Freeware App Pick: Musagi (DrPetter)
Article by Lim-Dul
DrPetter, a talented programmer from Sweden has taken the indie community by storm with his brilliant sound generator sfxr. It was one small step for him but a giant leap for game developers everywhere since now there isn't a single excuse for not including nice sound effects in a game left.
As nice as sfxr might be, few people are aware of DrPetter's other projects, especially Musagi.
What started out as a simple and intuitive music editor for Peter's brother turned into a fully functional and feature-packed application. Don't be deceived by the humble version designation of 0.1 pre-beta - it works and is more polished than many a shareware or commercial product.
Name: Musagi
Developer: DrPetter
Category: Sound Editor
Type: Freeware
Direct download link
Size: 1.3 MB (Unbelievable!)
Direct download link: Click here
Tutorial: Here
The closest comparison can be drawn between Musagi and Pixel's pxTone although the former has more features, yet is very intuitive to use. At first glance it resembles and emulates the basic features of commercial software like FL Studio.
The program comes with a broad range of instruments - from predefined "retro" sounds that can be customized a la sfxr to a MIDI interface and a WAV sampler. The possibilities are endless!
Even if you're not a composer and do not hook up your keyboard (musical instrument) to record tunes on your PC or use the keyboard (computer peripheral) to play them you can ignore the more advanced sound-editing features and start composing a nice melody right away - it's really intuitive and simple. Especially the so-called (at least in FL Studio) piano roll deserves high praise since it's very precise because of the nice "cross-hair" feature.
I could go on for ages how wonderful this DrPetter's work is and mind you, I'm not a composer myself, I'm just a guy that has been fooling around with various sound editors from time to time for many years - believe me, this is probably the best program when it comes to the ease-of-use vs effects achieved ratio I've ever seen.
I highly encourage everybody to try out Peter's work, even if you haven't come into contact with composing music before - maybe you'll unearth an undiscovered talent in yourself? Besides - the project needs as much attention as it can get so that Peter can find the motivation to finish it as soon as possible. He seems to be quite modest, hence he didn't announce such an early version all over the web but it really isn't very buggy except for the odd feature or the final touch that might be missing here and there.
Instead of wasting your time reading my article, download the program right away and be sure to read the text file in the documentation folder. Then you can check out the nicely written step-by-step tutorial that will let you compose your very first tune.
Comments
Very Nice
Posted by: Nu | December 29, 2007 11:33 PM
Yeah - I composed the following ultra original non-riped-off theme with it. :-D
Click here
I had to listen to the Knight Rider intro several times because I don't know the notes by heart. =)
P.S. It seems that Musagi cuts off a tiny little bit of music at the beginning and at the end of the file... I had to insert dummy "buffers"...
Posted by: Lim-Dul | December 30, 2007 1:18 AM
This is really great, I'm getting further with this than any other composing program I've messed with before (including pxtone). The tutorial is well written and interesting too, I highly suggest running through it. With just a bit more polish in a few spots, this could be really, really fantastic!
Posted by: Bobo | December 30, 2007 3:08 AM
I've just started fooling around with PXTone, you guys think I should maybe switch to musagi then?
Posted by: jeffx | January 1, 2008 4:02 PM
Actually you could just as well use them BOTH. =)
It's not as if they are too expensive to buy together. :-D
Posted by: Lim-Dul | January 2, 2008 12:00 AM
Bobo: Care to be more specific about the polish? There's a (very empty) forum: http://drpetter.proboards21.com/index.cgi?board=musagi
:P
Lim-Dul: Heh, sweet little tune there.
The MIDI support is pretty horrible at the moment as it was a quick and nasty hack primarily intended to enable a range of easy-access "normal" instrument sounds, file export wasn't really planned to start with and it only does the bare minimum needed to get a playable file out.
Did you inspect the exported song in a midi editor to see that notes were missing or was it just based on playing it in winamp or something? Actually it doesn't matter all that much, I need to rewrite the whole midi export code at some point anyway.
It's cool to hear people are actually able to do stuff in the program. Hopefully It'll soon reach a state where I'm comfortable "announcing" the thing on various places (among musicians perhaps and not only gamedevvers).
It's been in development for close to two years already - that should be enough ;)
(oh, and I know the 1.3 MB zip file is unbelievably large... it's due to the included songs/instruments/docs, without them it's a more reasonable 150 kB)
Posted by: DrPetter | January 17, 2008 9:22 PM
Ehm - by "unbelievable" I meant that it's unbelievably small for such a feature-packed application. ;-)
Posted by: Lim-Dul | May 8, 2008 6:35 PM
Lim-Dul: Heh, sweet little tune there.
Ha - I think this is actually the tune you attached to your Musagi tutorial. :-D
Posted by: Lim-Dul | May 16, 2008 4:30 PM