Free and Open Source Software
There are many free and open-source software programs that can facilitate a DAW. These are often designed to run on a variety of operating systems and are usually developed non-commercially.
The development of digital audio for Linux and BSD fostered technologies such as ALSA, which drives audio hardware, and JACK. JACK allows any JACK-aware audio software to connect to any other audio software running on the system, such as connecting an ALSA- or OSS-driven soundcard to a mixing and editing front-end, like Ardour or Rosegarden. In this way, JACK acts as a virtual audio patch bay, and it can be configured to use a computer's resources in real time, with dedicated memory, and with various options that minimize the DAW's latency. This kind of abstraction and configuration allows DJs to use multiple programs for editing and synthesizing audio streams, or multitasking and duplexing, without the need for analogue conversion, or asynchronous saving and reloading files, and ensures a high level of audio fidelity.
- Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor that can run on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux; it is particularly popular in the podcast community, and also has a large following among the visually impaired due to its keyboard interface.
- Rosegarden is a multi-featured audio application that includes audio mixing plugins, a notation editor, and MIDI matrix editor. The MusE Sequencer is a similarly featured audio application that includes an audio mixer and a MIDI sequencer.
Other open-source programs include virtual synthesizers and MIDI controllers, such as those provided by FluidSynth and TiMidity. Both can load SoundFonts to expand the voices and instruments available for synthesis and expand the ports and channels available to synthesizers. Such virtualization allows users to expand the traditional limitations of ADC-DAC hardware.
The Linux Audio Development (LAD) mailing list is a major driving force in developing standards, such as the LADSPA, DSSI and LV2 plugin architectures. The Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugin standard is supported as an option by some such programs but is generally implemented as a separate plugin, not a built-in option, due to Steinberg's licensing scheme. Among others, the creators of Audacity provide an optional, somewhat minimalist, VST-to-LADSPA bridge plugin for their software, but it is a separate download.
Read more about this topic: Digital Audio Workstation
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