Programs I use in my music making

One of the best-known music production applications. Very capable and well thought out for sound recording as well ass MIDI for running synths.
Originally released for the Atari platform back in 1989, and later adapted for Mac and Windows.

The first program I used for sequencing as well as scoring.
At that time, in 1997, Musicator had a notable range of nice features to speed up a composer's work.
The program was what I consider thankfully free of "bells and whistles" (meaning that it looks rather plain) and is therefore light and fast, unlike some of the major contenders on the market.
The Musicator program is of Norwegian origin.

Audition (originally CoolEdit by Syntrillium) is a powerful and easy to use digital audio recorder and analog waveform editor.
You can cut, paste, and move audio around just like you do with text in a word processor. Audition also includes multitrack recording and editing for audio as well as video productions.
I use it mostly for cutting samples and to apply many sound effects like echo, reverb, compression, noise reduction, and time/pitch stretch.

VAZ Modular is in virtual form very close to what a real modular synth is: it is truly modular and it has fat sounds. The difference is that it comes at a reasonable price.
I like the comprehensive modules that makes it fairly easy to build functional and interesting sounding synths.
I also like the sequencer and the mixer with built-in effects. Furthermore, the filters in particular has received favourable reviews.

DYNAMO is an low-budget version of Reaktor by the Germany based company Native Instruments.
This basic kit contains several soft synths ranging from classic virtual-analog to granular synthesis.
It is easy to get interesting sounds with Dynamo, but not that easy to use it musically. This is because the sounds are sometimes too exotic.

FM7 (now upgraded to new version FM8) is part of Native Instrument's Vintage Line of software synthesizers. This new soft synth resembles the Yamaha DX-line and gives you access to all the power and glory that is FM synthesis.
The FM7 has received excited reviews. It has been described as "clean sounding, punchy, and alive". Its arsenal of sounds contain Classic Rhodes and Wurlitzer sounds, percussive sounds ranging from the acoustic to the digitally industrial, synthy basses, leads, pads, strings, bells, drones, pulsing and throbbing effects, and all kinds of ethnic sounds.

Absynth by Brian Clevinger and Native Instruments is a software synth with a somewhat different approach. Its approach builds mainly on using strong filtering, frequency-shifting, and other processing options on samples of different length that are looping around each other.
The main strenght is in generating complex, evolving pads and soundscapes.
Absynth is great if you are in a hurry to get some interesting sounds in the background. It is easy to find inspiration from it. But its problem lies in that it is hard to manipulate the single occurances in the evolving sound, for example if you want to remove some element. That is why it still would be preferable to build sounds using individual parts as building blocks.

Albino is a software synth by Linplug, created on specifications by the Dutch synth-guru Rob Papen.
This is a "sort of" analog synth where the charm lies in its old-style interface and its clean sound. The easy possibility to build layers of sounds makes this into a very strong synth.

Arp-X8 is an arpeggiator with eight levels of control.
An arpeggiator is a device that scans a musical keyboard and then plays the pressed notes in sequence, thus forming an electronic approximation of the traditional arpeggio.
While most arpeggiators offer limited control over the arpeggiation - usually an up/down button and maybe a range control - Arp-X8 expands on that considerably by offering eight voices, each with 10 different motion algorithms, along with rhythm controls and a host of other variations. Each of the eight arpeggiators can have entirely different settings, and can even play on independent MIDI channels, for incredibly dense clouds of sound.
Arp-X8 is in many respects a true musical instrument, and like all instruments will require a certain amount of practice in order to provide useful results.

Seq-303 is an computerized analog sequencer emulator. Technically the Seq-303 is a 16-stage sequencer. Multiple sessions of the Seq-303 can be executed simultaneously to create a very complex texture.
Seq-303 was inspired by many of yesterdays great analog sequencers, including the Moog 960, Serge TKB, ARP 1613, Paia 4780, Korg SQ-10, and of course the venerable Roland TB-303.
Click here if you want to listen to a drum sequence created using the SEQ-303.

GranuLab is a real-time granular synthesizer. It uses stretching and pitch-changing of the input sound. Also modulation and randomisation is applied to grain generation parameters as well as morphing between patches.
Here is a short extract from a song (.mp3; 1 min. = 1MB) where I use plenty of material generated or enhanced with GranuLab.

The XG-909 is a virtual (computer based) copy of "X0X" series of drum machines from the 80's.
Its main sonic flexibility is based on Yamaha's XG synthesis, but it works well with other synths also.