Over the next few weeks my articles will focus on software systems designed with special consideration for music composition by the use of algorithms. Wiktionary defines an algorithm as "... a precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps".

I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s computers, and I see Audacity installed on a lot of them. Not many software programs deserve the adverb “versatile”, but Audacity is one of them. It is the Swiss Army knife of audio applications.

The Ardour developers have released version 2.8 of their Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). New features include track and bus templates, which allow specific recording configuration settings to be saved and reused, as well as the improved support of audio plug-ins that comply with the Steinberg VST standard. The release also includes a number of bug fixes.