I thought that I'd share a list of the software that I use on a regular basis, along with some comments for each. Not ambitious enough to do a full review of each, but wanted to share in case any of this is useful to others. No particular order here. Note that I am running Windows at present, but I notice that most products (especially creative titles) seem to be multi-platform Win/MacOS/Linux.
Reaper - a DAW that seems to check all the boxes for my minimal recording requirements and has a pricing plan suitable to amateurs - $60 for a non-commercial license IIRC. Plenty of instructional/tutorial stuff on YouTube as well as on the Reaper site itself.
http://www.reaper.fmdeCoda - a very interesting, if somewhat expensive ($63) package. I first bought it to help isolate bass and drum parts. It's only kinda ok on that (you have to "draw" a box around a dynamic sonic "map"), but it analyzes the piece and makes a pretty decent guess as to the chord progression and detecting the beats. What I'm finding it excels at is looping when trying to learn a recording. I'm currently working on James Jamerson's awesome bass part to the Marvin Gaye/Tammy Terrell "Your Precious Love". It "snaps" the looped section to the beats so if you're playing a loop repeatedly to get it down, you can easily keep in time as it loops back to the beginning. You can also define and name loops for the intro, chorus, verse, or any combination thereof, or any sub-section that is of interest.
https://products.zplane.de/products/decoda/Xtrax Stems - this was a super-cool discovery. It violates one of my rules in that it's a subscription online service. However, it's reasonably priced (I think outside of any promos it's about $60 per year), and what it does is split the recording into four tracks - vocals, drums, bass and "everything else". It's good enough to create a backing track by simply muting out your part and exporting the result. Very good - better than deCoda - for isolation of individual instrument tracks. They allow two free days of use, and I didn't even use it that long before ponying up for the subscription. The resulting "splits" get rendered as individual MP3/WAV files that can then be pulled into your DAW. I used this to turn up the volume of the drums (the better to lock in with my bass), and drop out the bass on Nina Simone's "I Put A Spell On You", added a lead-in click track then recorded myself doing the bass part.
https://audionamix.com/xtrax-stems/MuseScore3 - this is an amazing open-source music notation package. I just wish I'd find reason to use it more often as every time I sit down with it it's like I'm starting from scratch (I'm terrible at reading music). Considering the alternatives like Sibelius and Finale will set you back hundreds unless you qualify for their educational pricing, this is definitely worth a look. The one limitation I've discovered is MuseScore is
NOT suitable for drum set transcriptions. You can make it work, but man, it is a real struggle.
https://musescore.org/enAeroDrums - if you really need to do drum set transcriptions, you can't go wrong with this. It's free to try, and pay-what-you-like to remove the little nag on the UI. Very odd UI because they've really gone all-out on the minimalism thing, but man, does it do a nice job. Worth watching the video on their site. My only wish-list is if you could load your own VST drum kit. The built-in drum sounds aren't bad just for previewing purposes, but with a better kit, this would be an outstanding "drum machine"!
https://aerodrums.com/aered/Neck Diagrams - As stringed/fretted instrument musicians, we're all about patterns, right? This is a really nice package that has templates not just for the "usual suspects", guitar, bass etc, but also some oddball instrument known as the Chapman Stick!! Full control over how it's notated, and you can mix/match between note names & intervals. Full control over marker colors, marker shapes, whether markers are solid or outline. Only gripes so far is that you can't customize the fret markers, and for Stick diagrams, it would be nice to show variable string gauges, but those are kinda nits. I drew some rectangular shapes on my boards to indicate the marker inlays on the Stick. A little pricey depending on what features you want, $29 (Standard), $55 (Pro), $109 (Publisher). I started with the Standard edition, but eventually upgraded to Pro to get the Scale Generator and PDF/JPG export function.
https://www.neckdiagrams.com/Audacity - Everyone already has Audacity right? Some use it like a DAW, but I find it most useful for cutting and pasting things together, changing tempos, applying filters. For me, really just an audio utility, but pretty indispensable and powerful for basic audio manipulation. Also really good at re-rendering into different audio formats. I buy music on CD, rip to FLAC, and copy to portable devices as MP3s which is all handled by the next piece of software I'll mention, but for anything that's outside of my music library, Audacity is great for format conversion. FOSS so it's really a no-brainer to have this on your computer.
https://www.audacityteam.org/Media Monkey - I've used iTunes, I've used WinAmp, I've used other music players that used to be great but got so bloated with ads and b******t that I gave up on them. I've been using Media Monkey to organize my ~8,000 track music collection for (I think) close to 20 years now. This product is superb, is under active development, and just works seamlessly. It rips, converts, organizes, tags, plays and exports music files in any format you want. It knows when I plug in my iPhone or my Android tablet what rules to follow to convert the FLAC files in the collection to MP3 on the devices as each device has its own profile in Media Monkey. My stereo system is just on the other side of the wall from my music room, and my laptop connects to it via Bluetooth, and Media Monkey is the player that gets it done. "Smart" playlists (define the criteria and as you add new tracks they automatically get added to the playlist). It also does podcasts, internet radio and other stuff that I've never dabbled in using MM, but it's a very impressive piece of software kit. Dirt cheap at $25 or $50 for a lifetime license so you don't have to kick in a few bucks each time they go through a major-version upgrade. Currently on version 4, they also have an app for Android.
https://www.mediamonkey.com/Tag & Rename - As I mentioned above, Media Monkey has really good tag-management tools. There is an area in which MM is dependent on outside services, and that's identifying CD's when ripping. It uses FreeDB from which to pull the album info. This sometimes gives less-than-optimal results, with dodgy disc numbers, slightly off album names, genre, incorrect or missing album art etc. Nothing terrible, but something I always want to correct. Because MM knows my "rules" for naming individual track files, some of this bad info ends up in the file names. Tag & Rename is great for when I just want to do some clean-up on the ol' library, including renaming the files according to the
corrected track information. A bit pricey at $30 for what it does, but I looked at 3 or 4 different packages before settling on this one as the most robust.
http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm
RSS
Photo Gallery
