I Love Free Software » Music Software

SongSmith: Music Maker and Song Creation Software

Mike — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:00:14 +0000

Songsmith is a music maker software, where you can write, sing and create a song all by yourself. For those that like to sing, want to put songs together, but don’t play an instrument or know how to write music, there are a number of software options available. Songsmith, from Microsoft Research, is one of those options. With this software installed, all you need is a microphone to create your own songs.

Easy Download and Installation of this music maker

The installation download for this program is pretty big at close to 100MB, but since it’s on the Microsoft servers, that download goes pretty quickly with a fast internet connection. Installation is straightforward, but you have no control over whether or not icons are created (they aren’t). This means that if you want desktop or quick launch icons, you’ll have to create yourself.

Easy to Use and Intuitive User Interface

The program is almost completely wizard-driven, which makes the learning curve very shallow. All of the options have tooltips, which makes understanding what function they perform quite easy. The program comes with a good-sized selection of music types to choose your background instrumentals. Some of these options include rock, classic rock, classic pop, classic California pop, reggae, and salsa. The popular musical styles of today are well represented with a number of hip hop and R&B choices, as well.

Once you choose the musical style, you can choose the tempo. After that, it’s time to start singing and recording. The program has a meter near the bottom of the window to let you know if you’re singing loud enough, or too loud. You also have visual cues letting you know when each bar begins and ends. This helps you keep tempo with the background instrumentals.

After you’ve finished recording your song, it’s time to mix it. The program allows you to raise, and lower levels of the instruments and your voice getting them to exactly where you want them.

The Drawbacks

The drawbacks I saw with this program aren’t numerous, but they are rather significant. The biggest drawback is that this program is trialware, not freeware. Microsoft gives you six hours of actual program usage before you’re required to buy it, or it becomes non-functional. The six hours are only counted as actual program usage time, however. This means that if you minimize the program, or bring a different program to the forefront, the timer stops. Even Songsmith is trialware it is fully functional. According to the website you don’t gain any functionality from the program by buying it like with many other pieces of trialware software. The price to purchase this software varies by where you live. Those in the United States may buy it for $29.95.

The other drawback to this software is limited export capabilities. Songs that you create are saved in a Songsmith proprietary format. If you want to export them for use in media players, you have two options, Windows Media Audio format (WMA) and WAV, both of which take up quite a bit more space than a Mpeg Layer 3 (MP3) file.

There are also other background instrumentals that you can purchase for the program to increase the types of music you can make with the program. There are three extender packs available. Individually they cost $29, but if you buy all three together, the price is $69 US.

Songsmith is very easy to use and doesn’t take long at all to get up to speed. If you’re going to spend money on a software package to make music with, you’re better off looking elsewhere, like to FruityLoops, in my opinion.

SongSmith: Music Maker and Song Creation Software was originally published at I Love Free Software

View Lyrics for Songs in iTunes: LyricToy

Jaya — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 21:00:53 +0000

LyricToy is a free application which lets you view lyrics of the currently playing song in your iTunes library. It is very small in size and is very easy to use. With LyricToy you will be able to view lyrics of any song in your iTunes library.

How to download LyricToy:

Go on to the homepage of the application.
On the left hand pane of the window, look for featured, just below that you will see the download link for LyricToy or simply click here.
When you click the download link, a zip file will be downloaded.
Extract files from the zip folder.
Run the LyricToy.exe file.
The LyricToy window as shown below will open up.

How to view lyrics of a song:

Play a song from your iTunes library. You will see the same song in LyricToy window.
Click on the button given on LyricToy window.

You will be taken to the Lyricwiki website, where you will be able to see entire lyrics of the song being played.

That is it. It is that easy. Usually after clicking the button you will be directed to Lyricwiki. LyricToy will even Google the song for getting lyrics of the song being played for you. LyricToy come with a default Blue theme. Apart from that you can also download a Pink theme, a Silver theme and a Dark Tech theme.

LyricToy is a small and useful application to have. Specially, when you like a song but are not being able to understand few words in the song. Just go to LyricToy and view lyrics in no time. Go ahead and give it a try.

View Lyrics for Songs in iTunes: LyricToy was originally published at I Love Free Software

Free Audio Player with Songwriter: Lyricist

Mohit — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:30:15 +0000

Lyricist is a free audio player. It is a simple audio player with wonderful extra-ordinary features. Using this audio player one can also do songwriting. Songwriting is not an easy task, I cannot even think of manually writing a song, but now we have a software which looks like a simple audio player and which can easily perform this task of songwriting. For this very reason Lyricist is also known as the songwriter which can create or edit lyrics in a song.

This Audio Player application supports Formats like MP3, OGG, WAV, MOD, IT, XM and S3D files. This Audio player can create lyrics of an audio file and plays it along with the song. Like Other audio players this audio player also includes the basic keys like Playback/pause, Play previous/next song, stop playback, and volume controls.

This Lyrics Writer is very easy to use, as it’s a user-friendly software and it’s user interface is very simple. It also allows the Users to save their lyrics to the database.

Some Key Features of this Audio Player:

User friendly software, easy to use because of its simple user interface.
The best thing about this audio player is that you can Create/edit lyrics by using this software.
Users can Change the font of lyrics and also can change the color of the player.
This audio player also shows the name of the song, the artist, lyrics and album art.
It has a Play-all option by which you can play all the songs in the song library.
In this new version, users can easily save the lyrics of the song in the lyrics dialog rather than saving it in a separate file.
You can also easily change the overlapping of songs by the option in the Option Dialog.
It also consist of a music library where you can find your audio files.
You can also customize the sound with the help of equalizer.

How To Download and Install Lyricist:

Simply download this audio player from its website by clicking on “Download”.
Then after the download you will see a zip folder. Extract the files from zip folder.
Now you have to click on the Extracted File of Lyricist, and after that click on “lyricist-app” to open the software.
The Audio player window will open up. You can also create a shortcut for the file (lyricist-app) so that you don’t have to click again and again on the extracted folder to open it.

Lyricist is a very simple and user-friendly audio player which allows its user to create, edit and display the lyrics of the song playing.

Free Audio Player with Songwriter: Lyricist was originally published at I Love Free Software

ChordPulse Lite: Free Tool to Improvise and Compose Music

Jaya — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:30:50 +0000

ChordPulse Lite is a free simple tool to practice music in a fun way. Apart from practicing you can also compose music with ChordPulse Lite. ChordPulse Lite comes with 24 music styles and 5 chord types.

You can improve your playing techniques as an instrument player using this tool. All you have to do is tune in your musical instrument to ChordPulse Lite and play along. You can also play or sing along just for your own enjoyment.

You can make custom backing tracks easily. While you practice you can try out different music ideas and chord progressions. Amongst various features of this tool the most notable ones are that by just few clicks you are able to change music style, tempo, chords, etc.

You can also check out other articles reviewed by us like Anvil Studio, TunePresto and MuseScore.

ChordPulse is very simple to understand and has a easy to navigate interface. It is simple enough to be used by anyone.

Go ahead and give ChordPulse Lite a try today.

ChordPulse Lite: Free Tool to Improvise and Compose Music was originally published at I Love Free Software

X-Amp: Free Media Player

Jaya — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:30:49 +0000

X-Amp is a free media player. X-Amp is more of a player cum sound recording system. It is the perfect tool for all your music and sound files. It has a very simple interface and is very easy to use.

Lets look at some features of this software X-Amp:

MP3 playback is of high quality;
Compatible with FLAC format and PCM WAV-files;
Compact Disc Digital Audio standard is supported;
Playlists can be saved in M3U format;
ID3 tags of MP3 files can be edited;
While playing a MP3 file which was previously compressed, this software would be able to tell you the model and version number of the software by which it was compressed;
Graphic Equalizer;
Generate samples;
Automatic updates are done;
Various effects can be added through effects processor;
Modern features

You can also check out other articles like RealPlayer SP Free, BS.Player and VLC Media Player.

X-Amp is a very handy software to have, so go ahead and give it a try.

X-Amp: Free Media Player was originally published at I Love Free Software

Vorbital Player: Free Music Player

Jaya — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 02:55:05 +0000

Vorbital is a free Ogg Vorbis music player which uses OpenAL. It is small and compact so it takes very less screen space. That doesn’t mean you can not resize the window, you can always change the display window size according to your choice.

Vorbital supports playback of Ogg Vorbis, .WAV, Wavpack, AIFF, and SND format audio files.

You can also check out other articles like Shuffle Music Player, Random Music player and Jaangle.

The Vorbital Player is free to use and doesnot contain any malware or adware. It has a very easy to understand user interface and you are able to play your favorite music without taking care of setting and stuff.

So go ahead and give a try to free Vorbital Player.

Vorbital Player: Free Music Player was originally published at I Love Free Software

Exact Audio Copy: Free Audio Grabber

Jaya — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:30:32 +0000

Exact Audio Copy is a free software to grab or capture audio from CDs. This free audio grabber uses standard CD and DVD-ROMs to grabb audio. The technology Exact Audio Copy uses to read audio works like magic.

If any read errors occur which can not be fixed, then the software lets you know the exact position where this error occured. Exact Audio Copy uses technologies like AccurateRip and multi-reading with verify to check the audio being grabbed. Therefore, you can be sure of the good audio quality of the grabbed file.

Lets look at some features of Exact audio copy:

All kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported
Detection of read errors
Copies tracks along with range of music data.
Speed is automatically reduced when read erorrs occur.
Extracted audio volume normalization can be done to a given percentage.
Windows Audio Compression manager is used.
If there are gaps before the recording of the tracks, they can be easily detected.
Trackname editing with local/remote CD databases support.
Automatic renaming of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
Can extract entire catalog.
Supports multiple sessions.
Removes glitches if any after extracting audio.

You can also check out other articles like XreCode, Format factory and Pazera Audio Extractor.

Exact Audio Copy is completely free to use and download. So go ahead and give it a try.

Exact Audio Copy: Free Audio Grabber was originally published at I Love Free Software

Audio Media Player: Free Playlist Manager

Jaya — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:00:20 +0000

Audio Media Player is a simple playlist manager which is completely free to use. Your desire to just play music is fulfilled with this media player. Just select your playlist and click start to start playing songs. There are no complicated features to setup or skins to change.

Lets look at some features of this Audio Media Player:

It has minimal interface
Load, create and save playlists
No limit to number of files in a playlist
Playlist is notepad editable
You can play in modes like manual, run once, shuffle, and repeat
No limit on number of playlist that can be created
Plays all media player sound file types

Audio Media Player is a very simple player with a very clean interface. You will not notice anything complicated on this player. It is for music lovers who just want to listen plain and simple music, instead of setting or going through complicated features of other media players.

Lets see how this Audio Media Player works:

Choose MP3 files and then drag them over to the AMP icon and drop the files on it.
The MP3 files you selected will now be showing in a listbox.
Just press “Add to playlist”
You can also search for more music files to add to your playlist.
You can also multi select the files to add
The playlist now can be saved.
To load a different playlist just click on the load button.

Audio Media Player will start playing songs in your playlist from top to bottom in a sequence. It will stop playing after the last song in the list. If you have turned repeat on then it will restart again after the last song is played.

You can also check out other articles like M3U Dropper, Playlist Creator and Random MixTape Maker reviewed by us.

Audio Media Player is very easy to use and it fulfills the need of every music lover – just listening to music plain and simple way.

Audio Media Player: Free Playlist Manager was originally published at I Love Free Software

Kordz: Free Guitar Chord Finder

Ishayat — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 18:00:56 +0000

Kordz is a free guitar chord finder that works as standard guitar chord diagrams and presents you the fingering solutions. If you want to be a guitarist and you are learning guitar chords then this free guitar chord finder can help you to find standard classical fingering positions. It comes with 60 pre-defined chord types that can help you to learn chords or you can add your own if you want. This free guitar chord finder can help you to identify any chord shape and can help you to find more of that type.

This free guitar software is developed by a classical guitarist and it is designed to provide standard classical fingering positions. If you want to add some additional fingering techniques, you can contact the developer. This free guitar software can detect every chord shape and provide valid fingering suggestions for them. If you are looking for chords for specific notes, this free guitar software can find chords combined with it. If you own a MIDI device, this freeware can play diagrams through it.

This free guitar software comes with simple and easy-to-use interface. It also comes with a customizable and powerful chord search engine which can help you to find quickly what you are looking for. There are two types of notes you can select in this software – specific pitches and chord notes. If you want to play any specific chord, just select the note to make up that chord. If you are reading from sheet music and want to know which notes you have to play, just place them on stave as they appear in there and it will show you how to play them. If you are trying a solo arrangement, you can try the mixed mode.

You can also try 123Tuner and Pitch Ear Trainer reviewed by us. If you love music and want to play piano or drums in your PC, you can try Sweet Little Piano and Play Drums.

Features of Kordz:

Helps you to find valid fingering suggestions for every chord shape
You can find chords related with specific notes
You can play diagrams by adding MIDI device
You can get two or three hundred possible variations for most guitar chords
Comes with 60 pre-defined chord types

This freeware is available for download at Kordz’s official website. It’s only 144KB in size and supports Windows (All). Download Kordz Free.

Kordz: Free Guitar Chord Finder was originally published at I Love Free Software

Shuffle Music Player: Free Player which Plays Music Randomly

Jaya — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:30:02 +0000

Shuffle Music Player is a free music player which plays music according to its own choice. Yes you read it right, the music player plays music according to its own choice.

Shuffle music player will let you select a music album or directory and then will play music randomly. So you would keep guessing which song will come on next.

Let your player choose music for you. All you have to do is select an album or directory containing music and shuffle player will do the rest.

Shuffle Music Player supports many file formats like WAV, OGG, FLAC, MP3, IT, Mod, XM, etc. Also available now are music player skins. So you can change the look of your music player everyday.

Lets look at some helpful operating details about the shuffle music player:

Click the Right button on the mouse while on the software window and the choose “config” to access the configuration menu.

Open the config window, select “playlist management” and click on “create”. This will create a new playlist.

Keyboard shortcuts can be used to play, pause or volume control. Check the respective shortcuts on the website.

You can also check out other similar articles like Jaangle, Random Music Player and Muziic.

Shuffle Music Player is a good software and is completely free. Use this music player and listen to your favorite songs, Randomly!!

Shuffle Music Player: Free Player which Plays Music Randomly was originally published at I Love Free Software