AudioNodes

Anyone can fiddle with some downloaded audio samples, mix them up, throw in some effects and call it audio production. However, it takes talent and, more importantly, practice to create something great. You also need the right tools for the job.

AudioNodes is a music production suite with a rather innovative approach: it facilitates a modular interface for dragging and dropping audio sources, effects, analyzers and other tools, making it easy to experiment with music mixing and isolate unwanted channels. It features many audio sources and effects, melody sources and processors, control lines, outputs, analzyers, and other utilities.

The downloaded package includes a demo to help you get familiarized. You can click and drag the nodes to move them in the patcher, double-click items to edit properties or clone them (including their attributes), switch from patcher to timeline to view the classical waveform and, of course, play music.

As far as audio sources are concerned, it's possible to import music from local files, use regular or melodic oscillators of various wave types (e.g. sine, sawtooth, horn), insert melodic white noise, record your voice or other audio via the microphone (with echo cancellation), as well as load samplers.

When it comes to audio effects, you can experiment with allpass and bandpass filters, auto-wah, channel merger and splitter, chorus, classic equalizer, convolver, crossfader, delay, distortion, dynamic compressor, echo, flanger, and others. Each effect comes with its own configuration settings, like tweaking the amount of distortion or the depth, delay and LFO rates of chorus.

For melody sources, you can use constant base, piano roll, MIDI input, keyboard or sequences. It's also possible to add melody processors like component extensions, constant offset, melody filter, repeater, or node override. Audio production projects can be exported to WAV, OGG, AAC or MP3 filetype.

AudioNodes is incredibly easy and fun to work with, thanks to the modular interface as well as plethora of options available. The application hasn't reached a stable release yet, so it's prone to stability issues.