Resources

Applications

Reaper

A free DAW with flexibility for composition, mixing, and mastering. Comes with simple but effective VSTs for audio mixing, but anything for composition you'll have to track down and add yourself. (Okay technically it's not free, but its free trial period is indefinite.)

Musescore

First music composition tool I ever used. Entirely free and great for making sheet music--it's limited, but a good starting point if you're already familiar with such notation. Download without MuseHub to skip all the extra bulk it tries to throw in nowadays.

Polyphone

Free tool for editing or building your own soundfonts. Takes a second to figure out how it works, but once you get the hang of it, it's super straightforward.

Audacity

Free audio editing tool. I don't really use it anymore since switching to Reaper, but hey, depending on who you are and what you're trying to do, you can still probably get plenty of mileage out of it. Best to download without MuseHub.

Aseprite

Art tool geared towards making pixel art, but I've gotten a lot of mileage outside of that scope. Basically my general-use image editor. There's a completely free fork of it called LibreSprite, though I think it may be missing a few features.

OBS Studio

Go-to application for video recordings of all kinds. Also free!

DaVinci Resolve

Video editor with a really solid free version. No watermarks, no frustrating restriction of basic features. The Fusion page is convoluted, but that's my only realy gripe with the program itself.

Visual Studio Code

A program you can program in. With the Live Server extension, it's great for web development--I currently program this website with it! I've heard of this other distribution of it, VSCodium, that may be worth checking out if you dislike Microsoft, but I can't say much on it.

Soundfonts and VSTs

Surge XT

Free VST with a lot of great synth presets (and a lot of options to toy with).

Vital

Free wavetable synthesizer that you can build sounds from stratch in (though there's some presets too).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover

Free orchestral VST. Not much room to adjust timbre, so it's sort of specific, but it does what it does well. There are larger versions out there, but they get pretty pricey pretty fast.

C700

VST that emulates the SNES soundchip. You can use sounds from any game so long as you have their .brr samples, but there's also some demo patches it comes with that you can use.

Steven Slate Drums 5.5

Drum VST with a limited free version.

Delay Lama

Yeah.

juicysfplugin

Soundfont player VST, so you can actually use soundfonts in your DAW! There are better options out there, I'm sure, but this is just the first one I found, and I've had no reason really to switch to anything else.

ColomboGMGS2

Compilation soundfont I used a lot during my Musescore days. I was gonna recommend it as a lighter alternative to the much more popular SGM, only to realize they're about the same size.

Lil'Sness

Completely original SNES-like soundfont. Great for retro style stuff without having to worry about jankily ripped soundfonts and legal grey zones.