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Linux Software

Two Steps Forward for Linux Multimedia 142

Posted by timothy from the soon-fun-for-all dept.
chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."
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Two Steps Forward for Linux Multimedia More

Two Steps Forward for Linux Multimedia

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  • The Cinerella installation process is `unique' (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @07:48AM (#3678321)
    Use rpm -i --force --nodeps to install it.

    Euw. A package management system, like any other management system, has network effects. I.e, the power of the system is the square of the nodes. I don't install unpackaged applications because removing one of those nodes has a substantial effect on the usefulness of the system. I.e, I can't install any apps on top of Cinererella if I install it from an unpackaged tarball. Luckily we have the Linux Standard Base and RPM, but the
    Cinererella package apparently must be force installed. Euw.

    If Heroine Warrior or anyone reading this will host it, I can provide RPMs that will install on most major Linux distributions. If package dependencies are a support issue that HW don't want to deal with, make an apt repository to serve out the RPMs. Any dependent package will be downloaded as necessary from the apt source of the main distro and installed automatically. My email address is mikem, at the domain name above.

    • Re:The Cinerella installation process is `unique' (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @08:05AM (#3678368) Homepage
      rpm -Uvh worked for me.

      What widget toolkit does it use? And why does it link with libGL?
    • It doesn't mean that you have to use it.
      I guess they wrote that because they didn't want
      support mails telling them they had this or that
      failures while installing. This set of options just
      forces rpm to install it whatever happens.

      Not a good idea, they might get different kinds of
      mails like "you f***ed up our sistem."
    • Luckily we have the Linux Standard Base and RPM, but the Cinererella package apparently must be force installed. Euw.

      If package dependencies are a support issue that HW don't want to deal with, make an apt repository to serve out the RPMs.

      Reminds me of Broadcast 2000 (from the same authors). When I once downloaded the source, and started looking at it, the source tree contained about 10 general-purpose libraries (maybe some of them modified?), and I recall very soon finding a note somewhere basically saying "Do not try to compile this yourself! If the binaries work at all, use them! This will probably not compile!"

      Now looking at the source of cinerella, I see directories such as:
      cinelerra-beta1/audiofile
      cinelerra-beta1/freetyp e-2.0.4
      cinelerra-beta1/libavc
      cinelerra-beta1/l ibsndfile
      cinelerra-beta1/libmpeg3/a52dec-0.7.3
      cinelerra-beta1/libmpeg3/mpeg2dec-0.2.1
      cinelerra -beta1/quicktime/libogg-1.0rc2
      cinelerra-beta1/qu icktime/ffmpeg-2.4.5
      cinelerra-beta1/quicktime/la me-3.92


      Maybe the HW people can roll up some spiffy software, they sure don't know how to do it the clean, unix-like way! It was quite a surprise to download the huge Broadcast 2000 package over a modem line, only to discover it contained half a dozen libraries I already had installed. So be careful of what you promise.

      (Not to mention their over-arrogant way of expressing things. Somebody already commented on their page, and as I understand from cinelerra-beta1/make_packages, the package info is along the lines of:

      Summary: Complete production environment for audio and video
      Provides: Everything
      %description
      It's about transforming the impossible into reality.

      I wouldn't say that's very descriptive.)
      • This seems to be the case with a lot of Multimedia applications in Linux. Xine, Mplayer, transcode... they all seem to include all their required libraries internally instead of just linking to the appropriate one already on the system. Perhaps this is a reflection on how chaotic multimedia is in Linux. The only way to get consistent libraries is to just include them directly?
        • This seems to be the case with a lot of Multimedia applications in Linux. Xine, Mplayer, transcode... they all seem to include all their required libraries internally instead of just linking to the appropriate one already on the system. Perhaps this is a reflection on how chaotic multimedia is in Linux. The only way to get consistent libraries is to just include them directly?
          That's funny. I've been saying this about Linux for the past few years. The problem you describe is entirely true, but it is much more severe. This isn't just a problem with Multimedia in Linux, this is a problem with binary compatability between distros.

          The only way to ensure you get the libraries you need is to package them with your application. But, RPM is only good at packaging one thing at a time. One application, or one general library. If you try to cram both into a single RPM, you'll get funny problems when you try to install it.

          For instance, I can see why they suggest rpm -i --nodeps --force package.rpm. If one of the libraries is already installed, RPM will refuse to install the entire package because it doesn't want to overwrite a file. Obviously their solution could have been better implemented (put the libs in a subdir that won't break things and L_PRELOAD them from there), but the problem really shouldn't have been an issue in the first place!

          But it is, and it is because Linux has no standards. Anyone can roll their own Linux system, but that potentially breaks everything that a software vendor could ever expect to find on that system.

          The fact is, we need to get a standard to cover what a Linux distro must have to be considered a usable system. The LSB has about zero steam on its own. Its best shot is UnitedLinux, but of course everyone wants to instantly condemn UL because of what they thought they heard someone think they believed last tuesday under a full moon.

          All I can say is, I hope UL make it through long enough to at least establish some consistency between the involved distros, and that people notice how useful that really is before it is too late... I'm not the only one who sees this.
          • I don't think the "library hell" we have imposed on ourselves is so much a function of limitations in RPM, but rather inconsistent packaging. You can do anything with an RPM if you know how to tweak it. The problem in my mind comes from inconsistent library naming.

            For example, say you have libfoo which you package as Version: 1.0. When you move to libfoo v2.0, you introduce feature changes that make it incompatable with v1.0. Theoretically, you could have libfoo.so.1.0 and libfoo.so.2.0 installed at the same time, but you kept your RPM named libfoo for both RPMS. Thus, the RPM engine won't let you have both installed at once. If the new library had simply been named "libfoo2", no problem.

            All this gets back to what you called for: standards. While I don't think UL is the best way of doing it (they are only interested in dethroning RedHat), LSB would be a good place to start.

            As for multimedia applications, they have a different sort of library hell. Most of these libraries are 0.x betas and thus their feature sets are evolving by the day. To release your application, you generally have to include the libraries from a given day just to lockdown what features your application will use. Once these libraries and applications mature, maybe things won't be so bad?
          • Unfortunately, we have a little thing called "competition," and when two or more businesses have a bottom line, on the line, then you get inconsistencies. They may all state that they support LSB, and they all probably do. But then every distro will add their features which make them different from every other distro and then you have the same problem over again! Developers will become dependent upon distro-specific features and the LSB will fall very very behind. One person claimed that the LSB would simply be updated. I say this is horseshit. You can't have a moving standard because then it is no standard at all! There would become many many LSB versions in a short time and you would have LSB-version incompatibilities.

            In the end, it will be Red Hat that sets the standards for Linux. Infact, they already do with RPM. Even Slackware comes with RPM integration (strong *ix philosophy meets desktop user-friendly philosophy).

            There are problems with LSB itself. It has to define way too much to be useful (which it can't and doesn't) and LSB-compliant applications are way too restricted to be useful. GNOME/KDE applications are not LSB-compliant, for example. And never will because then LSB would require all implmentations to have KDE/GNOME installed (and would have to define the precise version of every library which consists of a "GNOME system" and a "KDE system".. a near impossible task at that).

            The LSB is a pseudo-standard. It defines many interfaces, but it leaves it wide open for interpretation. For example [linuxbase.org] (context: LSB application compliance):
            5. It does not use any interface or data format that is not required to be provided by a conforming implementation, unless:


            [...]

            * The use of that interface or data format, as well as its source, is identified in the documentation of the application.
            As you can see, this is pointless standardization and, IMO, will never get anywhere. The problem with defining Linux is that Linux can be anything to anyone and programmers tend to not conform to standards unless there is a _technical_ barrier that conforming to the standard is the only way to get around that barrier. For example, not too many people conform to UI guidelines, but everyone who wishes to use an internet RFC follows it precisely.
    • Unfortunately apt-get and RPM don't solve much either.
      I've tried today to get my system to use this, but I can not find many RPMS that I need. It basically means that I must use those that are provided which are often old versions or they link against optional things that I don't want. Still can't find an xvid RPM what avifile links against for example.
      Still, using the source is the best way and the little problem I have to maintain my own list of dependencies isn't that hard to do.
      • I've tried today to get my system to use this, but I can not find many RPMS that I need.

        Freshrpms contains all of Red Hat 7.3 plus a wide variety of additional packages. It doesn't include avifile (but rather, mplayer and xine) but Mathhias Saou, the maintainer, will generally provide additional packages on request.

        Alternatively, you could set up your own local apt repository. All you need is a http server (apt-get install thttpd), some packages, and the genbasedir command, which creates some indexes.

        The source is the best way, but unpackaged source isn't. It takes less than five minutes to create an RPM from any app that uses GNU autoconf once you're familiar with the system, and if you have the brains to compile your own software, you have the brains to create packages. I'd suggest taking a look at the IBM Developerworks RPM tutorial sometime.

  • Not userfriendly (Score:3, Informative)

    by oever ( 233119 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @07:55AM (#3678339) Homepage
    According to the website, Cinelerra is not intended for end users, because it is not user friendly. They suggest looking at Kino. From Kino's website:

    Kino is a simple non-linear video editor. Although it has windows and menus, it is actually a keyboard driven program. It uses many keyboard commands that are similar to the vi text editor.

    Hmm. Sounds very user frienly. :^)

    I'll give Kino a try though when my new digicam arrives!

    I wonder if this will work
    :%s/fat/muscle/g

    • Re:Not userfriendly (Score:2, Interesting)

      by nn4l ( 73972 )
      Yes, Kino is user friendly:

      "I don't like this scene": Type "dd".
      "Go to next scene": Hit return, or arrow down key.
      "Delete from here to end of scene, it's only getting worse": Type "d$".

      Many users don't need more commands, and it is fast.

      http://www.schirmacher.de/arne/kino/ [schirmacher.de]

    • Re:Not userfriendly (Score:3, Informative)

      by dinotrac ( 18304 )
      Kino's a lot friendlier than the description indicates. Most things can be done point'nclick, but learning the keyboard commands makes everything smoother.

      Kino doesn't try (at least it hasn't so far) a full-fledged editing package, but it is very handy for the simple things a lot of us want to do.

  • From the homepage:

    This kind of functionality for no cost is like the sun rising in the west, Americans building skyscrapers, women running for president. It just doesn't happen anymore yet in one act of rebellion you can download it right now.

    Yup. They said it went against the laws of God and man... Engineering feats and social change be damned; Chromakey in a tarball obviously heralds the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind. :)

    Seriously, though. This is very cool. It's nice to see *nix come up with a free alternative to Adobe "Hey, let's throw Skylarov in the pokey" Premiere.

  • This couldn't come at a better time, IMHO. As a manager at a small media company, I have been very interested in the low price/high reliability of the Linux platform. The one thing holding us back to Windows and Mac was the apps. They just aren't there one Linux, yet.

    But I'm downloading both of these now, and this may precipitate a switch in the near future. Admittedly, much of our work is in Flash, in the 468x60 and 336x280 formats, with no sound. But the industry may definitely expand in that direction, and we are already anticipating it.

    I'm very excited about the possibilities, as all Linux aficionados should be.
    • you will be much happier with MainActor as a Video editor. it is more mature, easier to use and crashes far less.
      • Unfortunately, even MainActor doesn't have a lot of the tools that I needed in a video editor (for example, easily changing the speed of a video clip), so for now I'm stuck with Premiere. I'll definitely have to check this out and see if it's worth trying to switch to, though.
        • I completely agree, premiere + photoshop + after-effects cannot be beat (except by Avid) and is the ONLY reason I have a windows partition. nothing else is installed there.. and then I use linux+mpegtools to convert the final AVI to an mpeg2 for dvd burning... as Adobe's Mpeg2 plugin for Premiere5 is obsenely overpriced. (no I will not buy version 6... no more money spent on windows software)

          Someday someone will get a clue and make a decent NLE and effects package for linux (or release what they have... how about it PIXAR!) until then, I draw the shades and edit in shame under windows. (Ok so I could have went the mac route... but I didnt want to double my costs for my suite)
  • While I am no film student Cinelerra sounds like great news for fan films and such and independent film makers when it is described as follows:-

    If you want to make movies, you want the compositing and editing that the big boys use, you want the efficiency of an embedded UNIX operating system combined with the power of a general purpose PC, or you just want to defy the establishment, the time has come.

    I wonder if this program could be used for rotoscoping (light sabers) and special effects with its compositing functions. It's really great how technology has become cheap enough for budget film makers to be able to produce their own short films ladden with eye candy and special effects we have come to expect from Hollywood.

    • Excellant

      All we need now is a program that will asist in creating a decent plot and three dimensional characters into a movie.

      Mr. Lucas could use it to give his latest a Re-Master...
    • Independent film makers are not going to be using the beta version of an incomplete Linux video tool. If they can afford to pay for a computer, digital cameras, and a cast, I think it's safe to say most of them can afford something much nicer, like Final Cut Pro.
      • >If they can afford to pay for a computer, digital cameras, and a cast, I think it's safe to say most of them can afford something much nicer, like Final Cut Pro.

        I would say not. Final cut pro costs $1000 [macworld.com]. A decent Mac costs $3000 [apple.com]. Pi (an independent filmt that actually "made it") had a budget of $60,000 [imdb.com]. If 7% of that budget was on computers, I doubt the film would ever be made!
        • You could easily run Final Cut Pro on an iMac, or even an eMac. I've run it on a 450Mhz G4, it should work fine on anything faster - such as a used Power Mac, or possibly even a G3 iMac with a memory upgrade. That means the entire computer+software budget is a one-time-only $2000-$3000.

          Besides, Final Cut Pro is definately worth the money if you're doing anything serious. Or, if you don't want to buy a Mac, you could use Adobe Premiere or another such program. As promising as Cinelera might be, I seriously doubt it will ready for production use anytime soon.

  • MainActor (Score:4, Informative)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @08:05AM (#3678366) Homepage Journal
    German company MainConcept makes a video editing software for Linux and Windows platforms. Check out MainActor [mainconcept.com].

    The cross-platform compatibility is done with Qt, so the basic user-interface quality is very good. Some strangeness in some video editing UI concepts, but otherwise excellent.

    I've tried the Linux demo version abt two years ago. It was rather nice even then.

    Price $99.
    • This looks just like Vegas Video 3.0 [sonicfoundry.com]!!
    • I've tried the Linux demo version abt two years ago. It was rather nice even then.

      I've used MainActor (I paid the $99 license fee), and it will turn your GNU/Linux box into a Microsoft Windows box ... the program is very unstable, and the one rule of thumb was 'save early, save often' (and you still will probably lose some of your work).

      Worse, GNU/Linux bugs seemed to get fixed last ... support was much better for Windows users than GNU/Linux users.

      I have since switched to using kino for my NLE needs (which are quite simple: cut, rearrange, export into a form transcode can manipulate), and while it isn't perfect, it is a heck of a lot better than MainActor. I don't need fancy star wipes (hey Homer) or text overlays ... I just need to be able to snip commercials out of my Max Headroom recordings, to edit out the dead space in my home videos, and rearrange some of the takes in my home movies. For that, kino is sufficient.

      I do hope Cinelerra is good, works, and actually remains supported by the authors for a time, but as another noted, the authors do seem pretty 'flighty', particularly in the context of the bizarr removal of Broadcast/2000 off the web a while back. One hopes it is, as another noted, just a quirky sense of humor on the authors' part and not a sign of deeper waffling on the whole software freedom thing, as even a buggy (and discontinued) GPLed product can at least be improved upon ... something I waited quite a while in vain for with Main Actor.
    • I bough a Main Actor package and it was pretty horrible. Broadcast2000 was much better.Much more robust for raw video processing. I saw Linux Media Arts is promoting Cienelrra. But, there isnt much there. http://www.lmahd.com/systems.html
    • If you want to destroy your computer, MainActor is wonderful. I wanted firewire compatability, so I went for the 3.74 (beta) found on their Linux forums. During capture, it went into an infinite loop, and quickly filled up my entire HD with a bogus video file. Oh yeah, and installing it suid root was great- it overrided system files. Not even an fsck could save my poor box. I'll stick with trying to learn Cinelerra and Jahshaka, thank you very much.
      • Thanks for the advice.

        Yeah, seeing what also the other people have said about MainActor, I'd probably be better off with Cinelerra.

        I tried Cinelerra a few days ago, but didn't manage to capture anything with it, although it seemed to control my TV card interface just fine. The UI is not too good. Oh well, I'll keep trying.
  • An other interesting video program to watch: jashakafx [sourceforge.net]. (Hope they ditch the horrid GUI though).

    More composting then editing, but shaping up nicely none the less. Brings up the question where the powerhouse apps are... Wasn't Shake released on Linunx as well?

    • "More composting then editing..."

      So, it turns any piece of sh** movie into something which is environmentally useful?

      Sorry.. couldn't resist...

    • > Hope they ditch the horrid GUI though

      The GUI is written in QT so it is quite possible that he is just using a very dark unflattering theme.

      They could probably benefit from a more convential interface and include Menus and keyboard shortcuts (i cannot see any from the screenshots).

      iFrames on the website cramped layout, no Menus in the program. Definately a project that would benefit from a some usuabilty analyis.

      http://jahshakafx.sourceforge.net/screenshots/gr ap hics/composite.jpg

      • jahshakafx's interface seems like it was inspired from Discreet Combustion - a default dark interface with a lot of buttons, but Combustion's interface is extremely nifty once you get the hang of it.
        • i can see the resemblance but the problem is the mac does have a toolbar and menus (just not in the main window)

          and "once you get the hang of it" does not mean it is even easy to use or remotely likely to meet the reasonable expectations of an ordinary desktop user.

          emacs is easy to use "once you get the hang of it" :)

  • Audacity (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ambush ( 120586 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @08:17AM (#3678392)
    I've been using Audacity for the last couple of weeks and found it very simple, very stable, and very very powerfull!

    I was looking for something to enable me to rip from audio cassette (dialog/speech only) to wav and then mp3/ogg. Audacity was the only (or best) product I found that allowed me to visually see the tracks so I could splice and dice the two sides of the tape together, remove the pops, and so on.

    The only two limitations were that it's mp3 support is limited to predefined bitrates (why not an external command line?), and recording large (ok, huge) wavs caused it to skip sometimes. But then sox saved me.

    In summary, as a wav editor it is brilliant!

    • I've been on the lookout for something like this.
      Say, do they have any ambitions of getting MIDI score editing thrown into this?

      LR

      • Re:Audacity (Score:3, Informative)

        by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 )
        > Say, do they have any ambitions of getting MIDI score editing thrown into this?

        I personally don't have plans to start on any serious MIDI features in Audacity for a while. But the nice thing about an open-source project is that if somebody else wanted to come along and start working on MIDI functionality now without getting in the way of the rest of the program's development, we would welcome it.

    • Re:Audacity (Score:2, Informative)

      by wheel ( 204735 )
      I was looking for something to enable me to rip from audio cassette (dialog/speech only) to wav and then mp3/ogg. Audacity was the only (or best) product I found that allowed me to visually see the tracks so I could splice and dice the two sides of the tape together, remove the pops, and so on.

      I downloaded audicity for a quick look, to compare with my preffered audio recording software, snd. I found that audacity's recording interface is just a little too basic, lacking snd's analog-style vu meters with peak- and mean-level displays. The advanced features of Audacity, however (envelope, effects, multiple track editing, etc) were a lot simpler to use than corresponding features (where they exist) in snd.

      Summary: for recording backups of your LP's, use snd. Then edit tracks with Audacity.

    • i cant belive they had the audacity to release it!

    • Re:Audacity (Score:3, Informative)

      by mbrubeck ( 73587 )
      The only two limitations were that it's mp3 support is limited to predefined bitrates (why not an external command line?), and recording large (ok, huge) wavs caused it to skip sometimes.

      Hi, I'm one of the Audacity developers. A few of us are following the discussion here, so feel free to ask questions of us.

      Regarding the MP3 exporting, the next Audacity 1.1 release can export to arbitrary command-line programs on Linux. The code in 1.1.0 has some bugs (doesn't work on big-endian hardware) and no user-interface yet, but see this mailing list post [geocrawler.com] for more information.

      As for dropped frames during recording, this has been our most long-standing problem. Dominic is planning a "Smart Record" mode where the program will do nothing but record samples with the minimum possible latency. On Linux, we also hope to move to ALSA eventually, which should help with latency.

  • Let's see if it meet's MainActor. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @08:18AM (#3678396) Homepage
    I have been using MainActor for some time now for Non linear video editing under linux. Yes It's unstable, but it does work. I had high hopes for Broadcast2000 but their abandoning it was and still is very fishy smelling. Cinderella feels very much like Bcast2000, but is still not as stable as mainActor.

    Yes, MainActor is not free... but I dont see anywhere that cinderella is going to be free. Linux is horribly lacking in decent - easy to use NLE video editors... Everyone it trying to reproduce what Adobe Premiere is offering or the AVID suite, and that is horribly overkill for 90% of the users. what needs to be designed is one of those simple suites that comes with a firewire card.. allows you to do splicing, title insertion and a few transitions.. (anything but a cut or dissolve is useless... No I dont want to watch your video with 900 different transitions. It makes people puke!)

    How about a simple NLE editor? or a stripped down version of Mpegtools that doesn't require 60 different libraries and packages? (this is a great example of what makes statically linked binaries a really good thing.)
    • anything but a cut or dissolve is useless... No I dont want to watch your video with 900 different transitions. It makes people puke!

      Tell that to Lucas! (am I the only one who thinks the transitions in EP-II look like they were done by some kid with a freebie webcam editor?).
  • HW pulled the Broadcast 2000 video editing software over liability issues. Then HW releases another video editor called Cinelerra and its ok to use?

    Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, if Chewbacca lives on Endor, that does not make sense. You must acquit.
    • The subtext is that, apparently, they signed a rather foolish deal with a company that distributed B2000. So they bailed on it citing vague liability issues, and released Cinelerra.

      Anyway, I've written video editors before (on other platforms), and neither B2k nor Cinelerra do much for me.
  • I see multimedia when a computer is used to present multiple medias(text, graphics, video, animation or sound) in one presentation integrated (seamlessly).

    An audio editor do not exactly fall in this category in my mind.

  • They use Windows as their development platform (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the news page on the sourceforge site linked to from the Heroinewarrior.com main page:

    "Posted By: heroines
    Date: 2002-03-27 14:59
    Summary:Switch to windows

    There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.

    By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have"

    ?! you tell me.

  • audacity... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @08:33AM (#3678435) Homepage Journal
    For working on audio samples, Audacity is GREAT. I had some old records that are not available on CD that I wished to preserve. The problem is that I've had these since the early 1970's and they are scratched and worn. I sampled them in, fired up Audacity, and used Audacity's noise filter. One of these days I'm going to look over the code for it - it must be some pretty tricky signal processing....

    You mark a section of noise, and tell the filter "See that: that's noise. Kill!". The filter will then remove that noise from the signal. The first sample I had the noise went from a "Schoosshh Schooshh" ever rotation to a very faint, high frequency "twinkle". Since the record was speech, I was able to then brick-wall filter that off, and Voila! I had an MP3 that was a pleasure to listen to, rather than a nasty scratchy mess.

    Audacity works. Well. Get it. Use it.

    (now, if only I could us it to filter out all the crap on the radio... But then I don't listen to the radio....)
    • >The problem is that I've had these since the early 1970's and they are scratched and worn.

      Well, now I'm confused. I've seen slashdotters tell me all vinyl beats CDs, and now you're basically saying it sucks?

      Can I use your comment next time I'm trying to explain to a vinyl always beats CD pusher that they're wrong? :-)
      • A coworker of mine has a good saying that is applicable when dealing with audiophiles like that:

        I don't argue with wheelbarrows, I push them.


        You may use my comments, for what little good it will do.
      • Scratched and worn vinyl sounds worse than CD audio.

        Vinyl only sounds better than CD audio if (1) the vinyl is in pristine condition and (2) it is played on some very expensive kit. Being analog, the sound quality of vinyl is only limited in theory by the quality of the gear used to record and playback. In practice, most equipment used to record and playback the vinyl medium has worse sound than CD audio.

        Of course, YMMV.

        • Vinyl only sounds better than CD audio

          It also sounds significantly better than a nonexistant CD. That's the case with 99% of my album collection. Stuff that will never be released on CD, like all of Tim Curry's albums, Little Nell's singles, etc. I listen to them on CDs and MP3s, yes, but those are captures from vinyl, either my own or a collector. One of these days (read: been planning it forever, probably never do it) I'm going to find a recording studio, pay a few hundred bucks for time, and play my virgin albums with a top of the line needle on a really good player, and do a serious high quality transfer.

          Vinyl is still important for quite a few things of historic and cult value. For that matter, so are casettes. I have the master casettes for quite a few interesting interviews and live performances that I'd like to get into a more portable media.

          --
          Evan

          • One would think (and I could be wrong on this) that the noise filters on software like Audacity and Cool Edit Pro could clean up the sound well enough that any moderately good ATDC would produce digital music that sounds at least as good (if not better) than the analog original played on regular stereo equipment. This should especially be true for your interviews and recordings of live performances unless you had some seriously good recording gear. The distortion introduced by conversion to digital should be well below the improvements that can be made by filtering out noise.

            The noise filter on Audacity is simply amazing. And Audacity is free!

            • This should especially be true for your interviews and recordings of live performances

              Yes, true for them, but not for the records. The interviews et. al I wouldn't do in a studio - a simple phono-phono plug to a sound card would be perfectly acceptable, as the source itself is low quality (as you point out). I've been slowly collecting MP3s via opennap and gnutella of all my casette only filk albums, and it's just easier to have a search for "Bayfilk" running rather than hooking up a casette player to my computer, and spend the time slicing and dicing the songs out myself. :)

              --
              Evan

      • Try some CDs you've got now after 30 years of use and then tell me that vinyl sucks. Goddamn I've got CDs less than a year old that don't play properly (and yes, I do look after them... well mainly).
        • I've got 15 year old CDs, and I copied them to CDRs to ensure they're preserved perfectly the other year. A couple of scratches made it a little difficult, but it could have been worse (I could have not recorvered the CDs at all)...

          Try doing that with vinyl ;-)
      • I'm not really a "vinyl beats CD pusher" or an "audiophile" but I do appreciate vinyl. I just bought 15 records today for a $1 a piece, most of which were classic albums (some of which I already owned on CD). I don't have great equipment (my cartridge costed $100 new), but even so, in most cases I like listening to the record better than the CD. If you actually sit down and actively listen you can't deny it. If anything, the sound is just different in a way that is pleasant and offers something that CD doesn't. When you record vinyl to CD quality you lose that something, I've experienced that myself.

        Though I won't say it beats CD, or vice versa. You've gotta take care of your records, putting them on is a bit of trouble, a flaky pitch control can be annoying, and you can't listen in your car or while you're on the go. I often rip my CDs (as WAV's) and queue up playlists, a convenience you generally don't have with vinyl.

        Digital audio is the way to go these days, but vinyl is still good. Though, maybe one of these 24-bit higher sampling rate formats will obsolete vinyl (I personally haven't experienced much of them so I can't say).
    • From looking at the site, it looks like audacity is mainly a stereo soundfile editor... does it do multitrack mixing a la Pro Tools? Or is there something else that does?
      • Dude, If you find the "multitrack audio recording and editor" for Linux that will do recording studio processes for Linux, please let me know as well. Everything I've found so far is seriously lacking in some respect or I, as a Linux Newbie, have been unable to properly install or run. Please let me know what you find out and you are welcome to e-mail me at Aspi_Thorsson@linuxmail.org . Peace, Aspi

  • Audacity smokes! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by motorsabbath ( 243336 )
    I've been using Audacity since 0.97 to record and mix individual tracks from my analog 4-track recorder - it smokes! The only limitations I've hit are those provided by the lackluster driver for my soundcard (f**k creative labs!) - time to get me a Hammerfalle!

    I heartily recommend this app to anybody who does any home recording. I've used in in Linux and OS9, I'm sure the win32 version is just fine.

    JB

  • My excitement is contained. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @08:46AM (#3678479)
    You can find the following on their Sourceforge development page:

    Posted By: heroines
    Date: 2002-03-27 14:59
    Summary:Switch to windows

    There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.

    By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have.

    - end quote

    That can be found at:

    http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id= 16 4360

    Another poster pointed out that the source tarball contains the libraries of some 10 other OS projects. These include things like lame and libogg. Their previous product bcast2000 used it's own (ugly) widget set as well. We're probably fortunate that this NLE works as well as it does and is polished as it is.

    It's hard for me to fathom just where these guys are coming from. Their methodology seems to suggest that they are talented Windows developers who don't even remotely get how UNIX works. They spring this NLE on us almost fully grown and then abruptly pull it because of some shadowy "liability" concern. They then spring its successor on us and are threatening to take it to Windows. There is also an announcement of an upcoming beta on their page where they point out that "it is STILL a native Linux program and won'
    t take advantage of "win32 features".

    I won't be in the least optimistic about this project's long term Linux prospects until I see a credible UNIX focused fork. These guys are good and wrote some nice software in spite of themselves but as far as their UNIX support goes they're flighty.
    • I think the HeroineWarrior coders simply enjoy pulling people's chain. Its very obvious to me that they're pure-bred *NIX people with an over-active sarcasm-center.
      If you go through the site you'll find all sorts of odd statements, and ultimately, I think the whole "pulled because of liability concerns" thing was just another manifestation of their odd sense of humor, as is the "moving to win32" thing.
    • A couple of points:

      1. I'm under the impression that "these guys" is actually "this guy". Incredible as it sounds, I think this entire app is the work of one brilliant and somewhat eccentric developer, Adam Williams.

      2. I don't think he's a Windows developer at all; in the documentation that comes with Cinelerra, he provide an explanation of why he chose to use symlinks rather than use the usual libraries.
  • I've used Broadcast 2000 and found it servicable for some things, but not as stable as I'd like.

    I'm still searching for the multi-track recording software of my dreams (ardour sure looks nice -- if only I could make sound come out!)

    No matter -- this is pretty exciting to me, even if I am little more than an end user and not the sophisticated sort the authors are aiming at.

    (talk about a cheesy way to avoid writing documentation!)

  • Some observations, Cinelerra, Kino, other tools (Score:5, Informative)

    by madsdyd ( 228464 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @09:23AM (#3678645)
    About cinelerra: As I understand it, the author of broadcast 2000 (which is the same as cinelerra) had an agreement with a company that packaged broadcast 2000 and sold it with support. At some point it appears someone threathened to sue the author, and he withdrew the project.

    You can still find the sources to broadcast 2000 on the internet (I even think it is part of the cinelerra sources) and there is also a patch floating around that adds ogg vorbis and openDivx support to it.

    Its about a month since I last checked out Cinelerra. At that point it was rather complicated to build - the makefile has errors that will allow the build process to fail but will make it appear to the user that it went OK. When built, it does work, but it is limited in its supports of Video encodings, which is a shame. The DV import module crashed for me, which means that I would have to convert all my DV streams to MPEG2 or MOV format, which is not so great. If you wish, however, the mjpegtools can be used for this.

    Cinelerra has a number of transitions etc, which is great. However, a month ago, there were many glitches, and in general the program did not seem stable.

    Several people mentioned MainActor. This program works well (for me) and the demo edition will work for as long as you wish, although it will print "MainActor" on any frame rendered by the program. (Read: If you do not manipulate the individual frames, you can actually edit all that you want, but transitions will have the stamp and so on). It does cost money though, and is not OSS. MainActor also have support for text effects, titles and so on. (Which I have not seen on any other Video editor for Linux).

    If you are taking up video editing on Linux and you have a DV camera, you should definitively check out Kino. (at sourceforge). Disclaimer: I recently got cvs write access to kino. Kino is build for DV editing, and will keep the DV metainformation, etc, while editing. It has a nice interface - both menus, toolbars and vi style keyboard shotcuts. But, there are currently no support for transitions, titles, or anything like that. Kino cvs, which currently depends on libdv cvs, contains a module called "dvscript" that can be used to create some simple transitions, as well as streams from pngs, etc. I believe it is the plan to eventually integrate this functionality into kino proper.

    If you are taking up editing, but mostly with analog video, you shold consider buying an analog to DV converter (An external box that works with Linux costs about $199 + a firewire card). In any case you also want the mjpegtools (sourceforge) to be able to work with captured streams, remove noise, constructs streams that can be used for videoDC's etc. Mjpegtools also support some hardware accelerated capture cards and jpeg compressors.

    Kino can export a playlist to a format the mjpegtools can read, which means that it is easy to create e.g. mpeg2 or DivX streams from your DV input.

    For your VideoCD creation needs, check out vcdimager.org.

    Mads Bondo Dydensborg
  • This week, support for RV20/RV30 (RealVideo and RealAudio G2+v8) was added to MPlayer [mplayerhq.com] CVS! It works great and now mencoder can even re-encode .rm movies to DivX .avi! :)

    No need for that sucky Realplayer anymore, except for two of its .so-files.. :)

  • RPM installed without notifying me that libstdc++.so.3 and libgcc_s.so.1 are required. I found copies of the files (in my /usr/lib/OpenofficeXX/program/) and copied to /usr/lib.
  • Maybe this story ought to be in the Apple section as well, because the appearance of a decent audio editor for OSX is huge. I have been waiting for someone to develop something that's simple, cheap, and works. So far, I have been recording VO audio clips in iMovie and editing them with QuickTime; or recording music in ProToolsFree, which only runs in Classic and is way more complex than I need. Hooray for Audacity! I'm downloading it tonight.

    • Re:An audio editor for OSX! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @11:52AM (#3679682) Homepage
      Maybe this story ought to be in the Apple section as well, because the appearance of a decent audio editor for OSX is huge.

      I'm also very excited about finally getting Audacity to run on OS X, but we need lots of help. It still needs quite a few Mac-specific features (and some bug fixes) and I'm spread thin, trying to lead development of Audacity on all platforms and also work on all of the Mac features. Please join the Audacity development team if you have any programming experience and can help out with the OS X version!
  • Ok, so let me get this straight... the initial program that was put out was Broadcast 2000.
    However, the program was capable of doing "Professional" quality and features, but there was the chance that it had a few major bugs.
    Soo.... the company pulled the product in case some major company sued them for lost information when the program crashed. This just doesn't seem to make much sense.

    Question: Can I sue Abobe/Macromedia/Digidesign/Avid/(Insert company here), when Photoshop/Flash/Protools/etc... crashes and I lose a client's information? Because that's what they seem to be afraid of. Instead, couldn't have they just called it a Beta or put a disclaimer on the page (or in the EULA?...)

    Don't tell me that each of you haven't lost information ever (well if you had a Beowulf cluster of redundant machines perhaps you haven't), to a program crash?
    Why could people sue about it in the first place? Java even has this little neat disclaimer....

    The Software may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as online control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.

    Which to me, tends to make me think that a simalar software disclaimer could put saying "If you are producing Starwars III on this, it probably won't handle the 1.7TB of information that the movie has..."

    Thoughts anyone?

    • Hi!

      -----
      TibbonZero wrote:
      Instead, couldn't have they just called it a Beta or put a disclaimer on the page (or in the EULA?...)
      -----

      Hmmm, If Bcast2000 was distributed under the GPL, then there's a "No Warranty" clause already a part of the licence, which says that the developer is not responsble for any damages, losses, etc. you incur as a result of using the software. Of course, that's assuming it was distributed under the GPL...

  • apt-get (Score:2, Interesting)

    by den_erpel ( 140080 )
    Only an apt-get URI now ;) and we're all extremely pleased.
    I had a quick look at the sources in order to build them myselves, but ...

    They are _again_ not using the GNU Autotools (which makes packaging a lot harder).

    buggers

  • Lots of Linux Multimedia (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @01:02PM (#3680210) Homepage

    Let's see, I've got my video capture card working on v4l, I've got video capture to mjpeg (good balance of 'quality of original encoding' and 'file size taken up by original encoding') working through xawtv's [bytesex.org](no, not a troll, that really is xawtv's URL) 'Streamer' utility, I've got framerate and format conversions of other file types working through mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]'s Mencoder, and I've got The MJPEG tools [sourceforge.net] for generation of VCD and SVCD video from the original sources (the yuvdenoise filter is handy when transferring old VHS's to VCD), and when I want to get more complex with my conversions, I've got transcode [uni-goettingen.de] (the '.ppml' format for subtitle rendering seems to support quite a lot of effects...) and now I've got Cinelerra (which I can never seem to spell properly the first time) for messing with the video itself, once I figure out how to use the program (which now runs on my Slackware box after seeing a previous poster's tip about finding the libgcc* libraries and such in OpenOffice - Thanks!).

    Now if only I could get xawtv to recognize that I have libquicktime.so on my machine so that I could save my video to .mov's (so that I can get more than 2GB at a time) I'd be set...

    Well, that and support for .ogg [XVid/VP3]/Vorbis video file encoding (MPlayer already supports playback at least, or so I'm told, and it sounds like support for this in ffmpeg [sourceforge.net] may be coming Real Soon Now from what I've seen on the mailing list...)

    So, there's quite a lot of work that seems to be going on with Linux multimedia (not even counting proprietary packages and audio-only tools) if you look long enough...

  • For a long time, we didn't have a Really Good audio editor to use in our magazine (and put on our cover CD) when writing about sound editing and conversion. The rest are either complex crippleware (GoldWave, CoolEdit), or too bad to be considered. Audacity fits the entry-level bill nicely with a few Very Obvious buttons right up front, and when you dig in, has lots of good stuff underneath.
  • I'm a die hard gtk user, so I am attracted to GLAME (http://glame.sourceforge.net/index.var). Can anyone compare the two? I'd rather not use a app that is also built for Windows as I fear it's linux integrety is compromised. Also eventually I am interested in SACD production. Does Audacity support 24/96 x 6 channels and 24/192 x 2 channels natively. Is there a linux app that can write to DSD? Thanx, Bearcat
    • Don't fear, audacity is a gtk app as well. It is written to the wxWindows api, which is a cross-platform 'wrapper' that will allow you to compile to native applications on gtk, windows, or mac. Glame seems to me to be more concerned with creating effect networks for real-time processing, whereas audacity is more about recording, editing, and playing sound files. Furthermore, the linux version of audacity is probably the most stable, because almost all of the developers are using linux. It accomodates an unlimited number of channels, and the "unstable" branch release has the ability to use high-quality 32-bit float audio. But don't take my word for it, the download is small--try it out. You can even use both of them on your system, and neither will get jealous.

  • Especially when I always get these wacked out errors trying to compile audacity:

    g++ -c -g -O2 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/lib/wx/include -DGTK_NO_CHECK_CASTS -D__WXGTK__ -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/opt/gtk/1.2.3/lib/glib/include -I/opt/gtk/1.2.3/include -Iallegro Tags.cpp -o obj/Tags.cpp.o
    Tags.cpp: In function `wxSizer *MakeTagsDialog (wxWindow *, bool,
    bool)':
    Tags.cpp:315: `wxFlexGridSizer' undeclared (first use this function)
    Tags.cpp:315: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for
    each function it appears in.)
    Tags.cpp:315: `gridSizer' undeclared (first use this function)
    Tags.cpp:315: parse error before `('
    Tags.cpp:376: parse error before `('
    make: *** [obj/Tags.cpp.o] Error 1

    I won't even dare ask how to fix that.

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