https://www.powercomposer.net/

I am not affiliated with this project, I just think it's awesome and deserves more publicity.

Power Composer is a piano-reel-style MIDI editor built in the Godot game engine (though it is a tool, not a game). It's intended to be lighter and more accessible than a DAW, but still quite powerful. The dev has been quietly working on it for a while now and just recently made a free early-access Windows build available!

I've been keeping an eye on it ever since it was featured in the Godot 2024 showreel, as I've wanted something like it for a while. Several years ago, I was playing around with Chrome Music Lab's "Song Maker" so I could use it in my classroom. I ended up having such a great time that I got incredibly sidetracked and spent a while just writing stuff. I know the grid-based sequencer isn't a novel concept, but something about that particular configuration just clicked with me.

Ever since then, I've been searching for something similar but more capable that still clicks in the same way. I tried Bosca Ceoil, LMMS, and a couple DAWs' MIDI editors, but nothing quite did it. Then I saw Power Composer. Now that I can actually try it, it's just as comfortable as I hoped! I'm a classically-trained music teacher and have been writing/arranging with software like Dorico for years, but something about sequencers (and Power Composer in particular) just feels more freeing to me than traditional notation.

It is not open-source nor is it planned to be, which is a bummer because I'd love to contribute, but I get it - being paid for your work is nice. No word on the release price or timeline yet.

The dev seems like a good guy. In addition to the website above, Power Composer has a Youtube channel and a Discord server, and he is actively taking feature requests and bug reports on the latter.

I've been exploring it a bit and I'd be happy to answer any questions people have about it! Really enjoying it so far.

Hi everyone!

I've been using Vox for about a year now to listen to music and while there are some good qualities to it, I'm honestly fed up with the lack of volume normalisation and having to constantly adjust my volume manually (There's heaps years old of threads on their forums requesting or complaining about this). So here I am looking for a replacement and was wondering if anyone has a setup that I could copy. Here are the requirements that I have:

• I can stream my own music library of high quality music (FLAC format).
• It provides volume normalisation.
• I can set my whole library to shuffle.
• Native macOS client.

I've been doing some looking around and so far the most likely solution will be for me to set up a Gonic server at home and use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop. A close second contender was Youtube music but they don't provide a native client and I currently use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and applescripts to manage playback (I found media keys insufficient but that's a topic for another post).

I am currently paying a subscription fee for Vox so I don't mind if I have to pay for the new player, I'd prefer a service like that for ease of use rather than rolling out my own.

Update
For posterity I'm posting what I ended up doing. I tried Roon and while it looked and felt amazing, the ability for streaming out of home is very limited, it's intended to stream within a local network. It appears you can only do remote streaming to a mobile device and requires a custom port to be forwarded, I wanted to put this behind a reverse proxy but was not able to do that (Seems it's not supported).
I did not try Plexamp, after all the work I did to get Gonic set up properly it felt like I was doing too much work myself to pay for a solution. Ideally I wanted something that would "just work" even if it wasn't free but no solution did that. If I had access to a free trial I would have probably tested it as well.
I already had Gonic working within my home network going into this but setup of it is still trivial. The bulk of the work came in setting a dynamic DNS set up, and a reverse proxy (NPM) inside my network to provide HTTPS support with Letsencrypt certificates for Gonic (It's only HTTP). I spend too much time trying to have a secure setup (Crowdsec + Cloudflare) but after ditching that, I'm still happy with it and looking at logs it does not appear there's any significant risk to my network (I'm also using a geoip block to outright block requests from some countries).
As far as clients go, I settled with Strawberry. Tried the following:

• Sonixd: It had limited hotkey functionality and doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
• Submariner: Did not work.
• Clementine: Current version crashes on launch, rc version complaints about wrong credentials when connecting to the server.

My hardrives are filling with music, but most of my friends only use spotify, youtube or something like 'em.

I do like spotify, and other streaming services for their convenience, but I still have to have all my music physically on my harddrive. I'd rather use my customized foobar2000 to play my songs than any other proprietary player.
Anyone here still stuck on the oldschool way?