MIDI is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing and recording music. The specification originates in a paper titled Universal Synthesizer Interface, published by Dave Smith and Chet Wood, then of Sequential Circuits, at the October 1981 Audio Engineering Society conference in New York City.
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control (OSC), and possibly audio and automation data for DAWs and plug-ins.
Reason is a digital audio workstation for creating and editing music and audio developed by Swedish software company Reason Studios. Reason emulates a rack of hardware synthesizers, samplers, signal processors, sequencers, and mixers, all of which can be freely interconnected in an arbitrary manner. Reason can be used either as a complete virtual music studio or as a set of virtual instruments to be used with other sequencing software in a fashion that mimics live performance.
GarageBand is a line of digital audio workstations for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS devices that allows users to create music or podcasts. GarageBand is developed and sold by Apple for macOS, and is part of the iLife software suite, along with iMovie. Its music and podcast creation system enables users to create multiple tracks with pre-made MIDI keyboards, pre-made loops, an array of various instrumental effects, and voice recordings.
A scorewriter, or music notation program is software used with a computer for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and produce high-quality printed results.
A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece.
Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA and Qt4. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free alternative to such applications as Cubase.
Renoise is a digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using sound samples, soft synths, and effects plug-ins. It is also able to interface with MIDI and OSC equipment. The main difference between Renoise and other music software is the characteristic vertical timeline sequencer used by tracking software.
Logic Pro is a digital audio workstation (DAW) and MIDI sequencer software application for the macOS platform. It was originally created in the early 1990s as Notator Logic, or Logic, by German software developer C-Lab which later went by Emagic. American technology company Apple acquired Emagic in 2002 and renamed Logic to Logic Pro. It is the second most popular DAW - after Ableton Live - according to a survey conducted in 2015.
MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) is a specification of precise musical pitch agreed to by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in the MIDI protocol. MTS allows for both a bulk tuning dump message, giving a tuning for each of 128 notes, and a tuning message for individual notes as they are played.
LMMS is a digital audio workstation application program. When LMMS is executed on a computer with appropriate hardware, it allows music to be produced by arranging samples, synthesizing sounds, playing on a MIDI keyboard, and combining the features of trackers and sequencers. It supports the Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA), LV2 and Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plug-ins. It is free software, written in Qt and released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2).
Digital sheet music is technology for representing and displaying sheet music in a computer-readable format. With the emergence of several technological innovations, sheet music evolved in several stages into what was to be termed digital sheet music.
Mixcraft is a multitrack recording application for Windows. This music recording software functions as a digital audio workstation, MIDI sequencer, virtual instrument host, non-linear video arranger, and music loop recording program.
Mozart the music processor is a proprietary WYSIWYG scorewriter program, which runs on computers running Microsoft Windows. It enables the user to create, edit, and print musical notation and listen to it via MIDI.
FluidSynth, formerly named iiwusynth, is a free open source software synthesizer which converts Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) note data into an audio signal using SoundFont technology without need for a SoundFont-compatible soundcard. FluidSynth can act as a virtual MIDI device, able to receive MIDI data from any program and transform it into audio on-the-fly. It can also read in SMF (.mid) files directly. On the output side, it can send audio data directly to an audio device for playback, or to a Raw or Wave file. It can also convert a SMF file directly to an audio file in faster-than-real-time. The combination of these features gives FluidSynth the following major use cases:
Qtractor is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application for GNU/Linux. Qtractor is written in C++ and is based on the Qt framework. Its author is Rui Nuno Capela, who is also responsible for the Qjackctl, Qsynth and Qsampler line of GNU/Linux audio software. Qtractor's intention was to provide digital audio workstation software simple enough for the average home user, and yet powerful enough for the professional user.
An isomorphic keyboard is a musical input device consisting of a two-dimensional grid of note-controlling elements on which any given sequence and/or combination of musical intervals has the "same shape" on the keyboard wherever it occurs – within a key, across keys, across octaves, and across tunings.
JFugue is an open source programming library that allows one to program music in the Java programming language without the complexities of MIDI. It was first released in 2002 by David Koelle. The current version, JFugue 5.0, was released in March 2015. Brian Eubanks has described JFugue as "useful for applications that need a quick and easy way to play music or to generate MIDI files." JFugue is free software released under the Apache License.
Overture is a music notation (scorewriter) program for Windows and Macintosh platforms, written by Don Williams. Visually, the Overture scoring interface resembles Encore, another notation program originally by the same author. Overture was the first scorewriter to feature full Virtual Studio Technology (VST) hosting; the software supports MIDI and audio playback.
Mus2 is a music application for the notation of microtonal works and, specifically, Turkish maqam music. Unlike most other scorewriters, Mus2 allows the user to work in almost any tuning system with customizable accidentals and play back the score with accurate intonation. The application has also received praise for its clean interface and usability.
