Post your favorite software tools

[glasshand]

I dunno if this is the right subforum for this, but close enough.
I thought it would be good if we had a thread where we could post recommendations for our favorite practice and recording software. I'll start with a few:

- Amazing Slow Downer: it not only slows down music, it can also speed it up, or pitch shift it, and you can loop parts of a track, you can select only left or right, you can EQ it, etc. etc. etc.

- Fender Riffstation: Also lets you slow down music and change pitch and loop sections, but it can also analyze the chords of a song and even lets you rearrange sections, and can isolate parts of the stereo spectrum.

- Moises.ai: Analyzes songs and breaks them down into component tracks so you can mute individual instruments or hear them isolated! It isn't perfect, but it can do a pretty impressive job considering the limitations of MP3s.

[sabasgr68]

I think this thread is a good idea!

It would be great to add if it´s paid software or free.

I also use Riffstation. I like it a lot.

Sonobus https://sonobus.net/ I haven´t use it so far, but it supposedly connects several users to play music together - among other things -. It´s free. How good is it? Will have to find out.

Audacity. https://www.audacityteam.org/ It´s free, and it´s good enough for your mixes. I use it a lot.

[sabasgr68]

Hey Glass @glasshand , I´ve just tried Moises AI and I´m very impressed!

I registered for free, and there´s some limitations, but the sound quality is very good.

I tried it with Journey´s "Ask the lonely", as I like that song a lot, but all the attempts I´ve tried to mute the guitar to play mine above it haven´t resulted as clean as I want, so I still wanted to have a decent back track for that song. The bad part of using the free version is that you have limited track options to isolate, in this case I could have vocals, bass, drums, and others, where "others" had the guitar(s) and keyboard together, so I don´t have keyboards in my backtrack because I don´t want the guitar in it, but I can roll down the volume on that track and I have something "decent" to play with. Paid versions have more options.

I also tried it with another song, where lead guitar and vocals are both centered, and in that case the guitar wasn´t removed completely in some parts, or clean.

But still, as I said, the isolated tracks sound very good, considering this are not original isolated tracks.

Other bad thing of the free version is that it only allows the user five songs per month to process. No problem, I´ll go slowly with the songs I like haha.

I have a weird musical hobby that it is to listen to songs with/without vocals, guitars, bass, drums, keyboard, piano, etc.; one of my favorite "mixes" are just drums and bass together, with or without vocals. It lets you listen to the song in a whole new dimension, for me, at least. I always search YouTube for "Isolated tracks of XXXX song".

Anyway, I´m glad you let us know about Moises.

Thanks!

[Chocol8]

I will check out Fender Riffstation and Moises. The only software I have been using lately is Tonex and rarely Reaper.

[sabasgr68]

I will check out Fender Riffstation and Moises. The only software I have been using lately is Tonex and rarely Reaper.

Riffstation is discontinued. You may land on pages offering to download it, but there is no official download page.

I downloaded the full version for free when they made it available before shutting down the page. I can share it with you via google drive if you want; I´ll share the link in a PM - for you, and for anybody who wants it -.

[glasshand]

How did I forget Audacity?! Thanks for mentioning that, @sabasgr68, I love Audacity for general-purpose messing around with audio. Just the other day I used it to prove to myself that someone else's transcription of a song was wrong - they had a half-step drop in a particular lick, and I imported the track into Audacity and looked at the spectrogram view, and sure enough, you could see that the frequency did *not* drop where they said it did.

I'm curious about trying Moises.ai with better source material. MP3s intentionally mess with the audio in a way that you can't usually hear in a full mix, but when you try to extract individual tracks, you hear the artifacts. Also obviously the original recording matters too; if it was really low-quality, I imagine Moises.ai can only do so much with it. But I'm eager to try Moises.ai with a high-quality track ripped directly from CD to WAV...

[andrewsrea]

I use Presonus Studio One 5 Pro for recording and it more than does the job for me. Shout out to PowerPoint of all things, for designing pedal graphics and terroboard circuits and good old Word for banging lyrics out unobstructed, when inspiration hits.