Free audio software

cross-platform free and open-source music player

Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems.

X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license.

open-source research platform

audio player, free and open source software

Media player software of the desktop environment GNOME

professional sound server daemon

cross-platform music player software

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

visual audio programming language

Audio interface for Unix-like operating systems

SuperCollider is an environment and audio programming language released originally in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition.

Exaile is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. It was originally conceived to be similar in style and functions to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is written in Python and utilizes the GStreamer media framework.

CD-Ripper

Praat ( ; ) is a free, open-source computer software package widely used for speech analysis and synthesis in phonetics and other fields of linguistics. The software was developed and is maintained by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the University of Amsterdam, and is compatible most major operating systems, including Unix, Linux, Mac, and Microsoft Windows. Praat has been used in linguistic research on endangered and minority languages, as well as for analyzing regional accents and phonetic variation.

Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA, JACK and Qt4. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter, and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free alternative to such applications as Cubase.

Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is named Csound because it is written in the language C, in contrast to some of its predecessors. It is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 or later.

The '''Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA''') is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. Originally designed through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers mailing list, it now works on a variety of platforms. It is used in many free audio software projects, and there is a wide range of LADSPA plug-ins available.

server-side application for playing music

WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It also supports compressing a wide variety of lossless formats, including various variants of PCM and also DSD as used in SACDs, together with its support for surround audio.

Linux distribution

Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack Moffitt and Barath Raghavan to provide an open-source audio streaming server that anyone could modify, use, and tinker with. Version 2, a ground-up rewrite aimed at multi-format support (initially targeting Ogg Vorbis) and scalability, was started in 2001 and released in January 2004.

music software

OpenMPT is an open-source music tracker for Windows. Currently developed by a multitude of contributors, it is based on ModPlug Tracker by Olivier Lapicque, first released in September 1997. Although developed for Windows, OpenMPT can be run on Unix-like systems via Wine.

dyne:bolic GNU/Linux is a Live CD/DVD distribution based on the Linux kernel. It is shaped by the needs of media activists, artists and creators to be a practical tool with a focus on multimedia production, that delivers a large assortment of applications. It allows manipulation and broadcast of both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode, and stream. In addition to multimedia specific programs, dyne:bolic also provides word processors and common desktop computing tools.

aRts (which stands for analog real time synthesizer) is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It was best known for previously being used in K Desktop Environment 2 and 3 to simulate an analog synthesizer.

audio tracker for DOS

console audio player

fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD extractor for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, distributed under the GPL-2.0-or-later.

Zinf is a free audio player for Unix-like and Windows operating systems. Zinf is released under the GNU General Public License.

TiMidity++, originally and still frequently informally called TiMidity, is a software synthesizer that can play MIDI files without a hardware synthesizer. It can either render to the sound card in real time, or it can save the result to a file, such as a PCM .wav file.

Sound server

music player, tag editor and library organizer

ZynAddSubFX (also now called Zyn-Fusion) is a free and open-source software synthesizer for Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Version 3's new user interface was initially released under proprietary terms, but is now open source (though prebuilt binaries are still sold to fund development).

EasyTag (stylised as EasyTAG) is a free and open-source graphical tag editor that is part of the GNOME project. EasyTag runs on Linux and Microsoft Windows, and there was an attempt to bring EasyTAG to OS X circa 2014. It is written in C and relies on GTK+ and id3lib for graphics and ID3 tag handling respectively. As of version 2.1.1, EasyTag also uses the tag manipulation library provided by the MAD project, for support of ID3v2.4.

mpg123 is a free and open-source audio player. It supports MPEG audio formats, including MP3.

ChucK is a concurrent, strongly timed audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, and performance, which runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and iOS. It is designed to favor readability and flexibility for the programmer over other considerations such as raw performance. It natively supports deterministic concurrency and multiple, simultaneous, dynamic control rates. Another key feature is the ability to live code; adding, removing, and modifying code on the fly, while the program is running, without stopping or restarting. It has a highly precise timing/concurrenc

CD ripping program

audio interface and effect program

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a cross-platform audio editing software. It has a command-line interface, and is written in standard C. It is free software, licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, with libsox licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later, and distributed by Chris Bagwell through SourceForge.

LV2 (LADSPA Version 2) is a set of royalty-free open standards for music production plug-ins and matching host applications. It includes support for the synthesis and processing of digital audio and CV, events such as MIDI and OSC, and provides a free alternative to audio plug-in standards such as Virtual Studio Technology (VST) and Audio Units (AU).

FluidSynth, formerly named iiwusynth, is a free open source software synthesizer which converts MIDI note data into an audio signal using SoundFont technology without need for a SoundFont-compatible soundcard. FluidSynth can act as a virtual MIDI device, able to receive MIDI data from any program and transform it into audio on-the-fly. It can also read in SMF (.mid) files directly. On the output side, it can send audio data directly to an audio device for playback, or to a Raw or Wave file. It can also convert a SMF file directly to an audio file in faster-than-real-time. The combination of th

NoteEdit is a defunct music scorewriter for Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems. Its official successor is Canorus.

Linux-based operating system

programming language for generating computerized music

MP3Gain is an audio normalization software tool. The tool is available on multiple platforms and is free software. It analyzes the MP3 and reversibly changes its volume. The volume can be adjusted for single files or as album where all files would have the same perceived loudness. It is an implementation of ReplayGain. In 2015 Debian and Ubuntu removed it from their repositories due to a lack of an active maintainer.

MusE is computer software, a sequencer for Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and audio, with recording and editing abilities. It was originally written by Werner Schweer and now is developed by the MusE development team. It is free software released under GPL-2.0-or-later.

qmmp (for Qt-based MultiMedia Player) is a free and open-source cross-platform audio player that is similar to Winamp. It is written in C++ using the Qt widget toolkit for the user interface. It officially supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. In most Linux distributions, it is available through the standard package repositories. Until Audacious switched to Qt in version 4.0, qmmp was the only audio player to use Qt and not feature a database.

free software

free software for audio spectrum anlysis

music player software

Streamripper is a stand-alone client, or Winamp plugin, that records Internet radio streams in the MP3 or Vorbis formats, programmed by Jon Clegg and maintained by Gregory Sharp.

software synthesizer plugin architecture