You can never have enough digital audio workstations. But it can be expensive to buy more than one. That’s why it’s great when a new DAW hits the market for the super low price of FREE.
Open Labs, the makers of Stagelight, have partnered with musical equipment retailer Sam Ash to offer the digital audio workstation for free, for a limited time. Stagelight is a cross-platform application that runs on Windows, macOS, and Android (iOS version coming later this year). Open Labs describes Stagelight as:
With Stagelight, you can make beats, mix loops and create multi-track songs without ever having to leave the app. Stagelight comes with a complete sound library that includes a powerful drum machine, onscreen instruments and presets for your voice and other acoustic instruments.
Some features of Stagelight:
- Integrated drum machine with step sequencer, AutoFill function lets users swipe to create simple beats with a single gesture, import samples and build your own kits
- 3-voice synthesizer with 2 LFOs and built-in effects, realistic vintage keyboards and pianos, sampled electric basses, sampled acoustic and electric guitars, vintage organ sounds, 3-voice PWM synthesizer
- Equalizer, compressor, delay, flanger, bitcrusher, chorus, filter, limiter, reverb effects
- Works with built-in sound cards or external audio I/O, including MIDI controllers
You can get your free copy of Stagelight by clicking the above link and following the instructions there. All that’s required for the download is a promo code (available on the linked site), a name, and an e-mail address.


The rise of digital audio production tools has forever changed the landscape of the medium. It might be fun to wax nostalgic over the recording studios of the past, with their rooms of big, bulky gear that looked really cool on photographs inside of a record sleeve. But for all their glory, those studios weren’t accessible to most. You had to be well connected and flush with cash to gain entrance. And while today it’s easier than ever to produce high quality audio with nothing more than a laptop, one thing that many producers long for is that “warm valve” tone that came naturally with all of that big, bulky gear.
When it comes to the audio production process, it’s easy to get obsessed with things like sound treatments, microphones, processors, mixers, and monitors. While those can all be important components of any session, one thing that’s easy to overlook is the headphone amp.
Playing live in front of a crowd can be a great experience. But one thing you definitely don’t want to worry about as a performing musician is your gear getting in the way of that next killer riff or vocal run. Modern players often work with a small army of accessories and effects to fine tune their sound. All of those extra devices come with attendant cables and cords which can get downright complex! That means eliminating even one cable from the mix can save a lot of hassle.
Most video consumers have probably heard of products like the Slingbox, produced by Sling Media. Slingbox has multiple offerings that let people stream video from different sources, including broadcast TV, to almost anywhere in the world. Given its background in developing this consumer-focused technology, it’s only logical that Sling Media would step over the fence into the video-production side.
Audio producers usually have a large library of digital samples. But how many times can you hear that same set of sampled drum or bass loops before they start getting stale? One way to breathe new life into those old samples is to manipulate them into something that sounds entirely different. That’s exactly what Accusonus is doing with 
It’s easier than ever to work on complex audio projects from almost any location. But doing so may still require producers to have to haul around bulky accessories like hard drives, with all of their attendant parts and cables, in order to work in a remote location. At this point in history, we’ve grown accustomed to storing everything from spreadsheets to our personal photo libraries in the cloud. So why not also do the same thing with our audio projects?
Apple has been under fire from professional-level users for some time. It’s been four years since the Cupertino-based tech giant refreshed its Mac Pro line, which may as well be a century in terms of modern computing. Many users have been wondering if Apple is abandoning the pro community for the more lucrative consumer smartphone/tablet market.