Audio and Music Software in general

I have been a musician all my life. When I was ten I started piano lessons and was classically trained then, at the age of sixteen, I taught myself to play guitar. I gigged with a few bands around local venues and got to know the local involved in the business and then ended up take over a rehearsal rooms. My plan was turn the rehearsal rooms into a recording studio so that bands could not just practise, they could record aswell. Having five fairly large rooms already with mixers, drum kits and microphones I decided to snap up a couple of pc's. The next dilemma that I was in was that I didn't know what software would be best to use. My only ...  Read the complete review

Getting bored with your PC? Wanna make some chunes? You know, - CHUNES! Like la la de da and stuff. You need a little PC studio set-up that's what you need mate. Bet you've already got a soundcard on your PC haven't you? What you probably don't know is that your soundcard is almost certainly Midi compatible. Here's how you find out. Open search on your PC (don't know how to open search huh?). OK, right-click on start and choose search. In the 'search' box type *.mid and in the 'look-in:' box, click on the dropdown menu and choose 'Local Hard Drives'. Press Return and let it rip. Don't worry; all ...  Read the complete review

Many people use computers to record, edit, clean up and store audio and a number of powerful (and expensive) software packages are available to achieve this. However, what can you (legally) do if you want to use your PC as a recording system but can't afford the £200 or so for the commercial software? Luckily for us, a number of programmers have written suitable software and let it loose on the Internet. These allow you to perform all of the basic recording, editing and processing tasks. I should point out that all of the software described in this article is freeware - The programmers allow you to use the software for free and pass copies on to others ...  Read the complete review

Transcription is an important skill for musicians - to listen to a song, make useful notes and figure out how to play it. Having recently joined a couple of bands, I've had a stack of tunes, many of them unfamiliar, for which I've had to pick up the bass line and so I had a look for computer-based tools to assist me. What I found was Transcribe! (http://www.seventhstring.demon.co.uk/xscribe/), a shareware package designed to assist with this process. It costs about £28 ($40) but has a 30-day trial period, so one quick download later I was ready to put it to the test. The starting point is a digital recording of the music you want to work on. ...  Read the complete review

There is no doubt that in the PC based MP3 player world at the moment, WinAMP is a very strong contender. One glance at the many features on offer, coupled with the fact that it is available as a totally free download, and there is no wonder so many computer users are running WinAMP. As opposed to the more expensive commercially available MP3 players, such as MusicMatch (although excellent in its own right), WinAMP succeeds by ditching any feature not necessary to the playback of music, which results in a very small download time and tiny working memory. So you will find no "CD-ripping" facilities, WAV-MP3 converter or automatic CD burning here. If it ...  Read the complete review