powerZwitch's Top 10 FOSS: Audio
FOSS = Free Open Source Software
Audacious is an advanced audio player. It is free, lightweight, based on GTK+, runs on Linux and many other *nix platforms and is focused on audio quality and supporting a wide range of audio codecs. There is also support for several visual styles from Winamp. Its advanced audio playback engine is considerably more powerful than GStreamer. Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player (BMP), which itself forked from XMMS.
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records, edit sound files, change the speed or pitch of a recording and much more.
Bosca Ceoil is all about looping, and designed that way at its heart. Songs are built up from lots of tiny 16 note patterns – the intended workflow is that you loop over these single patterns until you have something you like, then you start making variations. If you approach it this way, you’ll find it’s pretty decent at doing that – but it’s not very good at other things, like say, long melody lines. It is what it is! I made it for myself, and the way I work, but hopefully some of you out there will find it useful too. It’s free, and open source under the FreeBSD licence. If anyone wants to port it/fork it, go for it!
Clementine is a cross-platform free and open source music player and library organizer. It is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and the GStreamer multimedia framework, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music. It is available for Unix-like, Windows and Mac OS X.
Features: Search and play your local music library Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo and Icecast. Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX Visualizations from projectM Lyrics and artist biographies and photos Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music Download missing album cover art from Last.fm Native desktop notifications on Linux and Mac OS X Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player Queue manager Android remote control
LinuxSampler - free, open source pure software audio sampler with professional grade features. The LinuxSampler project was founded with the goal to produce a free, streaming capable open source pure software audio sampler with professional grade features, comparable to both hardware and commercial Windows/Mac software samplers and to introduce new features not yet available by any other sampler in the world.
LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio , which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.
Qmmp is an audio-player, written with help of Qt library. The user interface is similar to Winamp or xmms.
Extra features
XMMS and Winamp 2.x skins support 10-band equalizer MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+ streams support MMS support (experimental) MPRIS (1.0 and 2.0) removable device detection (via HAL or UDisks) video playback via Mplayer lyrics (using lyrics.wikia.com) cover art CUE sheet support embedded CUE support (for FLAC and WavPack) multiple playlists automatic charset detection for cue files and ShoutCast metadata playlist formats: m3u, pls, xspf ReplayGain support Last.fm/Libre.fm scrobbler CDDB support stream browser audio formats converter external programs execution on track change
Quod Libet is a Gapless GTK+-based audio player written in Python. Its designed around the idea that you know how to organize your music better than we do. It lets you make playlists based on regular expressions (dont worry, regular searches work too). It lets you display and edit any tags you want in the file. And it lets you do this for all the file formats it supports - Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, Musepack, and MOD.
Quod Libet easily scales to libraries of thousands of songs. It also supports most of the features you expect from a modern media player, like Unicode support, multimedia keys, and tag editing.
If you're happy with your current audio player and you don't want to switch to Quod Libet, you can use Ex Falso instead. Ex Falso is a program that uses the same tag editing backend as Quod Libet, but isn't connected to an audio player.
Schism Tracker is a free reimplementation of Impulse Tracker, a program used to create high quality music without the requirements of specialized, expensive equipment, and with a unique "finger feel" that is difficult to replicate in part. The player is based on a highly modified version of the Modplug engine, with a number of bugfixes and changes to improve IT playback.
Where Impulse Tracker was limited to i386-based systems running MS-DOS, Schism Tracker runs on almost any platform that SDL supports, and has been successfully built for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, BeOS, and even the Wii. Most development is currently done on i686 Linux. Schism will most likely build on any architecture supported by GCC4 (e.g. alpha, m68k, arm, etc.) but it will probably not be as well-optimized on many systems.
Traverso DAW is an audio recording and editing program which is very well suited to record a single voice, a band, an ensemble, a whole orchestra or any other source of music! Both the home and professional user will find Traverso attractive, it's clean interface is easy to learn, and enables you to work quickly and efficiently!
