I've been doing my own music since around 2005-2006, not sure anymore (and my oldest stuff arguably doesn't qualify as music, so let's not split hairs).
I've got a super convoluted setup where I use a bunch of free programs that I gradually added more programs to, to complement what I was already proficient with instead of relearning a full DAW from scratch. I make chiptunes in Milktracker, MIDI files in an old discontinued program called Jazz (which i've hosted an
unofficial mirror for, since the license permitted it), use OpenMPT to convert between the Milky formats and MIDIs, render MIDIs to WAV files using an obscure program called SynthFont using a bunch of free soundfonts, and then use Audacity to render those WAVs into OGG (to remove digital watermarks imposed by SynthFont and trim away silence at the start and end to make them loop better - also it renders WAV like 10 times faster so it's faster overall do have the intermediate WAV step).
I've heard good things about MixCraft and other modern DAWs, but I'm so used to this soup of Unix-style apps that are good at exactly 1 thing (and so stingy with my money) that I've not really felt like switching over. But maybe one day...
Music-wise, I have no education whatsoever, spare from reading a translation of a book written by Tchaikovsky and watching 8- Bit Music Theory's youtube channel. I've learned stuff solely via trial and error, with a healthy dose of getting game MIDIs from VGMusicArchive and looking inside them to see how they were made. As a result, I suck at chord progressions (mostly sticking to C major and the pentatonic scale that only uses black notes because I at least know how those work
) and basically only do music that's traditional game music: melody-based, short loops, more meant to get the feeling of an area (grass, desert, lava etc) across than to invoke emotion.
Here's a bunch of songs I made (the artwork is done by me to, and a reason I don't upload songs very often even though I have a few hundred old songs at this point is because making the cover art is so much work).
Lakeside Lupines: probably the best-sounding thing I've ever made, which means it almost sounds like actual music for a change.
Fungalvanic Fusewoods: a recent experiment where I tried mashing together instruments that doesn't really fit, trying to find a new interesting sound. It's surprising how catchy songs with fun little breaks in the melody gets, I really gotta stop some of my old habits with unbroken basslines and stuff.
Locked of the Drowned: the song has like no repeated parts, which is weird. It also gives it a lot more motion and feel than my other stuff. I gotta stop being lazy and reuse things constantly, I guess.