Links to mostly freely available software to help you get started with electronic music performance.

Cleartune – The top selling and most critically acclaimed instrument tuner available on the mobile market. The best feature is the myriad of temperament and alternative tunings you can use. Available for iOS and Android.

SuperCollider – a programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. The language interpreter runs in a cross platform IDE (OS X/Linux/Windows) and communicates via Open Sound Control with one or more synthesis servers. The SuperCollider synthesis server runs in a separate process or even on a separate machine so it is ideal for realtime networked music.

Jack – Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another? How about taking the output of that same program and send it to two others, then record the result in the first program? Or maybe you’re a programmer who writes real-time audio and music applications and who is looking for a cross-platform API that enables not only device sharing but also inter-application audio routing, and is incredibly easy to learn and use? If so, JACK may be what you’ve been looking for.

Audacity – Audacity® is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.

Ardour – Complete Digital Audio Workstation designed for professional mixing and editing. Almost free.

Pd-Extended – Pure Data (aka Pd) is an open source visual programming language. Pd enables musicians, visual artists, performers, researchers, and developers to create software graphically, without writing lines of code. Pd is used to process and generate sound, video, 2D/3D graphics, and interface sensors, input devices, and MIDI. Pd can easily work over local and remote networks to integrate wearable technology, motor systems, lighting rigs, and other equipment. Pd is suitable for learning basic multimedia processing and visual programming methods as well as for realizing complex systems for large-scale projects.

Loopy – A looping app for iOS devices: This is a looper that’ll come out to play, but gets down to work when you want to get serious.

SoundCloud – The world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks. It takes just a click to share sounds to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare. SoundCloud can be accessed anywhere using the official iPhone and Android apps, as well as hundreds of creation and sharing apps built on the SoundCloud platform.