What is some good software for producing electronic ambient/trance/electro-pop music on a home PC?

I dunno about open source but why would you need the code to make music? Fruity loops is good tho if you run windows. On mac logic is my first choice

Hydrogen is an open source alternative. There’s an experimental Windows build. I’m not sure how reliable that would be. There’s TONS of stuff for linux. You could dual boot and use Hydrogen natively, or LMMS.

Also, a new version of Ubuntu was just released, and it’s easy-peasy to use.

@skabeep, open-source software has many benefits over commercial software. It is usually free (as in, you don’t pay for it, especially for personal use). It is coded by enthusiasts who tend to care about the user-interface. There is usually a large and active support community. Finally, access to the code means that if I don’t like a particular feature, I can change it to suit my needs. It also makes it a lot easier to extend the software to do something specific, or to embed it in other applications.

@tonedef, thanks for the recos!

LMMS 4.0 has just been released, and despite its name, it now also runs on Windows and OS X as well.

It’s supposed to be excellent, but unfortunately there’s no musician in me, so I can’t really say much about that.

Be sure to let us hear some of your stuff ^.^

Pick up a copy of Computer Music Magazine every issue comes with a disc with all the software you will need to start producing music, it’s a really good magazine too, always full of useful tips and tutorials. If you want to get serious it would be worth spending some money on a decent DAW though, I’m currently running Reason v 3.0 I really do need to upgrade to version 4.0 and Ableton Live v 7.0.3