30 Music Players, Editors, Synths and Notation Editors

There are approximately 30 applications here that are open source options for Music in school ranging from players to sheet music editiors. Many of which are available for MacOS X, Windows and Linux.

Amarok – Rediscover music

Amarok is a powerful music player for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before - and it looks good doing it!

Ardour – Digital Audio Workstation

Record Audio, Mix, Edit and Collaborate. One of the Ultimate Audio Editing software for Mac OS X and Linux.

Audacity - The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor

Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Banshee – Music Player

Play your music and videos. Stay entertained and up to date with podcasts and video podcasts.  Sync your G1 phone, iPod, and other devices. We think you’ll love the new Banshee! Banshee is written in C# on the Mono platform using GNOME technologies (Gtk#, GStreamer, etc).

CDEx – Audio CD Extractor

CDEx is a very popular Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor with more than 38 million downloads.

Grip – CD Ripper/CD Player

Grip is a cd-player and cd-ripper for the Gnome desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia built-in, but can also use external rippers (such as cdda2wav). It also provides an automated frontend for MP3 (and other audio format) encoders, letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. Internet disc lookups are supported for retrieving track information from disc database servers.Grip works with DigitalDJ to provide a unified “computerized” version of your music collection.

Hydrogen – Advanced Drum Machine For GNU/Linux

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Jokosher – Multi-Track Audio Studio

Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.

LMMS – Linux Multimedia Studio

LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow 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. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

MuseScore - Free music composition & notation software

MuseScore is a free cross platform WYSIWYG music notation program, licensed under GNU GPL.

MusikCube – Fast, Lightweight Music management

musikCube is an mp3 player for the modern generation. It helps you just listen to what you want to hear, while offering innovative features not seen elsewhere. For the
technical user, musikCube is based on an embedded SQL database engine known as sqlite. For the non technical user, that means its fast. Really fast. “Dynamic playlists” allow fully automatic, randomized playback of songs based on your observed listening habits. The more you listen, the smarter it gets. It also features browsable, user sortable playlists.

MusE – Audio Sequencer

MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written originally by Werner Schweer now developed and maintained by the MusE development team. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux, it is published under the GNU General Public License.

Rosegarden – Audio Sequencer

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

Songbird – Manage Your Music

Click, Download and Start listening to your music in an organized way. Very simple, useful Audio Player. It is an alternative to Apple’s iTunes.

SoundKonverter – KDE Sound Application

soundKonverter is a frontend to various audio converters. The key features are:
- Audio conversion
- Replay Gain calculation
- CD ripping

StreamRipper – Internet Radio Recorder

StreamRipper is an Open Source (GPL) application that lets you record streaming mp3 to your hard drive. There is an alternative Open Source Stream Recording software – StreamHijacker.

WinLAME – Audio Encoder (Windows)

winLAME is an encoder for several audio formats, including mp3 (MPEG Layer 3), Ogg Vorbis and more. winLAME lets you set up the encoding process with an easy-to-use wizard-style user interface.

Updated List

Breakage – Intelligent Drum Machine

Breakage is an intelligent drum machine designed to make it easy and fun to play complex, live breakbeat performances. A step-sequencer pattern editor and previewer, database, sample browser, neural network, pattern morphs, statistics and probabilistic pattern generator give you the tools to work with breaks on a higher level than ever before.

Bristol – Synthesiser Emulation On Linux

BpmDJ – DJ Tools For Linux

BpmDJ is a tool to do DJ on Linux, plays MP3s and Ogg’s.

DJPlay – DJ App for Linux

DJPlay aims to be a high class live DJing application for Linux.

Exaile – Play It, Enjoy It

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

FluidSynth – Real-Time Software Synthesizer

FluidSynth is a real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications.

Helix Player – Media Player For Linux

The Helix Player is an open source media player for Linux, Solaris, and Symbian based on the Helix DNA Client media engine. More operating system versions are currently in development.

Jack – Audio Connection kit

JACK is system for handling real-time, low latency audio (and MIDI). It runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows (and can be ported to other POSIX-conformant platforms). It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a “plugin”). JACK also has support for distributing audio processing across a network, both fast & reliable LANs as well as slower, less reliable WANs.

JAMin – Professional Audio Mastering

JAMin is the JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK) Audio Mastering interface. JAMin is an open source application designed to perform professional audio mastering of stereo input streams. It uses LADSPA for digital signal processing (DSP). JAMin is licensed under the GPL.

LilyPond – Music Notation For Everyone

LilyPond prints music in the best traditions of classical engraving with minimum fuss. Don’t waste time on tuning spacing, moving around symbols, or shaping slurs. Impress friends and colleagues with sharp sheet music!

LinuxSampler – Audio Sampler

LinuxSampler is a free, streaming capable open source pure software audio sampler with professional grade features, comparable to both hardware and commercial Windows/Mac software samplers and to introduce new features not yet available by any other sampler in the world.

Mixxx – Beatmix, better

Mixxx is free, open source DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live mixes.

MPD – Server Side Application For Playing Music

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol. MPD has lots of clients such as Sonata, LnkMusic, MPCool, Ario etc. Check out Clients section here.

RhythmBox – Inspired By iTunes

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes. It is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and based on the powerful GStreamer media framework.

Sonic Visualiser – Audio Visualiser

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.

TerminatorX – Real-Time Audio Synthesizer

TerminatorX is a real-time audio synthesizer that allows you to “scratch” on digitally sampled audio data (*.wav, *.au, *.ogg, *.mp3, etc.) the way hiphop-DJs scratch on vinyl records. It features multiple turntables, real-time effects (built-in as well as LADSPA plug-in effects), a sequencer and MIDI interface - all accessible through an easy-to-use gtk+ GUI. This software is designed to run under Linux, FreeBSD and the like.