comes with features like audio clip fade-in/fade-out/crossfade and unlimited undos/redos.
www.kvraudio.com/get/866.html

Audiograbber
Jaisa naam, waisa kaam. Audiograbber grabs digital audio from CDs. It doesn’t route anything via your sound card. It simply copies all the audio digitally. It can automatically “normalise” music, delete the silent seconds from start and/or end tracks, and use a variety external MP3 encoders, or deploy internal MP3/WMA encoders for MP3 file creation. You can make knock-offs of your vinyl LPs or cassettes with Audiograbber and convert the audio into WAVs or MP3s.

Audiograbber has a neat and easy interface that is fairly flexible. You’ll be surprised but, it doesn’t mess with your Windows at all: No DLLs, OCXs, device drivers, spyware, adware intrusions; no evidence of it in the Windows Registry or win.ini. So go grab it.
www.audiograbber.com-us.net/

ALL FOR A SONG!

Audiri
[Online music/music video resource]
www.audiri.com

foobar2000
[Media player]
www.foobar2000.org/

iTunes
[Audio player/organiser]
www.apple.com/itunes

Pandora
[Online music radio]
www.pandora.com

wxMusik
[Media player/library]
http://musik.berlios.de