I'm always looking for some way to generate royalty free music. Part of the reason is that I see myself as providing multimedia to students, and there SHOULD be a soundtrack. And I am very frugal. I have to be, I am in education. ;-)
Last week I downloaded LMMS 0.4.4. I was very impressed. I don't have a keyboard at this point, though thanks to Musician's Friend I have a USB powered Yamaha on the way right now. In the interim I thought I might experiment with what was available in FOSS on Windows (not SuSE Linux. A long story certainly, but for another time) under Vista.
If you wish to produce a simple soundtrack/background music for a podcast or other project, this is fairly simple to use and it has the ability to use samples from soundfonts and the onscreen keyboard. For more on Soundfonts check out any search engine. A prime source for these is http://www.hammersound.net/ The idea is to provide samples for making music without a microphone or real physical instruments. I have to admit that this is by no means as end-user-ready as something like Garageband under OS X, but it is a very sophisticated system if you have afew hours to learn. If you have a background of any kind in music, then this will be even more of interest, if for no other reason than to help you waste hours at a time producing your own "opus". :-)
Oh yes, the link: http://lmms.sourceforge.net/
I think for those of you who took the podcasting course last year from Dr. Swenson, you will find this a great means of providing music free of charge in your podcasts. One hint that will be valuable: Look on the Web for midi files. These are music files in the .mid format. You can find everyting from Glen Miller to Metallica in this format. These can be imported into LMMS and then modified for your needs. Think of it this way. If you can find that perfect background music by Moody Blues or some such, then this program will allow you to import the midi track, modify it, and output it to an MP3. In addition, you can use Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) with LAME to output the creation to Mp3.
I am very impressed with what this can do. Hopefully you eill be too.
