Composing music in freedom

I started composing music in 2002 and from this years I was shocked by the price of audio software.

Professional MIDI sequencer can cost several thousands of dollars. But basically what they did is simply sending MIDI messages. I observed same problem with synth module, when wanted to emulate musical instrument with computer I was finally starting to work with SoundFont due to the cost of other professional alternative.

At the begin SoundFont was patented by EMU and usable only on specific Creative product (that include hardware RAM on sound card to load sound wave tables).
This kind of hardware was really useful when PC hardware wasn't able to play (with an acceptable latency) SoundFont.

But today SoundFont can be considered to be an open format. Creative as open documentation and a lot of free tools are available, and today's PC can run it without any problem and without using specific hardware.

So all that to explain that I made transition from Windows to Linux with all what I need to compose music (including SoundFont) with minimal latency. And the best is that it's totally FREE !

I now use Rosegarden as MIDI sequencer, and I want to say that this sequencer is really better than a lot of non-free sequencer you can found on the market.

You find all professional functions needed by a musician to compose a whole song, and with the help of QSynth you can access to huge collection of free virtual instruments using SoundFont technology.

Rosegarden is part of 64Studio distribution, I recommend to all musician working with computer to take a look to powerful Linux tools available for audio production.

Linux is a formidable opportunity for every beginner in music production to start experiment freely professional tools and techniques (preventing use of illegal license in home-studio).