I do all my composing using free software on Linux. There's some great stuff out there (see my profile for the things I personally use), but if you go down this route, be prepared for a big learning curve and a lot of pitfalls in comparison to commercial software: as you say, the workflow will be much easier when using commercial software. That said, with free software, you get the chance to learn an awful lot and to contribute to making the software better.

The DAW I use is Qtractor. Its author (Rui Nuno Capela) is an extremely talented Linux audio developer, who is also very friendly and open to suggestions. Before this, I was using a combination of Rosegarden for MIDI and Ardour for audio. Both of these are excellent and more mature than Qtractor, but I wanted to have one program for everything and, at the time, Rosegarden's audio capabilities were a bit behind its MIDI capabilities and Ardour didn't support MIDI at all (though it now does). The support for Ardour can also be a problem, unless you make a donation.

The main reasons I use Qtractor are:

- nice interface; easy to work in
- handles both MIDI and audio to a decent degree. MIDI isn't as full-featured as Rosegarden, audio isn't as full-featured as Ardour, but it does a good enough job
- great support and advice from the author
- still "relatively" early in development (though easily stable enough for daily use - don't let this put you off), so ample opportunity to contribute

By far the biggest drawback I've found through all this is that the quality of free samples is nowhere near that of commercial ones, so it's difficult to make something which sounds really convincing (at least for me :-)).

In terms of payment, I can't speak for others but I'd imagine that people who are composing would likely already have what they need. However, quality samples are expensive so perhaps that's an area they'd welcome some help with. Personally, I write my stuff for free just as a hobby (and, due to work commitments, I'd never have the availability to hit delivery dates, even if I wanted to accept payment).

Thanks very much for the comments and I'm pleased you're using this. The game looks great :-)

With regard to doing more Japanese music - I'm afraid I'm very busy with work at the moment and will be this way for some time, so am not currently able to do any composing :-(

Just to let you know in case you release in Japan/have Japanese users. This looks very much like the symbol which new drivers have to have on their cars. It's also sometimes used in Japanese games for the "beginner" difficulty level etc, so people may think it's a beginner's shield.

Thanks for letting me know :-)