I haven't tried it myself, but a friend used LMMS for a bit and put together some pretty good sounding songs. He just couldn't get vocal recording to sound good so he lost interest, but that's probably more on him than any software issues. Idk what the sample situation is with LMMS, but if you weren't aware of it, I'd say that's worth looking into.

I've started playing around with Reaper (I used Audacity for a very long time) and it seems to be a really good DAW. If you find samples in .wav format, it would be very easy to import those and adjust them however you need. I'm far from fluent in Reaper though so I'm sorry to say I can't offer much help in navigating it.

I also am very interested in an answer to this question. I like making music as a hobby so I really don't give a shit about permissions since I'm not selling anything.

[–] FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 9 months ago

As a music artist myself, i can say that most sample pack trading is done on private communities and kept way under wraps. I used to begrudgingly use discord servers for this but i've managed to stockpile so many by masse downloading that I left them all in the end. though if you just want drumkits there is https://rdx.overdevs.com/subreddit.html?r=Drumkits