Firstly, it's all going to be streaming, and in the worst case, via someone's 14.4kbps telephone line modem. What ?! Do those modems still exist ? Which Millennium you in ?
Anyway, as I was saying, most of the resulting BGMs would be highly down-sampled anyhow. So, no need for super-high quality output. Free or hobbyist-level music creation apps suit me fine.
Over the years, which have been my favourites and are still usable today ?
Here is my list, which I'll update over time:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/warez.html
Original creator's links; disregard his "warez" label in his URL !
Stomper, the software synth, and Little Drummer Boy, the drum app.
http://www.brambos.com/tu2.html
Killer App ! By Bram Bos, who was just a little kid when he started writing this - talk about brat wizards !
http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/
HammerHead, drum app - also hot
coupled with---
http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/simsynth.shtml
HammerHead Rhythm Station SymSynth
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Audacity, a freeware music editor
It has come a long way since it was first released by its Japanese creator.
Back in the day, Syntrillium had an app called Cool Edit.
Here is an update on what has happened to it:
http://www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/syntrillium.html
"Cool Edit Pro is now Adobe Audition - Adobe Systems Incorporated acquired the technology assets of Syntrillium Software in May 2003 and introduced Adobe® Audition® software (a rebranded release of Cool Edit Pro) in August 2003. Adobe Audition 2.0 is the most current version of the software, and Syntrillium's other products have been discontinued."
Cool Edit can still be located variously around the internet by searching for
"c96setup.exe" - download and install at your own risk, for goodness sake !
There are several notation readers which can take midi and other formats and convert them into human-readable music scores on your PC screen. I tend to stick with my last-Millennium Cakewalk Scorewriter even if it's old and dodgey. This app is no longer available, of course. Last time I checked, Cakewalk software now belongs to GenieSoft.
Finally, I have played with the demo versions of Virtual Singer, a plugin of Harmony Assistant. It is quite scary to have a synthesized singing human voice, in the eraly days of my pc-based music adventure. However, I think this is now a given in 3D VR projects.
On a related note, Text-To-Speech (TTS) apps help add that flat, emotionless voice-over for your music (said sarcastically - well until artificial speech can EMOTE, I don't think I can change my opinion on this).
I think I did pay for a bytecool coolspeech app once upon a time many computers and compute crashes ago.....
Look, basically, I wanted Japanese babe and hunk voices to go with a TTS app. Now, the Japanese text one enters is nothing like the romaji (romanised) Japanese - it has to be re-spelled so that the idiot synthesized voices can pronounce the words into barely-intelligible Japanese. I I trust and hope that TTS has improved in the past decade, judging from opportunities arising from mobile phone apps. ATT Labs had some nice interactive demos. RealSpeech ended up as the nicest Japanese female voice, and she was interactive for a while ( nice babe face too). But that's all internet history now. The voices have landed up as parts of commercial software, mostly for trade and industry use.
Meanwhile, my Artificial Intelligence chatbots remain voiceless.
