Have you ever considered to give it a try in the music industry? Are you looking up with admiration at music producers like Armin Van Buuren, Paul Oakenfold or Carl Cox? Maybe you didn't went after this dream because you considered they produce this music in very expensive studios and you will never be able to match the quality and the functions of professional hardware synthesizers. Well, you can just give it a try with music production without spending a dime out of your pocket. In Linux there are several free music production software, and the best are LMMS and Rosegarden. This review will be about LMMS, because it installs the easiest and will not give you headaches about a bunch of missing libraries and jack. With a little bit of talent and a little bit of luck you will become a star in no time.

At first you will notice a splash screen and then a window where you can setup LMMS. The most important settings are related to the buffer size, window behavior, sound and midi interface. One thing that I like is that when you move the buffer slider it shows how many frames are buffered and also what impact this has on the latency. Another nice thing is that you can make the program's interface display it's windows in a centralized interface or in separate windows just like in GIMP. The last two are self explanatory. Note that you will not have to use jack with this program, but I still recommend it. Unfortunately I wasn't able to test the midi interface, because I don't have a midi keyboard.

About LMMS interface I can say only one thing. I love it! It has a very good usability and it also looks nice. Applications like this are rare in Linux. When you fire up LMMS you will see two main windows: the song editor and the beat+bassline editor (I would have used the term “baseline” but I don't want to upset the developers). Another versatile tool you will definitely play with is the piano-roll tool.

The Song Editor

From the song editor you can add beats/basslines and sample tracks. Those are very nicely displayed in a timeline. They can be repositioned, resized and copied with amassing ease. With this basic operations you will arrange your sound passages in a song. Segments can be renamed and the color can be changed. Imagine how easy is to manage your project. Tracks can be turned on and off with just a click of a mouse and they can be cloned with two. With double-click or single right click you can rename them. In the little drop-down box that shows the amount of zoom, left-clicking increments the zoom and right-clicking zooms out the timeline. This allows fast and precise aligning. I wonder what you can't do in this window?! When adding sample tracks you should know that this software supports a fair amount of audio formats, but doesn't support the most common ones: mp3 and wma. I really can't figure out why those two are left out. Audio samples are displayed as waveforms in the timeline and the piano segments are displayed as patterns. Neat!!! The rest of the magic happens in the beat+bassline editor and in the piano-roll window.

Beat+Bassline Editor

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