Hydrogen

Hydrogen is a virtual drum machine that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Whenever I need drums, and have no drummer to borrow (always), this is what I use.Programming drum beats is pattern-based, so it's generally easy to figure it out just by experimenting. But, if you need more direction, it also has a manual in several languages. It also has an easy-to-understand way to create custom drum kits using various recorded samples. For that reason, there's lots of different types of free drum kits available for it (see http://www.hydrogen-music.org/?p=drumkits).

While it's an integrated sequencer/sampler (for those of you who know what that means), it can also be controlled by an external sequencer via MIDI.

Hydrogen is also an excellent example of Free Software. About 2 1/2 years ago, the lead developer Alessandro Cominu (a.k.a. Comix) either got bored or frustrated with it, and stopped working on it. But, because the code is publicly available, other people were able to make their own fixes when needed.

One example, I wanted Hydrogen to have a new feature, support for something called JACK MIDI -- something that didn't exist 2 1/2 years ago. Using the source code, I was able to add the feature myself. Others had other features that they needed/wanted... and so development has started again.

One of the devs released a beta of the next version of Hydrogen, and I expect the new version to be ready in a month or two. It will include a tap tempo feature, lead/lag, advanced humanization, swing, some JACK features (but not MIDI, yet), and some bug fixes. JACK MIDI is slated for the version after this, but if you want to play with it right now, it's available in the jackMidi branch of the Subversion repository (http://www.hydrogen-music.org/svn/branches/jackMidi/).

BTW, I'll explain what JACK is in a future post. It's very similar to ReWire.