[Opensource] Hydrogen Advanced Drum Machine | Software

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine. It has a Qt-based MDI-style interface, with mixer, song editor, pattern editor, drumkit manager, and instrument editor subwindows. Included drumkits (sample sets) include GeneralMIDI (emulating a Roland XV-5080) and Roland TR-808. Although I'm not a musician, the interface is straightforward enough that I was able to begin experimenting quickly, starting with the included demo files. Hydrogen is very easy to use and the resulting tracks can be recorded in the most popular standard formats for PC and Mac, such as. Wav,. Au, and. AIFF.

Hydrogen is created by Alessandro Cominu, an Italian programmer who goes by the pseudonym Comix. Its main goal is to provide professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Hydrogen was originally developed for Linux, but later ported to Mac OS X. Support for Microsoft Windows seemed to have been abandoned, since the last build dated to 2006 for 4 years, but a Microsoft Windows port exists as a snapshot of the upcoming 0.9.6 version, indicating that Microsoft Windows is likely to be supported in the future. The graphical user interface for the application uses Qt library. All code is released under the GNU General Public License. Hydrogen is free software.

Feature

• General

1. Very user-friendly, modular, fast and intuitive graphical interface based on QT 4.
2. Sample-based stereo audio engine, with import of sound samples in .wav, .au and .aiff formats.
3. Support of samples in compressed FLAC file.

• Sequencer and mixer

1. Pattern-based sequencer, with unlimited number of patterns and ability to chain patterns into a song.
2. Up to 192 ticks per pattern with individual level per event and variable pattern length.
3. Unlimited instrument tracks with volume, mute, solo, pan capabilities.
4. Multi layer support for instruments (up to 16 samples for each instrument).
5. Sample Editor, with basic cut and loop functions. (NEW)
6. Time-stretch and pitch functions via rubberband cli. Require the rubberband-cli package. (NEW) 
7. Play-lists with scripting function. (NEW)
8. Advanced tab-tempo. (NEW)
9. Director Window with a visual metronome and song position tags. (NEW)
10. Time-line with variable tempo. (NEW)
11. Single and stacked pattern mode. (NEW)
12. Export/Import single patterns into song projects. (NEW)
13. Midi learning via Shift+MouseClick on many gui-cotrollers combined with a midi settings editor. (NEW)  
14. Ability to import/export song files.
15. Unique human velocity, human time, pitch and swing functions.
16. Multiple patterns playing at once.

• Other

1. JACK, ALSA, PortAudio and OSS audio drivers.
2. ALSA MIDI and PortMidi input with assignable midi-in channel (1..16, ALL).
3. Import/export of drumkits.
4. Export song to wav, aiff, flac or ogg file.
5. Export song to midi file.