MusicRadar

Today's freeware apps rival many commercial tools, and they look the business too

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Never before has making music been so affordable, easy and accessible. A thriving industry has driven prices of instruments and recording equipment progressively downwards, enabling a whole generation of music lovers to write and record their own tunes without spending a fortune on gear.

However, thanks to passionate - and crucially, generous - software developers, music makers can also legitimately download powerful music production tools for absolutely nothing. And, amazingly, these often rival the commercial products in terms of quality and usability.

We’ve rounded-up 27 of the best free plug-ins and other software tools that we could find, providing a link and screengrab for each one. Everything from synths to sequencers is covered – most are PC only (although there is stuff out there for Mac), but all can be downloaded and used without charge.

We think this is a pretty comprehensive list, but do you know better? If there’s an amazing free music-making tool that we haven’t covered here, let us and your fellow musicians know about it in the Comments section below.

Index - Jump to:
Sampling
Audio editing
Drum machines
Real instruments/ROMplers
Synthesizers
Effects
Sequencers
Miscellaneous

Sampling - back to index

1. HighLife R1
PC – VST/VSTi host

DiscoDSP’s HighLife R1 is a fantastic VST sampler with a plethora of features, including effects, amplitude and modulation filters, and a multimode filter. It’s a breeze to create patches from scratch, even compared to some commercial samplers such as Kontakt and HALion.

Screengrab
Website: http://www.discodsp.com/highlife/

Audio editing - back to index

2. Audacity
Mac/PC - Standalone

Audacity is an impressively fully-featured audio editor. It’s easy to use and there’s a large library of optional extras including export as MP3 and VST plug-in support.

Screengrab
Website: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/