The Miro media platform (formerly Democracy Player) has made a new major release. 'We believe the open media world can be just as integrated and usable as the closed, top-down, DRM'ed systems of companies like Apple. And we want to prove it,' says Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of Participatory Culture Foundation, which creates Miro." Try it now if you haven't yet, you will like it.

In this tutorial I will focus mostly on manipulating and converting files to free formats, which in our case will be FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and Ogg Vorbis (free lossy codec), but support for MP3 is also included where it is the case. These formats are not patented and are free to use without the need to pay for using them.

Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users - XMMS has to be mentioned here - well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user's taste.

Qmmp (Qt Multimedia Player) is a Qt-based audio player for Linux which resembles the appearance of XMMS (and Audacious for that matter), so users of these two players which want to have a player which integrates well in KDE will probably want to give it a try.

The largest difference is that Amarok's design philosophy is influenced by the current interface design theories, while Clementine's are more oriented towards stone geeks, including every detail imaginable.

As I was working on a sound track project for a science-fiction film I've been working on, I remembered reading an article iwhich described filtering using Gimp and a command-line program now called "The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph".

Puredyne is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution aimed at creative people. It provides a number of creative applications, alongside a solid set of graphic, audio and video tools in a fast, minimal package. It includes software for everything an artist might need - from sound art to innovative film-making.

So sound issues STILL plague Linux in general. I think we can all agree that the decision to make Pulse Audio the default sound daemon in Linux has resulted in mixed results at best.