Hey guys,
What programs are there for making music? As we all know, games without music and sounds aren’t exactly awesome, so I’d like to find a program in which I can compose(Read, my gf will be doing this, after laughing at my poor attempts) some background music for my bachelor project.
Also, what programs to use for making sound effects?
Cheers! 
There is the free LMMS for creating music / composing.
And there is bfxr (sfxr fork) for very simple retro sound effects. Sfxr was initially created for LD48
I enjoy using mad tracker for making music. theres plenty of instrument files floating around the net as well as other tracker programs.
I am a fan of Renoise, http://www.renoise.com/products/renoise. You can download it for free with some minor limitations.
Most notable you need an external wave recorder like freecorder to record the final song to. wav with the free version
If you know sheet music, musescore is good for composition, although you need to know music theory fairly well.
I use FL Studio, although I started with the aforementioned LMMS, which is basically a free, stripped-down version of it, at least it promotes a similar workflow.
And yeah Bfxr for retro effects all the way.
I use Audacity (free) for some stuff (assumes you have your own instruments to record), and Sonar’s HomeStudio (not free, has lots of instruments, drums, samples, capabilities), and Finale (not free–for music scoring, more geared to Classical and written out arrangements, but it also has a sample library one can use to generate .wav files based on the part-writing). All of these assume making .wav files and importing them into Java via one method or another (e.g., via compressed Ogg/Vorbis, perhaps).
Very interesting is the possibility of generating scores based on game state. FMOD has some capabilities along this line, by allowing “branches” to scores. But it is pretty expensive. There is a JGO member who has posted software for his music generating project: Krasse.
There may be a more current link? I’m noticing this thread has been frozen.
I’ve been messing around with creating sound “field” and sound “slicing” structures, on the idea of having background textures that are stochastic and parameter-driven, and on FreqModulation as a sound generation tool. Still have a long way to go, but I do think there is a lot of possibility there.
I use FL Studio, although truth be told I’m still learning, so I’m not so much making music with it as making random sounds that give you a headache. 