Freesound Forums

So I want to try and make sounds on my pc with software. Is this possible and what software would you recommend. I would like to make the sounds from scratch.

That's pretty open-ended.

Sound editing software will prove useful regardless of what you want to do, but creating sounds to start with can be easier with various synthesizer programs. Either category can be divided into many sub-categories, and there are more products and programs out there than anyone could list or try. A few of them are even free.

There has been a lot of discussion here in the past about what people use. For example, I think you can do just about anything with Analog Box 2, once you go through the tutorials and ramp up the learning curve -- and it's free (use this search to see some of the things I have uploaded that used analog box). In addition to that I also sometimes just use Cool Edit Pro alone or I will "master" and finalize the output of analog box with CEP -- these days, CEP is no longer available but its successor, Adobe Audition, is available for lots of money (I prefer CEP). The point is, you will need to gain some mastery of different tools, probably combining synthesis software (whether its one of hundreds of emulators or a low-level utility like analog box or technical DSP tools like PD or Faust or C-Sound or ...) with a sound-file manipulation editor (like Audition, free Audacity, or hundreds of others). If you also want to create music, that's another discussion entirely.

Browse through the forums for other discussions of software, such as this thread about software wish-list items, or the entire Forum about Production Techniques.

Just another two cents: Software alone only allows you to generate sounds from scratch, mathematically, but sometimes (many times) it is better to start with recorded sounds, depending on the goal. Having a decent recorder and having 2 clues about how to use it to capture just the sound of interest, with reasonable fidelity, and without extraneous noise is pretty important, IMHO. I don't know of any serious sound designer who would create everything from scratch without using recordings for at least a part of their work. Also, when working with digital sound, it behooves you to at least understand the basics of sampling theory and the relationship between the time domain and frequency domain (how it applies to digital sound).

Thanks that helped a lot.