Im wondering what experts use to make sound effects/music for games. I want to be a music and sound maker. But I want to know what programs the experts use. Can anyone help?

Sound development is a huge topic and there are more sound utilities that graphical utitilities out there. When is boils down to it though, any midi device will work. Programs like Cool Edit, Reason, and Cubasis are all used for arranging music.

Sound effects are either straight recordings or sysnthesis with the likes of DirectX Audio.

Moderator of Music and Sound steps up

Well, it realy depends on what you want to do:

For sound effects, they are usualy recorded and then edited on a wave program. This can be as simple as the Recorder that comes with windows, or as complex as, say CoolEdit.

Then, for actualy writing music, you''ll probably want a MIDI program. The best I can recomend is Cakewalk, mostly because you can enter notes in a staff view like written music. I think newer versions of other programs can do this, but Cakewalk has been able to do it for a long time. Worth a look at. Cubase, that was mentioned, is another example of this type of program (although, I can''t stand its interface)

Also, most of the time you will want to take this furthure. You might be well off enough to hire actual musitions to play your music that you composed. However, most of the time you will just want to make a high quality, but computer generated mix. Now for this, I would very highly recomend Reason. You can get the same results by using a sound fonts (see your MIDI program) or a tracker such as ModPlug Tracker (freeware). This is a much cheeper, but slightly harder alternative. Also, most of the programs in this catogry can make music like the ones in the catogory above, but their interface is much worse (but still useable, if you can only afford one program, or use the free one)

Anyway, hope this answers your question. Google for some of the programs I mentioned (especialy MPT).

Do not meddle in the affairs of moderators, for they are subtle and quick to anger. ANDREW RUSSELL STUDIOS
Cool Links :: [ GD | TG | MS | NeHe | PA | SA | M&S | TA ]
Got Clue? :: [ Start Here! | Google | MSDN | GameDev.net Reference | OGL v D3D | File Formats | Go FAQ yourself ]

I used fruity loops for a while but i wasn''t sure if that was a good program for makin music.

Hire actual musitions to play my music? Don't you just make it on the computer? Then send it to someone if they want to use it? Is that what the big game companies do, they make the music then hire people to play it?

[edited by - CoOsMo on September 26, 2002 4:37:56 PM]

If you plan to make music/soundfx for the gaming industry, you would greatly benefit from having some knowledge of how it is implemented, as music and sound are mostly sequenced programmatically instead of being just a big wavefile played. For example, the FMOD sound engine can play various types of MOD files, so you could aim at developers using this engine by mastering MOD files. The actual hard/software used to generate the sounds doesn''t really matter, it''s the final data creation that matters. You have to be able to produce data that programmers can work with and most of the time you will have to meet developers'' specifications.
I''m not saying all this is neccessary, but it would greatly improve your chance of employment. And if you can come up with things like random music, or music that follows the mood of the game, you will have a job in no-time.
Good luck.

Whats better Reason or Fruity Loops?