by E Productions

Created on: January 16, 2007   Last Updated: April 26, 2007

Best free music editing software

Hardly anything is free. Yet you can find many demos, share ware, trials, and condensed versions of popular music editing software. Lets look at what music editing was. It used to be that you had to splice tape together and really be an expert in sound dynamics to say remove an off note from a track and replace it with a better part. Amazingly, all this was done using a tape counter and VU meters. There was no graphical interface to neatly arrange your audio on a scaled grid, nudging it back and forth if needed. Now audio can be "punched in" anywhere you want. Tracks can be doubled up at the click of a mouse. Even midi sequences can be recorded and then played back and auditioned with literally thousands of instruments many sounding exactly like the real thing.

The best free software is a misnomer. First you must ask yourself what are you going to use it for? Are you a musician who plays keyboards and would like to produce and arrange music using midi? You may not need to record audio or need an interface. Are you in a rock band who wants to record your band live in one take? You would need a program that records audio, and in addition to the editing software, you would need an interface of some kind. Plugging a microphone into the jack of your sound card isn't going to get the desired results you're looking for. Conversely, you could have the most expensive editing software on your computer and plug a cheap microphone in and you still won't get the desired results. Do you want to do all of that and more? Finding the best editing software that's right for your own individual applications is the smart approach.

Most music recording interfaces now come with bundled music editing software. As of late, Ableton Live was shipped with my firewire interface I recently purchased. I guess you could say it was free, although It was probably just free-ish. I tried it out and found it to be a very solid product. I already use Pro Tools and Sonar. These editing programs are both very good and I use each for different tasks in my studio. Pro Tools even has a free version that was around for a while, and was a fully functional yet stripped down version of their industry standard software.

Another consideration is the computer you are going to use to record and edit music. Music takes up a lot of warehouse space in your computer before its converted to mp3 format. Most editing software records using wav files. Do a search on your computer for

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