Stuff we use and love
Commercial music and sound software
1.
Live www.ableton.com This is The Absolutely Indispensible Axe for the last few years in my studio
2.
Sonar and
Project5 www.cakewalk.com I loved Opcode Vision a lot but with the demise of the Mac, Sonar is a pretty good tool. P5v2 came out and has really improved over v1 both in design and CPU load.
3.
Reason www.propellerheads.se The grandaddy of soft studios.
4.
Sound Forge and
CD Architect, formerly from Sonic Solutions, now owned by Sony.
The ultimate music and sound design geek kit...
Max/MSP formerly from Opcode Systems, now sold and supported by
Cycling '74
SSEYO Koan 2.7 I don't think anyone else in the world uses this, but it's a great tool for algorithmic music generation. (See some more details on
my Koan page.) Imagine my surprise in 2008 when the team that developed Koan announced a new product descended from it, called
noatikl.
Believe it or not, as of 2007 I am looking at
CSound and ChucK (I think it's at
http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu) CSound has a clunky, ancient architecture, but it has decades of work that has been done on it. ChucK is very new but it is designed for multi-threaded sample accurate realtime audio...it sounds like a programmatic way to do things that Ableton Live does. More research continues...
Other interesting places and things
Red Bull Music Academy You thought it was just a weird energy drink to mix with vodka? Check their site out to see how they support upcoming artists and producers...