Synthesia, formerly called Piano Hero, is a free program plus game that teaches you to play the piano using visual cues like falling notes. Don’t worry if you can’t read sheet music, because you require none. Synthesia lets you learn to play the keyboard and also keep track of your progress.
To use Synthesia you will require a real piano or synthesizer, a Windows or Mac computer to run the game and MIDI files of the music you want to practice. There are plenty of free MIDI resources on the web. If your synthesizer is capable of connecting to your computer (via USB, MIDI cables, or an adapter) then Synthesia can read as you play and score your playing. If not, Synthesia lets you follow along on your own but without scoring.
Impro-Visor is a free music notation program designed to help jazz musicians compose and hear solos similar to ones that might be improvised. The objective is to improve understanding of solo construction and tune chord changes. It has also been used for transcription. Because rhythm-section (e.g. piano, bass, drums) accompaniment is automatically generated from chords, Impro-Visor can be used as a play-along device. Now having a wider array of accompaniment styles, its use is not limited to jazz. Distributed with Impro-Visor is “The Imaginary Book”, a chords-only fakebook with chord progressions to about 2500 tunes.
LilyPond is a program which converts music definition files into visual or auditive output: it can typeset formatted sheet music to a TeX file and (mechanical) performances to MIDI files. Features include multiple staffs, meters, clefs, keys, lyrics, versatile input-language, cadenzas beams, slurs and triplets.
If you are looking for an application geared toward managing extensive music collections, easy to use and with a comprehensive feature set – MusicBee is that application. MusicBee makes it easy to organize, find and play music files on your computer, on portable devices and on the web.
Manage your music as a library, as playlists or as folders on the file-system. Organize, browse and find music on your computer, on portable devices and on the web. Small or large collections are handled with ease. Have folders watched for new tracks and added to your library, with the option to tag the files from an Inbox beforehand. Also manage and download Podcast subscriptions and listen to your favourite radio stations, including Shoutcast, Jamendo and Last.fm stations.
Tag music easily, with a large number of tags available for editing*, and custom tags that can be configured to edit other less common tags. Automatically look up missing Album Art, Lyrics and tag other metadata from the web, with the ability to have tracks identified by analysing their digital sound signature. Power users will appreciate the configurable input panel layout, bulk editing, handling for multiple artist/ genres, search & replace, and tools to highlight tracks requiring attention (missing tags, duplicates, etc).
Have music files organised and renamed into folders and files on your computer based on tag values such as artist, album, name, track number, etc. that you specify. You can have MusicBee do this automatically for all files in your library or you can choose the files or folders yourself.
Play MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, WMA and other formats and optionally have those tracks scrobbled to Last.fm. You are not restricted to music files on your computer – you can play the web as well. Playlists are automatically created from MP3 blogs and web pages you visit. Discover music with the Auto-DJ and have it create a playlist for you based on criteria you specify, such as tracks from similar artists, or include music tracks from the web not in your collection (or old ones from your collection you have forgotten about!) You can also create playlists that are dynamically updated based on your own rules, such as tracks with the same mood or genre.
ProTrekkr (formerly known as NoiseTrekker by Juan Antonio Arguelles Rius aka Arguru) is a tracker program combining a software synthesizer together with a traditional samples tracker which can be used to create electronic music (like psytrance, trance goa, hard acid, IDM, chip, techno, etc.) for small sized intros, demos or games.
The tracker is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Main features: – 16 multi-notes tracks (with 256 virtual channels). – Samples editor (can load up to 64 bits stereo samples). – Patterns based tracker style sequencer. – Synthesizer with custom waveforms support. – Samples loop editor. – 2 303s units. – Cubic spline interpolation. – Wav files import/export. – 16 or 32 bits wav rendering. – Multi effects engine with reverb, distortion, filters, delay, EQs, flanger, etc… – Fully customizable 10 combs reverb. – Midi in/out support. – Protracker .mod files import. – Samples compressor handling Gsm/Mp3/TrueSpeech/ADPCM/8 Bit (not on Linux or Mac OS X yet). – Replay routine source code to be included & used inside your own programs (Also featuring a replay routine for the PlayStation Portable). – Winamp/XMPlay plugin available. – And maybe more…
This is a FREEWARE tool, this means that you can use it for whatever you want and for free. There’s NO GUARANTEE that this program will perform well or even run on your computer.
The program supports a number of input formats, like the above mentioned AAC, M4a, MP4 audio, M4b (audiobooks), and some other MPEG-4 based audio formats. You can convert those types of audio files to MP3 or uncompressed WAV. The latter can be used as an intermediate format for further converting (with tools like AudioConverter Studio).
Free M4a to MP3 Converter combines professional quality with high speed and user-friendly interface. You can simply drag and drop your M4a or AAC files from Windows Explorer and then hit “Convert” (or F5 on your keyboard). On the other hand, it is also possible to fine tune quality parameters for output files. The program supports full range of MP3 settings: bit rates up to 320 Kbit/s and sample rates up to 48 KHz. This way, you can get high quality audio files along with the portability of MP3 format (which is supported now by virtually every player, hardware or software).
The program has also a built-in audio player, which allows you to listen to your AAC and M4a files even without converting them.
Features:
AAC to MP3 converter.
Convert M4a to MP3.
Audio books M4b to MP3 converter.
MP4 audio converter.
3GP audio converter.
AAC, M4a, M4b player.
MP3 quality settings up to 320 Kbit/s, 48 KHz.
Drag&Drop.
Batch processing of multiple M4a, AAC, M4b, MP4 etc. files.
User-friendly multilingual interface.
Meta information (ID3 tags) is copied from source files. Converted files contain all necessary data: title, artist, album (if the data was present in the source files).
notes. Don’t worry if you can’t read sheet music, because you require none. Synthesia lets you learn to play the keyboard and also keep track of your progress.
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