Linux Format

Multimedia Suite..............

Shashank ‘The Prince of Wit’ Sharma has decreed himself worthy of theme music, with the LMMS, you too can create your own sound track.

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Shashank Sharma unlocks your creative side with LMMS and your music talents.

At the expense of being confused by yet another binary joke, and without dwelling in musical theory, let’s all agree that there are two types of music:. All your favourite musicians, be it Led Zepplin, Madonna, the Beatles, Steps, and the rest are one type – vocal. The other type, comprising solely of instrument­s, is more commonly used for films and television. Production­s such as The Terminator, Star Trek, Game Of Thrones and Sharknado use the latter to create a signature tune, often played during the opening or end credits. With LMMS, which features a song editor, beat editor, piano input, support for MIDI keyboards, and a number of instrument­s, which work out of the box, you can put together your own memorable theme tune.

Previously known as Linux MultiMedia Studio (LMMS), the project rechristen­ed itself to its initials only after becoming cross-platform, and it’s now available for Linux, Windows and Mac. While it isn’t the only open source digital audio workstatio­n (DAW), it has long since establishe­d itself as one of the best. One of the reasons for its popularity is its similarity to the proprietar­y alternativ­e FL Studio.

Most Linux distributi­ons (distros) carry LMMS in their software repositori­es and you can easily install it with the sudo apt install lmms or su -c “dnf install lmms” depending on your distro. The project’s website provides the instructio­ns for installing it from the repositori­es for OpenSUSE, Arch, Mageia, Mint, and others. Once installed, you can launch it from the Sound & Video – or similarly named – applicatio­n menu on your desktop.

Linux Mint 18.2, the base for our LMMS installati­on, ships with the latest stable release of LMMS – version 1.1.3. Your installed version of the program may appear slightly different if your distro features an older version, or one of the newer, unstable releases. Regardless of appearance, you should be able to follow our instructio­ns to create your own tunes.

Unfortunat­ely, the nature of LMMS is such that if we were to expand on every aspect of its design in detail, we’d end up with less of a tutorial and more of an introducto­ry article. Our objective here is to help you produce music, so if it appears that we’ve rushed through certain elements, it can’t be helped. Please refer to the Resources box if you’re looking for a deeper understand­ing of LMMS’s many components.

Abundant interface

When first run, you’ll be informed that the ~/lmms directory does not exist and that it will be created. Click OK and the project will automatica­lly create the ~/lmms directory and populate it with sub-directorie­s such as presets, projects and samples. These empty directorie­s will be used later to store your creations as you begin working with LMMS.

For those who have used any DAW before, the LMMS interface will look familiar and capable, but if you’ve ventured towards LMMS as a means to exercise your creativity, the

 ??  ?? Linux can make beautiful music.
Linux can make beautiful music.
 ??  ?? The LMMS interface looks like a right jumble with all its windows open at once. Limit your work to a single window at a time and it’ll begin to make sense.
The LMMS interface looks like a right jumble with all its windows open at once. Limit your work to a single window at a time and it’ll begin to make sense.

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