I’m set up with a Linux based computer, so some of the more commonly used programs are a challenge. Does anybody here have a Linux computer, and what are your favorite music-related programs for it, and more importantly, where do you get them from? I’m talking specifically about things to read midi files, mp3’s, ABC, slow-downer, home recording, you name it.
On 2003-02-11 17:07, spittin_in_the_wind wrote:
I’m set up with a Linux based computer, so some of the more commonly used programs are a challenge. Does anybody here have a Linux computer, and what are your favorite music-related programs for it, and more importantly, where do you get them from? I’m talking specifically about things to read midi files, mp3’s, ABC, slow-downer, home recording, you name it.
As for abc, linux doesnt have a direct viewer from what I have found. abc2ps make postscript files so that you can view with something like ghostview. Another nice program I found was abc2abc with can do stuff like change the key and other useful stuff before you convert to postscript.
xmms is pretty good, havent found anything to slow down mp3’s yet though. There must be something though.
For midi and so forth there is stuff out there, I downloaded a composing program called Brahms that looked promising but never got it to work.
I run SuSe 7.3 Linux on my home PC, and I LOVE a program called APCstudio. Great home recording, editing, effects program, and of course… it’s FREE as most linux programs are!!!
Been running various UNIX variants on Intel hardware since 1989.
abc2ps is the abc translator o’ choice. There are several postscript viewers around and if you want it to be more portable, ps2pdf will turn the postscript to Adobe acrobat (PDF) format.
Bladeenc is still the most stable mp3 encoder, though the developer stopped doing work on it last fall. Go to sourceforge.net for alternatives. Sourceforge seems to be where most of the open source developers distribute their stuff from.
Haven’t done much with midi or slowdown; for that I use a Mac. With OS-X, I now get the best of both worlds. I’m waiting eagerly for the ProTools OSX release (supposedly this month).
XMMS is good, I’ve had mixed sucess with SLAB for recording and mixing. Rosegarden for MIDI sequencing, lilypond for Music Scripting. You can check software out at http://www.linux-sound.org
For more mundane things…
I use wine for Quicken and AAA Map and Go. Konqueror as my main browser athough fall back to Mozilla once in a while. I use mostly a KDE based environment.
Wow, thanks! I don’t understand a single word any of you said, but I’ll refer my hubby to this thread, right straight! I think what I’ve been using is GTV mpeg player. XMMS is on this machine, but I can’t get it to work. Time to call in the expert!
I have ended up running Suse for a few years after giving up on Debian. If you are new to Linux, Mandrake is supposedly one of the more user-friendly distributions around. Thou Suse and Red Hat are quite strait forward and simple as well.
For audio ware under Linux the site http://linux-sound.org above is pretty much all you need.
However, there is always software that doesn’t exist for Linux but don’t despair “VMware” is a simple and very good solution. With a mouse click you can start Win9x, 2k or xp (even win3x, if anyone is pervered enough) under Linux. No emulation, both OS are made to use the same hardware so just run your apps as usual.
Great if you have kids, just let them boot into win XP without even knowing that they work on a virtual machine. Then when they messed up the system or winreg just throw the whole thing in the recycle bin and give them a new one to play with. Also works the other way around so that you can run Linux under Windows.