Links for webmasters looking for audio open source software

Before you can distribute some music online you'll need a recording in a format that can easily be listened to on the web and one that will play on a CD or DVD if you are planning on selling or distributing your music in this way.

Below you'll find a range of free software that can help you learn about, convert and edit music tracks for this purpose. The following list is all open source software - which means it is free to download and use it, and even (if you wish and have the capability) to edit and improve the software itself.

Basic to Intermediate Audio Software

• Audacity

Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni who now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from others. Audacity supports WAV, AIFF, Ogg, and MP3 formats. Features include envelope editing, mixing, built-in effects and plug-ins, all with unlimited undo. Audacity won the Source Forge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia. 

• aTunes

aTunes is a powerful, full-featured, cross-platform player and manager, with audio cd rip frontend. Currently supported formats are mp3, ogg, wav, wma, flac, mp4, ape, mpc, mac, radio streaming and podcasts.

• LMMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio)

LMMS is a free cross-platform music studio which allows you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples.

• SoX - Sound eXchange

SoX is meant to be the Swiss Army Knife of sound processing utils. It can convert audio files to other popular audio file types and also apply sound effects and filters during the conversion.

• orDrumbox Java Software Drum Machine

Software Drum Machine and Audio Sequencer in Java. Create songs, use Drum Kits and give creative automatic compositions features

• Bristol Audio Synthesis

Bristol is synth emulation package for a diverse range of vintage synthesisers, electric pianos and organs. The application consists of a multithreaded audio synthesizer and a user interface called brighton.

• Aria Maestosa

Aria Maestosa is a midi tracker/editor. It lets you compose, edit and play midi files with a few clicks in a user-friendly interface offering score, keyboard, guitar, drum and controller views.

• LAME (Lame Aint an MP3 Encoder)

LAME is an educational tool to be used for learning about MP3 encoding. The goal of the LAME project is to improve the psycho acoustics, quality and speed of MP3 encoding.

• Zina is not Andromeda

Zina is a graphical interface to your MP3 collection, a personal jukebox, an MP3 streamer, a Podcaster. It can run on its own, embeded into an existing website, or as a Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress/Xoops/etc. module.

• FLAC-Free Lossless Audio Codec

FLAC is a free lossless compressed audio format which supports streaming and archival. The FLAC project maintains the format and provides a reference encoder/decoder and input plugins for several popular audio players.

• cdrecord 

A tool for creating disk-at-once and track-at-once CDs and DVDs.

Advanced Audio Authoring for Web

As well as production and listening to audios in a media player, some people may have need of software for audio websites that requires embedded descriptions.

Digital Bazaar list a range of projects on semantics linked to from this page, (list below): http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/Main_Page

Microformat Semantics

• Intro to the Semantic Web 

A short introduction to the semantic web.

• hAudio Microformat 

hAudio is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding information about audio recordings in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. The hAudio microformat was authored by Digital Bazaar with a great deal of help from the Microformats community. hAudio is one of several microformat open standards.

• Firefox Operator Extensions 

Extensions to Firefox Operator, a tool that displays the semantic data in a web page. The extensions enable the hAudio markup of music in web pages (using either Microformats or RDFa).

• Creating the hAudio Community-supported Microformat using RDFa 

A journey in creating a community-supported semantic data format for music for the Firefox and Songbird web browsers.

• hMedia Microformat 

A microformat for describing pieces of media on a web page. This is useful for search applications that need to find particular pieces of media in a website, such as songs, video and meta-data associated with each.

• Microformalyze 

A website analysis tool that is most useful when attempting to discover a common semantic vocabulary among a group of websites. If you are interested in creating a new Microformat, this tool is for you!

• Practical Web Semantics 

An in depth video guide to practical web semantics and the technologies currently in use (filmed April 28th, 2008).