Amuc is a program for composing music and playing it. If the program is started from a terminal, then the following command could be given, where the parameter is the name of a score file:

amuc dance.sco

A score file contains short tunes that are to be combined into a complete piece of music. This combining is controlled by a script file which is a normal text file.

Amuc claims to be quite different from other music software. It is especially focused on composing music, which is a very difficult but also rewarding endeavor. The tool tries to place as little hurdles as possible in the user's path.

The entering of new tunes is done on a normal 5-bar staff (treble or bass clef) in one of the 2 panels at the left. There are 2 kinds of instruments: sampled instruments and instruments whose waveforms are generated real-time. Fore each kind there is choice between 6 instruments, indicated by a color. Three real-time instruments can be replaced by a classic monophonic synthesizer. The sound of each instrument can be modified via its own control panel, that will appear when the appropriate color is selected. The sampled instruments are created with a technique called "physical modelling", or their waveforms are read from files in WAVE format if Amuc is run with option -sf.

The characteristics of a real-time instrument are controlled by algorithms. So if you know how to program, then the creation of different sounds is among the the possibilities.

An online manual for AMUC is available at: http://members.chello.nl/w.boeke/amuc/amuc-man.html

Features

• It does not use a gui toolkit, only Xlib.
• Apart from real-time sound output the following output formats are provided : WAVE,
  MIDI, and human-readable scores (postscript format).
• Works with ALSA or OSS soundsystem.
• Includes built in monosynthesizers