Linux for music production

I've recently (well in the past year haven't been posting all that much) come across a cool couple of apps that help with writing of music. One is tablature editing program, the other is a virtual drum kit. The Tablature editing program is called Tuxguitar, and despite it's name it's available on the nasty operating system as well as GNU/Linux (I did that just for Richard) The second program is called Hydrogen and is an amazing program.

I'll talk about Tuxguitar first.
It is now at version 1.1 and the UI has been improved quite impressively. It uses the SWT(Standard Widget Toolkit) which is the Eclipse platform, and iText libraries. I like it because I have a soft spot for all things Java. (Must be the coffee thing)



The awesome thing I did with this program is I wrote a bassline with it, exported it to midi, and then using Timidity++ I converted the midi to wave.







Now moving on to Hydrogen, which is a virtual drumkit simulator. This is a very powerful piece of software, and has some pretty awesome features on the horizon. Once again open source and free. I loaded up the pattern editor and put in a 4 bar drum pattern to match my bass line.







Then I combined the two in Audacity for the final mix.




Coming soon a link to a sample of what can be accomplished with open source audio software.

Blue Screen of Death

Ok this was too funny and I just had to put this on.



more animals

Seagull Framework

I've started working on a website for selling cars person to person. Hardly an original concept, but one that still has a lot of potential. What's neat is I'm able to build it without relying on a single Microsoft application. I started trying out a framework called Zoop which has a lot of potential, but unfortunately is not mature enough to be usable. Do to some very problematic bugs, that I could not get timely enough information on I had to leave this framework behind. I settled on the Seagull framework based on its feature set. I was pleasantly suprised to find out the missing feature that Zoop had on Seagull, AJAX, actually is included in the framework. Which means that Seagull is the most fully featured framework on the market that I know of.

Of course it is open source, licensed under the BSD license. I personally don't have a problem with this particular license. I know some folks do, but hey different opinions are what make the world turn. Diversity of vision, and opinion is also the reason there is so much excellent software available in the open source world.

As for the feature set:

It's compatible with either PHP4 or PHP 5, it has a content management system built in, it has ORM capabilities built in (this gives it an edge over Zoop), multiple templating engines are available (zoop only uses smarty), it uses the Model/View/Controller, can handle mutiple databases (which was essential for this project, as it will need to be scalable), database objects, caching (once again you can pick from a few engines based on your needs), validation, as mentioned previously AJAX, authentication, and many, many more modules such as rss feeds, feedback, just to name a couple.

Overall it has the most features out of the 15 frameworks I considered for my project. I was thoroughly impressed with the documentation, and the maturity of the project. I was able to develop a sample application is less than 5 minutes. It's the easiest to use framework I've ever worked with. In fact, it was a breath of fresh air from my J2EE development with Struts.

In my next post I'll talk about my integrated development environment that I'm using. The amazing Quanta Plus.

Coming up Making A Gentoo Live-CD

I've decided to make my own live cd for various reasons. I thought I would share the walk through in my blog, so stay tuned. I don't know how long it's going to take so it may not be up until next week. I compiled a version of Gentoo a couple of years ago, and I'm still geeking out over it. So I've been thinking it would be really awesome to compile my own live cd from scratch. (Well with a few exceptions, I don't feel like compiling either the JDK or Netbeans from scratch ;-), and my NVidia drivers are a definitely no go, but hey it's still totally cool to be able to compile a distro from scratch.

So keeping watching this space for more.

NT

Review: PCLinuxOS 0.92 - Continued

Well here's the continuation of the review of the start menu.

The next menu: Configuration
and the subtopics here...Networking,Boot and Init,Hardware,KDE,Other,Packaging,Printing,KDE Contorl Center,kusbhome,PCLinuxOS Control Center

First the Networking configuration:
Just one entry here the Wlassistant, for wireless configuration. Handy util to have indeed.
Next Boot and Init:
Just one entry here KSysV which I admit I've never used, and have no idea what it does. ;-)
Next Hardware:
Here we have Device Manager,HardDrake,KFloppy,KRandRTray,NVidiaSettings(Yay!),PCLinuxOS Info Tool,Proc Configuration,Redo Lilo,Removable Storage
Next is the standard KDE menu:












The next config menu is all the stuff that doesn't fit the other categories, hence the name "Other" ;-)

In this Menu we have: bab,Change Password,ChBg,IRKick,KCron,KDat,KDE Wallet,KGpg,Kuser,LocaleDrake(System),LocaleDrake(User),Menudrake,Screensaver,User Administration

The next section has the most amazing part of this LiveCD the packaging, and in particular the Synaptics Software Manager. This made upgrading a complete joy, and not an annoyance from which I'll never recover. (Sorry Mandriva, but....)
Packaging:

Here's a screen shot of the Synaptics Software Manager in action:

I can't say how much this utility makes this the best LiveCD distro I've used to date.(Including the much revered Ubuntu, which I found quite dissapointing compare to Knoppix and others)
The rest of the configuration menu is pretty straight forward let's move on to the good stuff: Multimedia
Under Graphics we have:
digiKam - a standard digital camera app - this ones great I use it all the time with my camera
gqcam,GQview,GTKam(Gphoto 2),Kcdlabel,KColorChooser,KColorEdit,KolourPaint,
Kooka - an awesome scanner application,
KPovModeler - so you don't have to make your scenes in a text editor ;-)
Krita,KRuler,
KSnapshot - your looking at output from it ;-)
Kuickshow - a great thumbnail and slideshow viewer
KView,showFoto,
The GIMP - If I have to say anything about this...get out from under your rock! :-D
Thumber,XSane.

Okay onto sound:
We have Amarok,aRTs Builder,aRTs Control Tool,
Audacity - This is an extremely power multi-track audio editor/converter.
Aumix,EasyTAG,Gnormalize,Grip,Juk,Kaboodle,kamix,KAudioCreator,KMid,KMix,KRec,KsCD,Noatun,StreamTuner,TiMidity++,Xmms

Next we move on to Video:
In here we have: k9copy,
Kaffeine - an excellent video player,
KMplayer,
MPlayer - this is big, lots of codecs, DVDs, XVid,DivX,Quicktime, you name it!!!
RealPlayer - meh.
TVtime,VLC Gui media player,xine - a classic



Next time we'll look at the included Networking apps.
Until then-NT