Best of LMMS Vol.1 (album)

The first ever album made by the LMMS community for the LMMS community! You can buy the album and support development of LMMS :-)

Buy album on Bandcamp

Listen to the album on Soundcloud

For those of you on social media... you already know this, but I am still going to write about it. A review, kind of. I recently bought the album and must say this is high quality music! I know perfectly well that good LMMS artists produce good songs now and then, but I have never heard any of those songs together. Outstanding! It is overwhelming to hear it for real and actually in good quality. Now I understand how much Soundcloud's compression ruin my listening experience... Songs I have heard before just sounds better on this album. I am not making it up.

The album features a wide variety of genres: ambient, chiptune(!), dubstep, electronic, electro-swing(!), house, trap, trance, orchestral, rap(!), . Each song sounds different. You can't really tell that these songs was made in LMMS by just listening to the instruments and sample. If I am to say one "negative" and obvious thing about this album it is that the levels (dig deeper and you find that it is the mastering) is not even. This naturally must happen when different artists on different levels around the world produce songs independently and then put them on an album. The only solution is to lower the level of some songs, and no artist who has worked hard on mastering a song wants to lower it's level. I can tell you that. The jumps in level isn't too much of a problem, at least not when you sit back and just want to enjoy the music, like I did.

Notice that six of the perhaps best LMMS artists didn't have the opportunity to contribute their works, simply because they were the judges. Actually that means that 7 of the best LMMS artists didn't made it to the album because of this, theses six is in fact together the group Avelocity. Big thanks go to: Stakeout Punch, Second Flight, ManiaRib, Umcaruje, Raptor980 and Combustible Lemonade.

LMMS hierarchy

 UPDATE: This is far from reality. The reality as of now is that we know who can code and who cannot, and those who can code and have sticked with LMMS for a long time have the final word.

Everyone (even you) can have their say about anything regarding LMMS, through the mailing lists, the forum, social sites or github.

A leader and/or project manager of LMMS was selected just a short while ago. The leader is supposed to ease the work of developers which previously was leading the project together. The leader organizes a bit, set goals and take some decisions. Right behind the leader is a lot of people with their own opinions, so the leader have to cooperate and in the end everything are actually still pretty democratic.

The ones actually working with the software is of course the developers, and they discuss and agree on what should be developed and fixed. They take the suggestions and feedback from users into their discussions and considerations. The founder of LMMS has a lot to say in every case and usually knows best, at least up until now. Many devs are involved, but some tend to be more active than others and thus have the chance to prioritize what they think is important. Fixing bugs is tedious work (and sometimes perhaps boring), but highly important, so if you are a developer you know what you got to do. There is also a man appointed out to coordinate the GUI changes.

Superusers is the users who are more than average interested in LMMS and do more for it than most people do. People who test future versions and submit bugs, and/or help out other users in need, and/or, make LMMS themes or artwork, and/or translates LMMS, and/or acts as a link between regular users and the developing process. I for example try to inform regular users about everything LMMS related, the guys running the lmms facebook page do a lot of great work, and the ones that have taken initiative for LMMS contests and volunteered as judges has been busy lately.

At the bottom we have the users, but not really at the bottom still. This article might show who got the most power to change LMMS, but the average user is probably having most of the fun, as he should be having! I am having a lot of fun too running this blog, but even that is sometimes hard and it naturally takes time, so I can only imagine how it would be to be a developer.

Now you know more about how the reality is for the persons involved in the project. LMMS won't get better without someone working at it. Are you up for the task? If you want to get involved and don't have programming skills you can be a tester and report bugs on github, translate the program to other languages, come up with ideas for the program and for the FB-site, answer comments and help others on the forum, Google+ and the FB-site, design themes, sounds and presets and share them on the sharing platform.

Syntasq (LMMS artist)

Another Finnish music magician... Again? The phrase is cliché already! The artist name is very similar to that of syntask, so perhaps it is the same person? Yeah, according to Umcaruje and his comment, DOWN BELOW, it is only his second account. I don't know how it is possible, but it keeps popping up music makers from Finland. I love it! Like most of the rest of his/her countrymen syntask is a master of music theory. I would very much like to learn how they keep in scale and produce mind blowing songs. Maybe it is a Finnish secret.

Listen to syntasq on SC


Other Finnish music makers:

• Greippi
• Syntask (same person)
• Maddog
• Jernemies
• Psygfault
• Squatro
• Domina Carelian
• Skiessi
• Exprimamus (not LMMS anymore)

LMMS master default sound

You have probably heard all the default sound of each instrument in LMMS. I once began to wonder what the real LMMS sound would be like, what the native LMMS sound is, what all the default sounds stacked together in a mind blowing orchestra would be like. So I obviously went and did exactly that.

LMMS 1.0.0

My high expectations were not met. It was a rather dull sound. Slightly interesting of course. The first sound you notice and hear easily is the mixture of LB302, BitInvader, FreeBoy, Organic, sfxr, SID, Zyn and TripleOsc. They all play the same note and apparently have somewhat similar sound. Then you can sense the presence of Kicker, which of course is not blending with the single tone because it makes a drum kick (slide). And lastly the surprising one, OpulenZ, which because of the default preset decides to be late for the symphony warm up.