Tunafish

Tunafish is an amazing program that allows you to control and regulate audio sequences all inside a mixer directly on your computer.

You can record and store them as MIDI data or WAV audio files for playing back later (it exports to 44.1 KHz 16 bit for WAV and 192 to 320Kbps for MP3). It includes 28 different sample instruments, but you can import as many instruments (plug-ins) as you want. It has 10 channels for each segment that can be used for storing drums, samples or VSTs. Each channel can be adjusted, e.g. volume, add effects and so on. You can create segments of songs for intros, breaks, themes, etc. Tempo and general volume can be adjusted. First you can generate beats and rhythmic patterns in a drum channel, later you can enter notes in the sampler. Also, the duration of notes can be changed. Some features I really liked are: the Freezing feature that keeps in memory an entire channel before playing back to avoid the CPU overload. It automatically backs up every 4 minutes. You can run Tunafish as a portable application.