Our Review:

Hydrogen by Alessandro Cominu@Hydrogen is a drum sequencer for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I've tried a few free drum sequencers and found none of them to be close in either functionality or overall usability to my commercial drum tracker of choice. Hydrogen is different and I am well impressed with this full featured freeware drum tracker.

Ease of Use: This is so easy to use it's difficult to see how you could go wrong: pattern based sequencers are much of a muchness when it comes to the actual pattern/song creation, and this one is good and intuitive. Again I am running the application with no MIDI hardware, just using it as it comes with the preinstalled GMKit. A nicely laid out GUI with everything right there where you need it makes Hydrogen a pleasure to use, but that's really the least of it with this app. The main point for me is that i knew exactly what i wanted to achieve with this app before i even downloaded it and i was not disappointed: it's nice when that happens. The Hydrogen team give support on their site forum and other resources (user manual, additional drumkits etc) are available on the main site.

Functionality: The facilities most of the free drum sequencers i have tested lack are present in Hydrogen. The ability to change the time signature from 4/4 to 3/4 and the facility to export each drum as a *.wav file are vital if a freeware app of this type is to stand any chance against my commercial ware: granted it is not imperative that a drum sequencer exports as wav (or other file types), but it saves a great deal of hassle if you are multitracking.

The facility to change the parameters of each drum in the instrument rack is a great feature: this allows the user to adjust the sound and duration of any instrument to create a new instrument. The onboard mixer is handy and I like the way each beat can be divided into smaller instances using the resolution function. I like everything about this application.

Performance: Very light on system resources and ultra stable. Full featured. Excellent freeware.