The MusE 4 MIDI Sequencer Music Maker

MusE, a digital audio workstation, offers a free software solution for MIDI projects on Linux.

- By Hartmut Noack. Photo by Marius Masalar

If you want to create music with free software on Linux, you can choose from a few digital audio workstations (DAWs). If you play live music, Ardour is usually a good choice. However, if you primarily compose music in MIDI notation with virtual or hardware synthesizers, you may want to consider MusE 4. Of the free DAWs for Linux, MusE 4 puts the most emphasis on full support for the many methods and standards that have found their way into MIDI technology over the past 50 years.

Where to Get It

A few years ago, MusE was in the standard feature set of popular distributions related to music production, which is true of Ubuntu Studio (used to test MusE in our lab). Today, the major distributions often only have an outdated version in their package sources because work on MusE has been pretty slow at times.