Songbird, our favorite open source music manager has just released their 0.6 version. According to the website, the new release is “harder, better, faster, stronger”.
Looking at the release notes, it shows that the team has been placing quite a bit of work to improve its performance and usability. This project created by Mozilla promises to be the next big thing in the way you discover, play, and manage your music. We actually agree.
Running on Java, aTunes is a multi-platform application that manages your library of songs. Do not let the name resemblance fool you, according to the site aTunes will only read songs from your iPod but not write to them.
The program can play pretty much all the major audio track formats (mp3, ogg, flac, wma, and more). The playlist functionality, podcast management, and cd ripper tools look to be pretty solid.
Miro, the social video management platform has just been upgraded to v 1.2.3. What’s new?
Although I’m not a musician, I have an aunt who is. While trying to find everything that she would need to convert to Linux, I found MuseScore, a music score typesetter.
From their official site, the list of features include:
You can download MuseScore for Linux, and there is also a test version for Windows. Now I’m one step closer to convincing her to switch. 🙂
VLC has just came out with a bug-fix new release, v 0.8.6f. From the site, the update includes:
“VLC media player 0.8.6e and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the Subtitle demuxer, Real RTSP demuxer, MP4 demuxer and Cinepak codec.
This release also includes improved video output on multi-screen setups running Mac OS X and compatibility with Windows 9x/ME has been restored.”
You can get the newest version from VLC’s website.
Mixxx is an open source DJ tool that can be useful for amateurs and professionals. This multi-platform program is loaded with features such as:
beat estimation for you to know which songs that have a better sync match;The UI seems simple enough to start using as soon as you install it.
[Windows] If you want to store your CDs into your hard drive, you can start ripping them using CDex. I always like to convert my audio CDs into files so I can listen to the songs easily on my mp3 player and even to guarantee I’ll always have a copy in hand if I lend the CD to someone or it gets lost somewhere around the house.
CDex streamlines well this process by extracting the audio from the CD and converting it automatically to mp3, ogg, or WAV formats while storing ID3 tags. Besides these main tasks, the software has even more features.
Songbird is my new favorite music management software. Why? Because with it I can organize songs on my desktop and explore music throughout the web.
Using the Mozilla platform, Songbird allows me to browse the web searching for songs while keeping track of my music collection on my computer. I can easily find music tracks available on a site to play them, download them, or dig deeper through different web pages to find more stuff on the bands and artists I like.
If you’re not much of an iTunes fan, you can still manage your podcasts easily with Juice. This open source and multi platform (Windows, Linux, and MacOS X) podcatcher will check and download your podcasts whenever you want.
Juice is extremely simple to use:
Audacity is a great application for you to edit audio files, add effects, or even convert them. Its most basic functions are quite easy to do such as record, cut, add another audio stream, to name a few.
You can easily use Audacity to create podcasts, free cell phone rings, and convert audio files into a different format. This is just the tip of the iceberg when we’re talking about Audacity’s features.