The topic for this week is creating music on your computer. Depending on your operating system and budget you can spend quite a lot or very little on music software. The style or genre of music you play will also affect what choices you have. In general I tend to prefer free or inexpensive software, but that route can be tricky for a novice computer user or musician. One of my favorite free tools (open source) for music creation is Audacity. You can use it to record audio from a microphone or instrument plugged into your PC sound card, edit and apply effects, and save your creation. The program is easy enough for kids to use (I know of one 9-year old who loves it) and deep enough for a pro. Audacity works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix. Give it a try, and give me some feedback if you like it (or if you think it’s crap). You can view a Wikipedia article on Audacity here. In future installments I’ll post other recommended music creation programs.
This week’s picture was created using POV-Ray for Windows, a cool 3D rendering program with a long history. A Wikipedia article about POV-Ray is here.
Click on the picture to get a full sized view.
The loops of the week were created with Orion Pro.
The website of the week is a web comic called Count your Sheep. It’s funny, gentle, and generally suitable for kids and wistful adults. The Wikipedia article about CYS is here…
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment