dyne:bolic

This is actually an entire Linux distro that’s targeted at the multimedia enthusiast. You will soon see why this distro has a mention of its own.

“ dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, FireWire, USB and more; all using only free software!”

Basically, it’s a Live CD of a distro that bundles in a lot of open source multimedia software. The reason for not mentioning any Linux based audio software thus far is solely because of dyne:bolic.

The good news for those of you who did not want to switch operating systems, just to use the “Linux Only” open source audio packages that are freely available, is that you no longer need to do so. All you have to do is to download the ISO for this distro, burn it to a CD, and then get started using you favourite open source audio (video, image and 3D as well) software.

So here’s a look on all the audio softwares bundled with the distro (as published on their site).

PLAY AUDIO

Xmms: An audio player with a minimal and intuitive playlist manager that can play
Internet streams and local files and can be skinned or customised with plugins.

Amarok: A fully featured personal jukebox that can handle your audio collection,
automatically download labels and lyrics, search your collections by keywords,
remember your preferences, automatically create favourite playlists, and more.

Timidity: A midi synthesizer that uses GUS patches to render your MIDI files into audio
files, as well as make you listen to MIDI partitures.

PERFORM

Hydrogen: A drum-machine that lets you load sample kits of instruments and compose a
partiture for them to play on a specific rhythm. You can download more drum kits for it
from http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

Jamin: The Jack audio mastering interface can perform professional audio mastering of
any stereo input stream, equalizing signals with an intuitive and advanced interface to
shape all the frequencies in real-time.

Jack Rack: A powerful effect rack that can apply chains of audio plugins (LADSPA) on the sound currently being played by other programs. Using Jack, you can interface it with all other performance tools and add one of the more that 200 effects available in dyne:bolic.

Free Wheeling: A funky application that lets you record and play multiple samples in real-time, so that they loop, and can be overlayed one after the other. You can manipulate, sum and create recorded sounds, but make sure you read the manual before you start using it, because it’s all controlled via keyboard (or midi).

EDITING

Ardour: The fully-featured multi-track studio that offers the most advanced interface for you music recording studio. Combined with other applications (such as Jack), it can resolve all your needs for audio mastering and music production.

Audacity: Read my earlier posts for any knowledge about audacity.

Rezound: A sample editor that lets you manipulate (with precision) your music samples, record, loop and apply effects using an intuitive and complete interface.

Time Machine: A simple tool for recording audio, requiring Jack as a sound engine. It is, quite simply, a big red button: press it, and it starts recording from 10 seconds ago! This is so that you can record what you find interesting in an audio input, just by listening, without needing to rewind to start recording again.

STREAM

MuSE: A software that lets you stream audio on the Internet over various servers (Icecast, Darwin, and SHOUTcast) in MP3 or OGG format, so that listeners will be able to listen to you voice and music using the most commonly available sound player around.
Visit http://muse.dyne.org/ , or http://flossmanuals.org/muse for a lot more documentation on how to use the cool software.



Here’s a list of other bundeled apps:

- MP4Live lets you stream mpeg4 audio and video on a Darwin server.
- HasciiCam, to have a cool (h)ascii webcam, also on low bandwidth.
- TermionatorX, GDam, SoundTracker and PD, to perform with live audio.
- Kino, Cinelerra and LiVES, to edit video and publish clips.
- GIMP, the GNU image manipulation program.
- Blender, a powerful 3D modeling and rendering tools.
- ABiWord and Ted, to read, edit, and save any kind of word file.
- GCombust, to easily burn data on CDs.

And much more, including email clients, games, html editors, etc….Can’t enlist every feature or bundled app. as it’s, you know an entire Linux Distro/OS.

Audacity

Audacity is yet the most popular free music editor, and the fact that its open source means that there’s a ton of support available in the form of forums and developers.

It can be used to record audio from any input source, edit MP3/WMA/Ogg Vorbis, split and splice audio clips together, change the speed or pitch of audio, mix tracks, record multi-channel (up to 16 channels- with of course the right hardware), normalize and edit loudness, and much more.

You can undo/redo your changes an unlimited amount of steps; it’s fast, low on system resources, and has a very easy to use interface. Effects include pitch changing without altering the tempo, or changing tempo without changing the pitch, static removal, bass boost, equalizers, echo, Wahwah, Phasers and more.

It’s so much feature packed that no one but only the professionals would find that they need to do something more that audacity can’t do, but for most of us it’s more than enough. We are not going to look for more Open Source Audio editors as none of them are even half as good as Audacity!!

Open Audio EDITORS..

Not a lot of us need to edit audio, but those of us that are in need to would really appreciate the open source ones…
So here Goes...

.......

So that was all about the players. I will soon be back with the open audio editors....
Till then keep checking for more....

VLC Media Player

VLC media player (Earlier called VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular open source media players. Though more popular for its video playing capabilities, it’s also a very good audio player, with tons of options and features. It natively supports MPEG1 and 2, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, FLAC, Real Audio (RA), Speex, Quicktime and more.

Apart from playlists and other standard features it also offers a whole range of additional audio features and options. It’s an essential tool that everyone should have.

Zinf

Zinf is an open source audio player that is built for both Linux and Windows. It has a good looking interface and is really easy to use. It was a project based on FreeAMP, the open source answer to Winamp. You can get a whole range of themes for the player. It also supports SHOUTcast or Icecast streaming audio, Ogg Vorbis, Mp3, WAV, Audio CDs, PLS or M3U playlists, a skinnable interface, and more. I does not support or play video but.

One of its best features is that it can save the streaming SHOUTcast/Icecast to your hard disk. Of course you need to take care that you aren’t breaking any law, but you can surely save the free streams with no license limitations.

One drawback is that it doesn’t have any equalizer. But overall if you are looking for a plain audio player which uses little system resources and gives the basic functionality then this is surely your best bet.

It runs easily on Windows 95/98/NT/200/XP
Linux 2.x, Pentium 100 MHz, 32 MB RAM

MPlayer

From the site: “MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NupelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies.”

I think that pretty much says it all about the MPlayer capabilities..
To have an actual experience just download the Beta GUI version from the site, unless you just want to be GEEKY and use the command line version!!

You can also get the various skins for the Player.

Open Audio Players

Hey everybody I am back with the audio players……
Though many of us are happy with our usual players such as Winamp or Windows Media Player, still there are some of us who prefer the flexibility they get through the use of Open source Players….
These open source players are actually a lot customizable and improvable if you know the programming.
So now comes…