Ardour

Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. Its primary author is Paul Davis, who is also responsible for the JACK Audio Connection Kit. Ardour is intended to be digital audio workstation software suitable for professional use.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version two or any later version), Ardour is free software.

Ardour major version 5.0, with improvements including support for a new tabbed interface, Lua scripting, VCAs, plugin pin management and many other new features, was released in August 2016.

Ardour – official website –

LMMS

LMMS (formerly Linux MultiMedia Studio) is a digital audio workstationapplication program. When LMMS is executed on a computer with appropriate hardware, it allows music to be produced by arranging samples, synthesizing sounds, playing on a MIDI keyboard, and combining the features of trackers and sequencers. It supports the Linux Audio Developer’s Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) and Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plug-ins (on Win32, Win64,or Wine32). It is free software released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2).

LMMS accepts soundfonts and GUS patches. It can import Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and Hydrogen files. It can read and write customized presets and themes.^[6] Audio can be exported in the OGG, FLAC, MP3, and WAV file formats, and the projects can be saved in the compressed MMPZ file format or the uncompressed MMP file format. It can use VST plug-ins on Win32, Win64, or Wine32, though currently the macOS port doesn’t support them.

LMMS – official website –

Audacity

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS/OS X and Unix-like operating systems. Audacity was started in the fall of 1999 by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University and was released on May 28, 2000 as version 0.8.

As of August 14, 2019, it is the most popular download from FossHub^[9], with over 76 million downloads since March 2015. Previously, downloads were served from Google Code and SourceForge, with a combined total in excess of 100 million downloads. Audacity won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.

In addition to recording audio from multiple sources, Audacity can be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out. Audacity has also been used to record and mix entire albums, such as by Tune-Yards.  It is also currently used in the UK OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit

Audacity – official website –