Welcome to the wild, unregulated west of the freeware world, where you could saddle up with an entire studio of big gun software applications, without spending a dime, or end up in the saloon, drunk on cheap whiskey and with a hard drive of unusable varmints. Let’s lose that ‘western’ thing and help you make sense of the world you’ve entered, starting with the simplest of scenarios…
What’s free, what isn’t free
Really there are two sorts of freeware options available: those titles that have been created to butter you up to pay for full-fat titles, and those that have simply been created for the love of programming and making music. Two worlds: a cynical, capitalist one only concerned with making money from your passion for music making, and another one full of joyous hippies who program for free and give you the results.
Of course, just as our politics is a little more nuanced and less extreme than it appears, so there is a massive grey area between these freeware worlds, so let’s try and break it down.
Different types of freeware
The first type of freeware is simply what you might – and we often – call ‘oldware’. Titles that have been superseded with flashier new designs or upgraded sample rates, but still serve a purpose and can be pretty decent. Advantages here are that these titles are fully-functioning applications that might have cost a fortune at one time. Disadvantages are that they may not run on newer operation systems (stand up Apple) or be dated in appearance.
Next up, we get what you might call ‘’, where the applications are functioning but there will very obviously be some controls that are either missing, or greyed out. And guess what? You
