I started working towards making games in Godot as a hobby, and so far had a lot of fun learning how to make models in Blender and textures in Krita and GIMP.

But eventually, there's also going to have to be some kind of audio. At least some beeps and bops, and perhaps some humming in the background.

Are there any kinds of Synthesizer software that are free and open source and accessible to clueless beginners on Linux in the way that Godot, Blender, and GIMP are?

#music #synth #gamedev

@yora are you looking just for synths or for a whole DAW ?

@yora i have BespokeSynth and FamiStudio installed now. LMMS is also popular, my friend loves it.

@dispencer @yora lmms was my first daw , but ive never uhh .. loved .. it . this was like almost 10 years ago tho

i tried ardour a while back and it was a bit better but still not rlly to my taste

@yora I like Vital, though it can be a bit conplicated if you don't already understand synthesizers
https://vital.audio/

@fiore @dispencer @yora have you tried fl studio

@maxine @fiore @dispencer I have not tried anything yet.

@yora @fiore @dispencer fl studio is good if u utilize google u can get a cracked version

@maxine @fiore @yora i also enjoy fl studio, but it is not FOSS

@dispencer @fiore @yora oh i did not read op sorry

@dispencer @yora @maxine yea :/ also not on linux without a bunch of work . im ngl doing music production on leenoocs is . ass .

@dispencer @maxine @yora oh wait !! furnacetracker is a thing !!!!! if youre up to learning what a tracker is and how it works , it is literally perfect for video game music . highly recommend

@fiore @maxine @dispencer @yora i would highly recommend learning scream or milky before furnace. its great at what it does but tutorials are slim and you can get lost in the weeds of the many, many sound chips it wants to emulate before you know what you are doing.

but its good yes

@yora music is a little odd because synthesizers just make noise, as do samplers, and you need a sequencer to make it all work. linux is in a particularly bad place for this.

Bosca is an old one that used to market itself for game jams and newbs https://yurisizov.itch.io/boscaceoil-blue

Furnace, Milky or Scream are trackers which do work. They do not support plugins. There are learning curves but they are also the most "out of the box," with Milky being a clone of fasttracker and scream being a clone of impulse. There is a lot of resources about using old trackers. Furnace is its own thing (its based around simulating a lot of old sound chips.)

Ardour is the closest to the traditional sequencers that is worth using. You will still have to bring other plugins, though, because over in audio land you use plugins instead of how krita just has the brush engine built in. SurgeXT is very good, Odin2 is alright, Linux Studio Plugins are generally very good as well.

Bespoke Synth is quite fun to play with. But its very... not standard, and kind of meant to eventually go alongside other things. helio.fm looks nice but i think it has the same issue; you can compose with it, but you'll ultimately want to export and finish with ardour.

Non-open source the answers are obvious: Reaper and/or Renoise.