Free musical software for linux

MMA (Musical MIDI Accompaniment) is an accompaniment generator. It creates MIDI tracks for a soloist to perform over from a user-supplied file containing chords and MMA directives.
Musical MIDI Accompaniment is very versatile and generates excellent tracks. It comes with an extensive user-extendable library with a variety of patterns for various popular rhythms, an extensive user manual, and several demo songs.
It is a command line driven program. It creates MIDI files which need a sequencer or MIDI file play program.
Main features:
- mma - the executable python script,
- modules - the various python modules needed to run MMA,
- lib - a set of standard library files which contain MMA patterns for different rhythms,
- songs - a few demo songs
Enhancements:
- A new command set that lets MMA create and play MIDI files on-the-fly, some additional synchronization options, smoother volume changes with (De)Crescendos, and minor bugfixes/improvements.

Music::Scales can supply necessary notes / offsets for musical scales.

SYNOPSIS

use Music::Scales;

my @maj = get_scale_notes(Eb); # defaults to major
print join(" ",@maj); # "Eb F G Ab Bb C D"
my @blues = get_scale_nums(bl); # bl,blu,blue,blues
print join(" ",@blues); # "0 3 5 6 7 10"
my %min = get_scale_offsets (G,mm,1); # descending melodic minor
print map {"$_=$min{$_} "} sort keys %min; # "A=0 B=-1 C=0 D=0 E=-1 F=0 G=0"

Given a keynote A-G(#/b) and a scale-name, will return the scale, either as an array of notenames or as a hash of semitone-offsets for each note.

METHODS

get_scale_nums($scale[,$descending])

returns an array of semitone offsets for the requested scale, ascending/descending the given scale for one octave. The descending flag determines the direction of the scale, and also affects those scales (such as melodic minor) where the notes vary depending upon the direction. Scaletypes and valid values for $scale are listed below.

get_scale_notes($notename[,$scale,$descending,$keypref])

returns an array of notenames, starting from the given keynote. Enharmonic equivalencies (whether to use F# or Gb, for instance) are calculated based on the keynote and the scale. Basically, it attempts to do the Right Thing if the scale is an 8-note one, (the 7th in G harmonic minor being F# rather than Gb, although G minor is a flat key), but for any other scales, (Chromatic, blues etc.) it picks equivalencies based upon the keynote. This can be overidden with $keypref, setting to be either # or b for sharps and flats respectively. Cruftiness abounds here.

get_scale_offsets($notename[,$scale,$descending,$keypref])

as get_scale_notes(), except it returns a hash of notenames with the values being a semitone offset (-1, 0 or 1) as shown in the synopsis.

get_scale_MIDI($notename,$octave[,$scale,$descending])

as get_scale_notes(), but returns an array of MIDI note-numbers, given an octave number (-1..9).

get_scale_PDL($notename,$octave[,$scale,$descending])

as get_scale_MIDI(), but returns an array of PDL-format notes.

is_scale($scalename)

returns true if $scalename is a valid scale name used in this module.

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.
The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the program you reach for when you find a musical recording you want to study rather than simply hear.
As well as a number of features designed to make exploring audio data as revealing and fun as possible, Sonic Visualiser also has powerful annotation capabilities to help you to describe what you find, and the ability to run automated annotation and analysis plugins in the new Vamp analysis plugin format.
We hope Sonic Visualiser will be of particular interest to musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers and anyone else looking for a friendly way to take a look at what lies inside the audio file.
Main features:
- Load audio files in WAV, Ogg and MP3 formats, and view their waveforms.
- Look at audio visualisations such as spectrogram views, with interactive adjustment of display parameters.
- Annotate audio data by adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves.
- Overlay annotations on top of one another with aligned scales, and overlay annotations on top of waveform or spectrogram views.
- View the same data at multiple time resolutions simultaneously (for close-up and overview).
- Run feature-extraction plugins to calculate annotations automatically, using algorithms such as beat trackers, pitch detectors and so on.
- Import annotation layers from various text file formats.
- Import note data from MIDI files, view it alongside other frequency scales, and play it with the original audio.
- Play back the audio plus synthesised annotations, taking care to synchronise playback with display.
- Select areas of interest, optionally snapping to nearby feature locations, and audition individual and comparative selections in seamless loops.
- Time-stretch playback, slowing it down to as little as 10% of the original speed while retaining a synchronised display.
- Export audio regions and annotation layers to external files.
The design goals for Sonic Visualiser are:
- To provide the best available core waveform and spectrogram audio visualisations for use with substantial files of music audio data.
- To facilitate ready comparisons between different kinds of data, for example by making it easy to overlay one set of data on another, or display the same data in more than one way at the same time.
- To be straightforward. The user interface should be simpler to learn and to explain than the internal data structures. In this respect, Sonic Visualiser aims to resemble a consumer audio application.
- To be responsive, slick, and enjoyable. Even if you have to wait for your results to be calculated, you should be able to do something else with the audio data while you wait. Sonic Visualiser is pervasively multithreaded, loves multiprocessor and multicore systems, and can make good use of fast processors with plenty of memory.
- To handle large data sets. The work Sonic Visualiser does is intrinsically processor-hungry and (often) memory-hungry, but the aim is to allow you to work with long audio files on machines with modest CPU and memory where reasonable. (Disk space is another matter. Sonic Visualiser eats that.)

The Million Musician Challenge is a project to allow you to play music by playing games. The first game is a 2D vertically scrolling shoot-em-up game.

The keyboard (qwerty or musical) controls an array of sprites corresponding to the music notes. As you shoot the falling sprites, you play notes corresponding to the music.

Mediainlinux is a complete Linux distribution targeted at multimedia production, wich consist in a live cd (knoppix derived) containing more than 200 graphical application and thousands of command line tools for:

* Acquisition
* Conversion
* Editing
* Compression
* PostProduction in the Audio, 2D and 3D graphics and Video domain.

Mediainlinux distribution is a working prototype of a Debian Multimedia Distribution, based on the last version (3.4) of the Knoppix Linux Live Cd.

Our CD supports most of the graphic, audio and tv/satellite computer card on the consumer and prosumer market GNU/Linux compatible and has more than 200 graphical applications and hundreds (nearly 1000) of command line tools for covering all the complexity of the multimedia process of production: acquisition, conversion, compression and mastering.

Most of the Multimedia in the GNU/Linux world is covered, but there are some tools which we dont want to distribute together with Mediainlinux for legal reason and mainly because we are not sure about the integrity of the code, which could be stolen or covered by copyrights and so on.

You can install this applications after Mediainlinux is installed on the hard disk, because they will be present in the Synaptic interface (because we added the sources to the sources file).

Technical Goals:

1.Multimedia Kernel (modified to gain more reactivity from the system) and especially in the graphic (drivers for consumer and prosumer video cards) and audio (firmware for professional audio cards) subsystems, applying many patches like the low latency, preemption, real time e capabilities patches and reach a better recognizing of peripherals.

2.Boot splash: cover the Knoppix Live Cd initialization (which is oldish and bad looking, in our opinion) with an animation and some informations about the project.

3.Develop customized multimedia cd and application.

4.OpenMosix enabled kernel to make distributed rendering with Blender and Yafray.

Non technical goals:

1.Include applications which are not already part of the Debian distribution: speed in the free software world creates a situation in which hundreds of projects starts in a year and the ones which survive with an active development the first year and get developed for two or three years have a good chance to continue and be included in the major distributions. Sometimes it needs to anticipate this process and “discover” some applications which are not already shipped with a major distribution, before they become famous and encouraging their diffusion putting them in Mediainlinux. This has a double effect: makes the software better testing it and reporting bugs, suggestions and ideas and making better the whole Mediainlinux itself.

2.Support package maintainer to promote the diffusion of applications that havent already been debianized: programmers that transform the source code of a certain software in a Debian .deb, ready to be installed on a computer with a Debian GNU/Linux distribution (or a Debian compatible one like Mediainlinux) are often volunteers doing this work just as an hobby. For some other software there are already some sponsorships from some facilities and one of the goals of Mediainlinux is to find economic support for this programmers in the multimedia field of application.

3.Organizations: we had contacts with some organizations like ONU and UNESCO and with Italian (Turin, Padova, Bologna, Siena) and international (Bristol, Oslo, Zlin, Tampere, Georgia) universities and with some other organizations in the audio and video fields like FESTPACO or African Women Media Center. In all this places Mediainlinux has been introduced and in some also experimented, still limiting to single tests. With all this entities we would like to set up a collaboration that goes from simple testing and reporting of bugs, to requests for new characteristics and development of additional software.

4.Art Academies: many institutions like MULTIDAMS of Turin, the school of Art and Media of Tampere or the Brera Academy of Art in Milan has a double role: public places for experimentation (and so contamination between technology and art) and possible producers of demonstrations and examples of use, artist and collaborators.

User side goals:

1.Make Mediainlinux a better looking distribution: the look of Mediainlinux is a key aspect of the whole project. The more the distribution will be stylish (from the cd to the manual, from the Internet site to an exhibition stand) in the design and in its graphic and artistic ideas, the more it will gain success between the Linux Artists and the Macintosh community. Then we need to surpass the look of proprietary systems, using all the widgets that can simulate the most stylish looking applets and so we must need graphics to create icons, desktop themes, wallpapers, screen savers and audio video materials (like desktop sounds or video tutorials).

2.Make Mediainlinux simpler: we need to do more integration between different applications, in the way that for a .ogg vorbis file we will have a contextual menu to play, edit, record it etc. etc. This should be done for most of the file formats in the multimedia field and its an operation very intensive of configuring, programming, experimenting and daily use.

3.Make better configuration tools: most of all we need a good configuration of auto mounter to create automatically the icons of peripherals on the desktop.

4.Documentation: we need a manual for the primary applications (mostly done) and its translation in English, French, Spanish and German.

5.Training: we are organizing many courses on subsystems included in Mediainlinux and especially for audio and video streaming, 2D and 3D graphic, musical composition and less common training lessons in multimedia installations and physical and acoustic simulation.

6.Support: make concrete a way to support our users with a mailing list, a forum and a satellite program with tutorials, examples and demonstrations of creativity.

Strasheela is a highly expressive constraint-based music composition system. The Strasheela user declaratively states a music theory and the computer generates music which complies with this theory.
A theory is formulated as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) by a set of rules (constraints) applied to a music representation in which some aspects are expressed by variables (unknowns).
Music constraint programming is style-independent and is well-suited for highly complex theories (e.g. a fully-fledged theory of harmony). The results can be output into various formats including MIDI, Lilypond, and Csound.
Enhancements:
- This release greatly extends the available documentation.
- It now comes with a tutorial (draft) and includes several examples with musical output, an explanation of their underlying music theory, remarks on their implementation, and the full source code.
- Substantial background information on Strasheela is given by a monograph.
- Also, many additions and bugfixes have been made to the system.

Free Music Instrument Tuner is a musical instrument tunning application.
Main features:
- Error history
- Volume history
- Wave-length shape
- Harmonics ratio (Formants)
- Microtonal tuning (with Scala file support)
- ALSA support
- JACK support
- Translations for: francais