In The Garageband
In this article, Thomas Wilburn helps us successfully navigate the murky waters of free PC audio software to find some hidden treasures.
In the Garageband
If you're just starting out with music production on a Mac, Apple's Garageband is the obvious software option: while not yet quite professional-grade, it's included with OS X and capable of producing perfectly acceptable results. On Linux, there's a variety of free recording applications, assuming that you can get them running. But what about the vast majority of home studio musicians, who are running Windows XP or Vista? While Microsoft may have tried to challenge iMovie with its Movie Maker, or iPhoto with the Photo Gallery, there's not currently a prosumer digital audio workstation (DAW) bundled with Windows.
The good news, however, is that PC-based musicians don't need a built-in application to start production without spending a lot of money. Windows users have plenty of budget prosumer audio options, meeting (or even exceeding) the capabilities of Garageband. In general, these programs can be sorted into three categories: OEM, cheap, or (perhaps best of all) free.
OEM
Original Equipment Manufacturer, or OEM, is a tech-industry term for products resold by another company, either under the new brand or packaged with something else. In the case of digital audio, companies making music hardware (such as an audio interface or a MIDI keyboard) often include recording software as an added value. If you plan to do more than just drag loops around on a timeline, you'll probably want to pick up a USB or PCI audio interface anyway, since computer sound cards tend to have lousy input options, so you may find yourself looking at an unanticipated bonus in the form of a software installation CD. And while you may be inclined to discount the bundled programs as just another bullet-point on the packaging, don't be too hasty: some OEM software can be surprisingly effective. There are two common DAW packages included with prosumer audio hardware, Cubase LE and Ableton Live Lite.
A cut-down version of Steinberg's Cubase SX 3, Cubase LE comes packed in with offerings from Presonus, Tascam, Korg, and several other companies. In my opinion, Cubase LE is as close to "professional" (whatever that means) as many people may ever need to be. It includes a usable set of effects, can host the many VST plugins freely available online, and provides full automation envelopes for track and plugin parameters. Its main limitations are that it can only host two virtual instruments at a time, allows only two effect plugins per track (not including the built-in channel EQ), and can contain a maximum of 48 audio and 64 MIDI tracks in each project. While the instrument limit might chafe for electronic or solo artists, in all other regards Cubase LE is more than enough to make great-sounding recordings of bands or multi-instrumentalists.
Ableton Live (the full version) is a real paradigm shifter for audio software: it's as much a time-warping performance tool as a recording suite. Ableton Live Lite, the OEM version, lets you see all the great stuff from the full version, but locks much of it away from actual use. This is frustrating, but the good news is that it's practically free, much like Cubase LE. Buy a MIDI keyboard, and you'll probably get Live Lite. Buy any of Line 6's computer products, and you'll get Live Lite. It even comes with Pro Tools LE hardware. I've owned at least four or five of these CDs, and had to give them away to other people just to clear out my desk--if you have any musician friends, ask around. For free, Live Lite's not a bad deal--it's basically a 23rd century tape machine, restricting you to four total tracks (MIDI and audio) and only a couple plugins or instruments. With planning and clever use of Live Lite's flexible routing, it's possible to combine tracks in a "bounce" and create more complicated mixes, just as recording artists used to do on tape-based four-track recorders. Ableton recently released Live LE, a mid-priced version of Live, to try to cater to the beginner/low-cost market, but it's crippled down to practically the same level as the OEM version and costs $250. If you're curious about Live, I'd recommend that you start with Lite and upgrade, instead of paying for LE.
Cheap
Let's say that you've already got all the hardware you want to buy, or you're just trying to test the waters and don't want to spend more than a decent dinner for two. Believe it or not, there is an option for making great music at under $50: Reaper. Created by Justin Frankel, the brains behind WinAmp and Gnutella, Reaper is a complete DAW that's $50 for personal use. As you might expect from his previous projects, Frankel isn't a stickler for licensing and copy protection: the shareware download of Reaper from www.reaper.fm is fully-functional and never expires, so you should feel free to try it out for as long as you want before purchasing (although Reaper will gently nag you during startup after 30 days). The installer is only a 2MB download, making it both cheap and easy to try. However, if you start making money with Reaper, Frankel trusts users to upgrade to the $225 commercial license.
Thanks to digital technology, You don't have to spend a lot of money to make music any more
Impressively at this price range, Reaper does everything that SONAR, Cubase, and Pro Tools do, and some things that they don't. Reaper has unbelievably flexible routing options and prides itself on its ability to change almost any parameter while recording. It supports the ASIO driver standard for low-latency recording, and if you own other audio software that you'd like to integrate, Reaper even appears as an ASIO sound card for recording from other applications, or it supports ReWire if you prefer. I'm not alone in my admiration: it's gotten rave reviews from music magazines. The only bad news, as far as I'm concerned, is that some parts of Reaper still look and feel a little clumsy. While it's skinnable, that doesn't necessarily make Reaper the easiest software to use. Still, the interface has improved immeasurably since I first used it (version .62, I think), so it'll only get better as Frankel continually updates it. This is an insanely powerful tool, and there's nothing on Mac or PC that competes with it in terms of value.
Free
Whatever else you can say about the next few programs, at least the price is hard to beat. First of all, for a free multitrack recorder, a good standby is Krystal, available from www.kreatives.org. Free for educational or hobby purposes, it's a multitrack recording program with an attractive and straightforward interface and VST support (with four plugins included). It's roughly comparable to Garageband 2, but doesn't have the looping support. It also lacks MIDI functionality, plugin automation, and more complicated routing options, and the input routing is a little weird. Still, for its intended purpose of simply recording and arranging audio, Krystal does the job well. However, if you make money using Krystal, they ask that you pay the still-affordable 25 euro commercial license fee. There's supposed to be an updated version (K2) coming soon, but they've been saying that for a couple of years now, and no sign of it has appeared, so don't hold your breath.
Oftentimes, when beginners ask advice online about recording software, Audacity gets recommended. An open-source DAW available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Audacity really is free--no matter what the circumstances, even for commercial purposes. But I actually don't recommend using it for music projects, for a variety of reasons. It doesn't have much in the way of plugin support, it only records in stereo, there's no support for low-latency recording like ASIO, and it distorts at the drop of a hat (I suspect it actually mixes at the same bit depth as the project). What's worse, Audacity teaches a lot of bad habits--after using it for several months to mix podcasts, then graduating to Pro Tools and SONAR, I had a lot to unlearn in a real DAW environment.
Audacity is also sometimes pitched as a wave editor instead of a multitrack recorder--and since Krystal requires an external program for fine editing, you might think that Audacity could still help in a free studio setup. But instead, consider Wavosaur (www.wavosaur.com). It doesn't do multitrack recording, but it does amazing work on multichannel samples or audio clips, and it's also free. Wavosaur can use ASIO drivers for low-latency editing or very simple recording, creates looped samples for use in many soft samplers, includes its own set of effects plus VST-based processing with real-time auditioning, and can even batch process sets of multiple files. And Wavosaur is extremely portable--it can run perfectly well off a USB disk, and doesn't store anything in the registry. It's my go-to program for quick and simple audio editing.
Tracking On The Cheap
Thanks to digital technology, you don't have to spend a lot of money to make music any more (not that it hurts).
The ability to create great-sounding mixes is no longer restricted to expensive studios, but can be done
on a home computer. And while the software listed above may not make the process quite as easy, or
the end product quite as polished, as the big-name DAW packages, it's certainly miles above the
entry-level of only a few years ago. This is a great time to be making music--take advantage of it!
Author
Thomas Wilburn is a writer and multimedia producer in the Washington, DC area. He got his start at the World Bank, where he edited educational radio programs, voiced self-running presentations, and created the institution's first podcast series. He currently works on new media and multimedia for a political news organization. Thomas also writes about digital audio at Ars Technica, as well as his personal blog, Mile Zero.