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Hey guys im a secondary school teacher and want to do a music production club. The only problem is due to the cuts schools are completely skint and am looking for a free daw that i can try out hopefully is possible with VST support as i know there are loads of free synths. If possible something that can do automation too.

Any ideas would really be appreciated.

Cheers

Craig

Theres reaper. Its not technically free, you can get away with using it with out a license but I would avoid that for a school, but it is also only 60 bucks

http://www.reaper.fm/purchase.php

edit: just noticed that they have a specific classroom license

the most powerful one is Podium Free.

Reaper is NOT free. however, version 0.999 is legally free.

and here's a post where i've listed a bunch of other freeware VST hosts.

What OS? There's ardour for mac and Linux.

http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/
Kristal is free. The did work on Studio One as well.

You can get educational licenses for more feature rich DAWs quite cheaply as well, look into it if you haven't.

Audacity also has VST support, but not really a workstation just a nice editor.

Ahh thanks guys really appreciate it. Ive had a look at most of them and to be honest i think im going to have to just ask very nicely to see if they will get reaper or FL i think. Seems the best value for money

some companies offer education discounts, so you might want to approach that avenue as well

If the school won't spring for a license, LMMS is evidently available for Windows as well as Linux and appears to have quite a bit of the function you'd find in something like FL.

This is actually pretty sweet, I might download it and have a look myself...

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

Ahh Jas0n!
I think xmas has come early for me!
Cheers dude!
Craig

chikin79 wrote:Ahh Jas0n!
I think xmas has come early for me!
Cheers dude!
Craig

Hah! Right on brother! Please let me know what you think... Feel free to PM if you don't want to resurrect this thread.

LMMS (Linux Multi Media Studio) is very similar to FL Studio. Enough so that it used to support FLP files.

Podium Free > LMMS, imho.

I would make sure that whatever i choose could handle asio4all. Correct me if im wrong but lmms cant run with asio right?

Also I wanna say that i wish i had you as teacher when i was in school .Sounds like an awesome project, the kids are probably gonna love it and be proud as hell over their new skills!

Bandersson wrote:I would make sure that whatever i choose could handle asio4all. Correct me if im wrong but lmms cant run with asio right?

I don't know. Linux doesn't need ASIO and I've never used it in windows.

chikin79 wrote:Hey guys im a secondary school teacher and want to do a music production club. The only problem is due to the cuts schools are completely skint and am looking for a free daw that i can try out hopefully is possible with VST support as i know there are loads of free synths. If possible something that can do automation too.

Any ideas would really be appreciated.

Cheers

Craig

I just wanna say, that's a really cool thing to do! The world will appreciate it. Post the kids' tunes up if they make anything cool, which I know they will!

Cheers guys thanks for all the help and a really big thanks to those who mentioned about the teaching. Made me really happy! Its very early days as ive got 100 and 1 things to do but looking forward to getting it underway. I will defo post some tunes up when the kids have something done.

Who knows they will teach me a thing or 2!