Multimedia editing and analysis software

Zero-cost solutions recommended here: software included with your computer (providing basic functionality, sufficient for Music 666), or open source tools (which can be quite sophisticated).

Audio

Audio and MIDI:

Open source: Audacity, super open source and cross-platform (mac and win) audio editor. Get to know it. Another open source tool is Ardour.

Proprietary: GarageBand (included with mac) handles audio, MIDI, and can represent scores as well - it's quite useful. There are a number of similar options for Windows.

Pro: If you want to do a lot of mixing and editing, you may prefer a more professional product such as Cubase or Pro Tools.

Scorewriters:

Transcription certainly isn't as crucial as it used to be in ethnomusicology, but it's still an important intermediary zone between audio files and analysis, and transcribing remains a crucial step for getting close to the music (unless you're actually learning to perform it). The gap between sequencers and score writers has narrowed considerably, but for a flexible notational system you'll want the latter; see this wikipedia article. I use Sibelius, which has student student pricing, but there are even cheaper solutions out there. Finale does everything, but is typically overkill for ethnomusicology, and is cumbersome, in my opinion). A neat open source solution, suitably for monophony, is abc, widely used in the folk tune community. An inexpensive but very powerful score writer is NoteAbility.

Audio metadata:

Certain audio file formats have slots for metadata; these include BWF (broadcast wave format) and mp3. This is a pragmatic approach, since when encoded within the file (as opposed to a separate metadata database or table) the metadata will travel with the file automatically. MP3 format includes provisions for unfortunately limited information in the so-called ID3 tags, of which there are two versions (v1 and v2), the latter holding much more than the former. Various ID3 tag editors are available; I've been using fixtag, written in java. iMusic can also edit ID3 tags but the problem is that it stores some information in its own database, so it's hard to tell whether the information you're adding is actually getting stored in the file or not.

For analysis, try Praat, developed for linguistics but suitable for short music segments also.

Image

Windows and Mac operating systems provide simple image editing software, e.g. iphoto for mac. More sophisticated is the open source cross-platform project, GIMP. The professional package is Adobe Photoshop

Video

Windows: Movie Maker, included with Windows up to Vista; Live Movie Maker for Windows 7. Many professional packages are available; probably Adobe's Premiere Pro (see below) is most widely used.

Mac: iMovie is simple video editing software included with every mac; suitable for presentations. Professional package for mac is Final cut pro

You can download a 30 day trial version of the industry cross-platform standard, Adobe Premiere Pro

Text and qualitative research generally

We'll use the cross-platform HyperRESEARCH - not open source or even free, but a trial version is provided.