hip hop software

Software is not genre specific. You should be asking for good software period, not good software "for hip hop."

Which software you want depends on you and your particular needs and preferences. So you need to give us more info about your musical needs etc before we can really help you.
 
Hey nathan!

You've asked probably one of the top 5 most asked questions on FutureProducers :) Starting out questions like this crop up more often in the 'Newbie Producers' forum; there's a 'Search' option at the top right of the page...I recommend searching on 'samples' there for plenty of long, long, long lists of sample sites to explore.

If you're new to writing music, I'd recommend one of the smaller 'softstudio' packages over the bigger sequencers. They're usually a lot more focused than software like Cubase/Sonar/Logic/ProTools etc which can help you stop from getting overwhelmed at the start.

FLStudio is a popular choice in the hip-hop forums (although it has just as many vocal opponents who feel it somehow violates the spirit of hip-hop or something) and you'll find many posted examples of beats written with it. One distinct advantage is that you have a lot of people here to turn to for advice. FLStudio provides you with a heap of 'generators' for making sound (I think that's their terminology) but you can easily add VSTs (plugins for adding instruments & effects).

Reason takes a different approach, providing an emulated hardware environment. You have a 'rack' which you slot different devices into; Reason has 2 sample-players, a loop player, 2 synths, a drum machine, an advanced reverb unit and a very cool distortion device, as well as a bunch of smaller effects, a mixer... It's a great way to introduce yourself to all of the components used in making music and is ideal if you're planning on working with a lot of samples. It can't record audio though, which is a drawback if you want to do your own sampling; I use both SoundForge (for sample manipulation) and ReCycle (for cutting up loops for the loop player) to supplement it.

Project 5 is similar to Reason, but it's modular nature isn't modelled after hardware. It does allow for third-party plug-ins to be used with it, unlike Reason. I'm less familiar with it but there are a (smallish) number of vocal users here.

Orion, from what I've seen of it, is fairly similar to FLStudio, but I'll leave it up to someone who knows it to fill in the blanks.

These are all great products for starting out and should give you enough to cover the basis of music production and to be able to at least produce the meat of a track.

Welcome to the addiction!
 
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