I need some free drum loop/generator software. Any suggestions. I've been using the drum machine in my DigiTech RP250 and I like the sounds of the drums but can't find the right beat. I'm looking for something that's compatible with Audacity.
Audacity doesn't do ReWire or MIDI, so what you'll need to do is make your drum beats/loops as audio files and import. This is cumbersome, but does open up your options a little bit.
The old stalwart I'm aware of is
HammerHead Rhythm Station. It's fairly limited, and mostly geared toward electronic sounds, but it's not a bad starting point.
There's another old free program, which is slightly more flexible, called
Drumbox. This one is pretty good in concept, but so far as I know it never left open beta and has some interesting bugs in it.
There are a couple of open-source alternatives primarily for Linux with ports to other platforms that are actually quite powerful:
LMMS is designed to be sort of an alternative to sequencer software like Fruity Loops or Reason. This does mean that it can behave as a feature-rich drum machine. I've tried it out a little bit and after a bit of a learning curve it's pretty good overall.
Hydrogen is similar, but is designed with the specific intent to provide drum tracks and beats. It's probably the most ambitious project I'm aware of (for free), but at least the Windows port (which is what I've used) had some stability and performance issues. This is understandable, since it's a port, but might be a deal-breaker for you. The devs have actually officially stated that they're only going to focus on Linux versions for the foreseeable future, so the current Windows/OSX ports are probably it, unless you're willing to do a port yourself. Also, it has a small dev team with a very strong sense of the open source "customize your own software" ethic, so development is glacially slow, even on the Linux versions.
The one that I'm really liking the most as of late though is
DrumTrack, which is Windows only. It's being developed by a single developer who's got other stuff going on, so it's also prone to incredibly slow release schedules. However, the 0.9x releases are pretty darn stable for me, and though it's a little cumbersome to figure out the interface at first, it has a strong feature set and it's easy to figure out pretty quick.
