Enjoy! I imagine you got into Terragen on your own somewhere and then sussed it out, if you can do that you shouldn't have a problem sussing audio software. Bram Bos is good guy, the Tu yahoo group isn't that active anymore, but it has great archives. My wife is a teacher, and I showed her Terragen (0.9) and Tuareg 1.5 about 5 years ago. Bram gave her a very generous educational discount on Tuareg licenses for her school, so she could teach it. She taught both of those software "toys" to middle school kids and they went absolutely NUTS over them.
The hardest thing about audio, for me, was getting the picture in my head of how things work together (lo, these many years ago .. lol!). Basically, the main Tuareg GUI is what really makes it fun to play with. It's basically like this:
Track 1 <crossfade mixer> Track 2
Track 3 <crossfade mixer> Track 4
Track 5 <crossfade mixer> Track 6
... etc.
OK, so each track above is simply a single, independent audio source from all the other tracks (i.e. a single .wav file, mono or stereo).
But that <crossfade mixer> is what makes Tu really fun. You would load up a .wav file loop into Track 1, and another one (or even the same one!) into Track 2. Then, you play with the crossfade mixer and the effects for each track. There's preset crossfades you can select or can you draw your own. All the crossfade mixer does is determine whether you hear only Track 1, only Track 2 or both together, but when you stack six of them on top of one another, you suddenly have this very simple but powerful pattern/loop arranger.
This may all go over your head now, but once you sit down and play with it, then you can come back to this thread and follow it.
TIPS:
* Grab all of the free .wav loops you can from the web. The beginning and end of the .wav file should (ideally) "wrap around" in a loop, so that if you play that single .wav file in any media play with 'track repeat', the end of the audio just wraps around right to the beginning seamlessly. A lot of the .wav loops you get on CD are "untrimmed", meaning: they've got extra audio at the beginning and end of the file. Most free .wav loops I've found on the web have been trimmed though.
* Play with just the top two tracks in Tuareg, all of the other tracks do exactly the same dang thing, so if you get one of them figured out, you've got the whole stack figured out.
* Watch your output volume for each track and for the main output too. You probably shouldn't have any volume faders at maximum unless you've only got a handful of elements in the mix. Tuareg 1.5 doesn't have an output meter, so you can't tell if you're playing any audio track too loud (so that it distorts) or if the combined volume of all the tracks is too loud (distorting the combined audio result).
* If you're totally new to pattern music arranging, see if you can find a free drum machine called 'Hammerhead'. It's also written by Bram and is one of the simplest free drum machine programs around. Playing around with Hammerhead will teach you the basics of drum pattern arranging, and you can save the results as a .wav loop to use in Tuareg or any software.
I love running into audio folks on video forums and vice-versa. I'm just waiting to run into any hardcore Orbiter fans up here now.
EDIT:
Ok, I just actually went to Bram's site and it appears he's removed Tuareg 1.5 (only has 2.5 up there now). 2.5 is definitely a better program than 1.5, but 1.5 was really easy to get into and learn from. I'll see if I can find an archive of it somewhere. In the meantime, Tu 2.5 is 1.5 on steroids and works essentially the same way, with a number of elaborations (so it's a little harder to navigate, but it's definitely more powerful).
The Tunafish software is a plugin host (it runs VST audio plugins - synths and effects, etc. - and there's tons of free VST plugins out on the Internet). But it also has a .wav sequencer. Tunafish is a great portable VST host, I may have to check out the latest version, as I haven't yet.
