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What's something that's free that everyone should know about?

I'll start by plugging Harvard's free courses catalog as well as Udemy

Edit: Gonna add 2 more I remembered-

Blender - I wish I had more time to learn it, but I did start the infamous "Donut Tutorial" once!

Watch Cartoons Online - Lots of good older stuff!

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  • Sort of, I found that portion. Here is my workflow in Garage Band.

    • Pick loop and sound speed (has a ticker before it starts), and place on timeline
    • Add instruments and play with melodies from a keyboard plugged in and record them.
    • Use the melody.
    • Record some vocals
    • Add more layers of sounds or loops
    • Create file

    This takes about 4 hours to make an opening song that I usually love.

    In LMMS

    • I can find some loops, but they seem to really point towards making your own, or maybe there are some loop vaults somewhere I could use?
    • I found some amazing instruments on the plugins4free site, but recording them with a keyboard seems hard somehow.
    • I have the studio (paid) version of Davinci Resolve, I guess I could just switch over there once I've made my loops?

    The rest seems easy and I like the set up.

    • Gotcha, now I have a better idea of what you're trying to do.

      Watching this video about looping in LMMS shows it can sorta be done, sometimes with some help from Audacity.

      If you're adding in more stuff like VST plugins and vocals, you may want to try out Waveform Free, which I checked is for iOS also, so you get a full modern DAW. It's the same product as their paid full version, just like 2 updates behind.

      For more premade loops, check out Looperman if you haven't already.

      It's not free, but I think I under $20 for the program and all the upgrades, if looping and sampling is something you want to focus on, check out Koala Sampler. I downloaded it the other week and have been sampling vinyl recordings from YouTube, it has an AI stem extractor to separate the instrument tracks, and then chopping and looping that.

      It has a built in simple synth now as well, and you can use a midi controller with it. Lots of videos are out there if you want to see how that works. You might be able to incorporate that into your setup.

      • I'm jumping around to many programs now, thanks for all of this info.

        Have you used Cakewalk? It seems great and a bit too good to be true.

        • That's the drawback of there being so much great free music stuff these days! You can get lost playing and never actually finish anything.

          I haven't used Cakewalk. It seems very powerful, but I see people say it's one of the harder DAWs to learn.

          I also hear Sonar discontinued Cakewalk Free and is moving to a paid license, though that was 2 years ago and Free is still available I think, but I don't know if it's being maintained any longer.

          • I just was going through it. I think it's updated and they're focusing on earning money with the licensing of your songs. The UI seems comfortable for me, but we'll see. Thanks for all of your help again.

    • If you want to do any loop and sample work FOSS style, then I'd highly highly recommend Bespoke Synth, easily the best FOSS modular DAW out there

      It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you're over it then it's a pleasure to use and easily the best open source DAW I've used so far (and I've tried alot)

      Biggest thing it has over LMMS: VST3 support, so you can actually use modern synth plugins like Surge XT, or dynamic EQ plugins like ZL Equalizer, or lo-fi plugins like CHOW Tape and MAIM

      Although, there is a FOSS workout to get VST3 working in LMMS using KV Element, which you can load as a VST2 that itself can run VST3's.

      I use to use that before Bespoke but it was very much a workaround, and I had this infuriating annoyance where KV Element would just send pitch-wheel signals to everything and detune my synths without me knowing, and I could not find any reason or fix, so I just stopped using LMMS in favor of Bespoke

      Hope this helped!!!

      • Bespoke looks really interesting, but I don't know if my mind could work that way. I'm a project manager, so seeing the entire song is the only way I think i could work. I've just recently become used to working with nodes in Davinci and I still prefer not to use them.

        It definitely helped to see what is out there, thanks for the great write up too.

253 comments