MU.Lab - Free virtual music studio!

[ken]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before.

http://www.mutools.com/products.html

MU.LAB is an alternative, state of the art software application for OSX and Windows, transforming your computer into a rich virtual music studio!

It does not overwhelm you with a complex feature set, in which you can get lost.

On the contrary, MU.LAB is a user-friendly yet rock-solid musical tool designed to create, finetune and play Your Music!

MU.LAB's core feature set:
* Audio Recording & Playback
* MIDI Recording & Playback
* Flexible Composition & Sequence Editing
* Supports Audio and MIDI VST Plugins
* Powerful Audio and MIDI Plugin Routing (up to 100% modular if you want)
* Integrated high quality synths, samplers and effects
* High quality Audio Engine
* Sample Accurate Sequencing
* Available for OSX (Universal Binary) and Windows

MU.LAB Free (which is free to everyone!) has a 6 track limit and can only mixdown in 16 Bit. But be sure: a creative soul can do A LOT with that!

[Billy's Little Trip]

Sounds cool, Ken. I'm going to keep that link for friends that want to start computer recording but not ready to make the investment or just can't afford it. 6 tracks can be mixed to one stereo track until everything is recorded. Then just mix the 6 track chunks on a final mix.

[jast]

I find that 6 tracks are really limiting, so I'd like to suggest an alternative:

REAPER -- fully functional even without registration, so you can evaluate it without restriction, and it's one of the most affordable pieces of software I know (at least the non-commercial license, at currently $50).
In short:

• 64 bit audio internally
• Works well with low-latency, multi-processor support
• Pretty cool 64 bit audio effects: unlimited multiband EQ and compressor, normal compressor, convolution reverb, algorithmic reverb, pitch shifting (high quality), multitap delay, graphical FIR filter (can do pretty much everything), noise gate, vocoder. Instruments: sample player, basic synthesizer, basic drum synthesizer. In addition: scriptable effects engine, including 100 or so quite usable scripts. Effects can be parallelized across networks. VST/VSTi/DX/DXi plugins can be used.
• Can be installed on USB sticks and is really lightweight (3.4 MB installer and that includes a Brad Sucks sample project). Starts up fast. Frequent updates.
• No artificial limits (unlimited tracks, extremely powerful routing)
• Powerful GUI (even if it takes some getting used to); manual exists. Many things are scriptable.
• On-the-fly resampling and en/decoding of many formats: WAV, OGG, FLAC, ACID, APE, WavPack, MP3 and others

In long.

REAPER is my music making thingy of choice. I'm not getting paid for this post.

[Reist]

I started using reaper about 2 months ago. It's great. I might have to check out MU.Lab just for fun though - you can never have too many toys to fool around with.