Music software recommendations

Unfortunately, music software is in general rather pricey. I will therefore be splitting up this by price and then by type.

DAWs

Cheap/Free

• Renoise - Costs 68 EUR/75 USD for a license that lasts more than a decade in terms of updates. The demo for Renoise is extremely generous as it lets you save project files (but not export them to a playable format). This means that if you make something cool before buying it, you can render it once you have a license.
• Reaper

Expensive

• Bitwig
• Reason

Free

Sounds

• Synth1 - Looks a bit ugly, but has a lot of functionality and is a fun little synth to muck about with, especially when new to making music.
• The ODOsynths archive - Collection of synths. Highly recommend 38911Bytes for making weird retro-sounding sounds.

Effects

• Variety of Sound - Collection of sound effects. TesslaSE and epicVerb are in my opinion effects that easily could’ve been sold for a decent amount of money, but the maker has decided to make all of these effects free.
• RoVee - Voice morpher.

Other

• VB-CABLE Virtual Audio Device - Creates a virtual speaker that outputs to a virtual mic. Useful for routing Renoise and other DAWs into voice chat.
• ASIO4ALL - Don’t have a good sound interface or can’t afford one? Get this to make ASIO work on cheaper/on-board soundcards. It has some limitations, but is better than regular Windows sound systems. This will cut down your input-to-output delay by a lot.

Relatively Cheap

You’ll see why I call this relatively cheap in the next section.

Sounds

• FXpansion Strobe2 - In my opinion this is one of the best synths out there. Easy to get into due to a great layout, visualisers, and intuitive parameter modulation, incredible depth despite the intuitive nature.
• FXpansion Cypher2 - Same as Strobe2, but more focused on frequency modulation and waveshaping. Slightly harder to use.
• Arturia Pigments - A combo synth combining wavetable, sampling, and subtractive synths into one package. Has similarly easy modulation options as the former.

Expensive

Sounds

• Arturia V Collection - Digital recreations of many classic synths in one big package.
• Superior Drummer 3 - Huge library/system of drums.