I've wanted to write this article for quite a while. Over the years I've noted that Java-based music and sound applications have increased in number and quality, yet no comprehensive list or summaries have covered these advances. And so at long last I present this survey of music and sound applications that require Java.

KDE’s default sound subsystems, aRts (Analog realtime synthesizer) has been part of KDE since ages. I really appreciate the quality of lots of software it comes with, however aRts is a real disappointment.

2007 has been an exemplary year for software freedom, which makes the keynote speakers selected for Ohio LinuxFest 2007 particularly fitting. The Ohio LinuxFest organizers are proud to announce that Max Spevack and Bradley Kuhn will be keynoting this year.

The latest figures from French based Internet traffic analyst XiTiMonitor shows that the Mozilla's Firefox web browser has continued to take market share off Microsoft's Internet Explorer across the globe over the past year, with a significant spike in Firefox usage in December 2007.

I've already written two Pardus reviews -- 2007 Beta 2 and 2007.1. So it's time for a review of 2007.2 Caracal release. In this article I will focus on the key changes and my personal thoughts concerning this interesting distribution.

It's not usually a big deal, getting sound working in Linux or BSD. In my case, however, my laptop's internal sound module is dead, and I've substituted a USB sound module from DealExtreme.com that costs about $2. It works, but it can be hard to get a given distribution to pipe the sound there rather than to the dead internal sound system.

For developers, the open source world of 2007 was all about updates and interesting new projects. From a new version of Eclipse to a new scheduler in Linux, developers around the world contributed their free time to make their lives and the lives of others collectively easier. But in hindsight, the significance of 2007 may well be that the GPL finally grew some teeth.

In this second part of my survey I list and briefly describe some of the Java sound and music applications known to work under Linux. Java applications show up in almost every category found at linux-sound.org and the Applications Database at linuxaudio.org.

When I began collecting links for the Linux Sound & Music Applications pages I frequented a variety of announcement and news services. Some of those services are no longer with us, some have been superceded by more comprehensive and modern channels, and a few have remained as primary sources for new and updated Linux audio software.