So, one glaring flaw in my LD22 game is that it had no music whatsoever. This was one thing that I wanted to fix for LD23. The problem is: since I’m not a musician, I have no idea whatsoever about how to use the many tracker tools available in the bar to the right side.

So today I decided to go on a quest for some simple music generators that I could use for my game. The conditions:
– Must allow me to use the generated music freely (so no wolphram tunes)
– Must be usable from the web, or runnable under linux/wine
– Must be easy to use by a total music noob like myself
– Must allow me to download my work so I can use it in my game

Luckly, in spite of all my rage and conditions, I managed to find some generators that fit the bill.

The first was “Aviary’s Music Creator”. It has a very wide range of sounds, but the sound sample has a very limited size, and you can’t make it larger. I found that if you select some of the percursion, drum or bass sets, and ask for a “random” set of beats, it can create something rather cool, like this.

The second was Otomata. A very cool celular automata based music creator. You create cells on the board, and as they touch the borders, they play sounds. As they touch each other, they change directions. The cool thing about this site is that you can change the board while it is recording your song, which allows for you to add/remove cells to make your song more/less complex with time. Here is a sample I did while meddling with it.

Hope this can be useful to other sound noobs like me. Also, there is this really cool site called inudge, listed among the tools – the nice thing about it is that it lets you use multiple instruments at the same time, in arbitrarily large songs. But for the life of me I can’t figure out how to save the output for a file. Other than pointing my microphone to my sound boxes, can anyone suggest me an easy way to save a song from inudge.net?