BEST SOFTWARES FOR COMPOSING MUSIC

LMMS for player roll. MuseScore for notation. Audacity for mixing. This is your holy trinity of free music composition software.

author=TungerManU
If you want to do any mixing at all I highly suggest using a proper DAW, since Audacity is mostly just a track-editing tool. I recommend Reaper, which is basically free (it technically isn't, but it works kinda like WinRAR where you can keep using the "trial" forever without paying for the license). It also has a decent MIDI tool, though I'm not sure if it's as beginner-friendly as LMMS.

I agree with this, and while I love Reaper, it's worth noting that it doesn't come with any midi patches by default. It only comes with a very basic synthesizer. So if you need string sounds, flutes, etc, then you will also need to acquire a .vst. Luckily, if you search "free midi vst", there are tons of them.

author=kentona

author=TungerManU
though I'm not sure if it's as beginner-friendly as LMMS.

but LMMS was an intimidating wall of confusion.

Yeah. If you figure it out, it becomes easy, but you have to figure it out first. Odds are, if you're used to composing in a piano roll format, you'll take to LMMS, but if you're more used to notation, you're going to go with MuseScore. When I say these are among the holy trinity, what I really mean is that you're going to use one or the other based on how you prefer to compose music, but you're not going to use both...like ever.

As for Reaper, umm, I got the free trial of Reaper and they specifically gave me a "readme" that told me that they used to be infinite trial, but not anymore. Regardless, it's as cheap as video games were a decade ago, so it's not a big deal, and the 30-day trial is more than enough to decide if you like it.

I like Reaper because it's the only DAW aside from FL Studio I've found that didn't have shitty latency with my MIDI controller. And unlike FL Studio, it's cheap.

There's a particular midi sequencing tool I found a while back called Sekaiju. A cool feature that it has is that it can read controller change 111 events as loop points, which are commonly used in the makers which have midi compatibility.

As for DAW's, synthfont is my go-to tool. The first version is free but the second one is cheap and gets semi-regular updates. Apparently it handles soundfonts better than FL Studio, tho I can't confirm that. It also lets you use VST effects, which really come in handy. I have a couple of echo and reverb effects I use on occasion.

Now, if you're willing to get your hand dirty and use a tracker, openMPT is just absolutely incredible. It can import and export into every common tracker format, back and forth midi, and render an audio file if needed. It is quite technical in places, considering you need to configure your samples and all, but for a free music program, it's hard to beat. If you don't like writing music in numbers, importing from midi works just fine (with mindful post-export edits) and then you can skip ahead to the sample assignment stage.

author=Mirak
Anything handles soundfonts better than default FL studio.

Can you elaborate? I've never had a problem using VSTs or plug-ins of any sort in FL Studio for the most part.