The following section introduces the most popular multimedia applications for Linux. Get to know media players, sound editing solutions, and video editing tools.
Table 24.3. Multimedia Software for Windows and Linux
Task |
Windows Application |
Linux Application |
---|---|---|
Audio CD Player |
CD Player, Winamp, Windows Media Player |
KsCD, Amarok, Grip, Banshee |
CD Burner |
Nero, Roxio Easy CD Creator |
K3b |
CD Ripper |
WMPlayer |
KAudioCreator, Sound Juicer |
Audio Player |
Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes |
Amarok, XMMS, Rhythmbox |
Video Player |
Winamp, Windows Media Player |
Kaffeine, MPlayer, Xine, XMMS, Totem, RealPlayer |
Audio Editor |
SoundForge, Cooledit, Audacity |
Audacity |
Sound Mixer |
sndvol32 |
alsamixer, Kmix |
Music Notation |
Finale, SmartScore, Sibelius |
LilyPond, MusE, Noteedit, Rosegarden |
Video Creator and Editor |
Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, Media Studio Pro |
Kino |
TV Viewer |
AVerTV, PowerVCR 3.0, CinePlayer DVR |
xawtv, motv (analog), tvtime, kdetv, zapping, Kaffeine |
Amarok is a powerful media player for the KDE desktop. It handles various audio formats and plays streaming audio broadcasts of radio stations on the Internet. For more details, see http://amarok.kde.org/ or read Section 19.2.1, “Amarok Music Player”.
Banshee is a media player that can encode and decode various media formats. Banshee can play, import, and burn audio CDs. For more details, see http://banshee-project.org/ or read Chapter 20, Playing and Managing Your Music with Banshee.
Grip is a CD-player and ripper for the GNOME desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia built in, but can also use external rippers. For more details, see http://www.nostatic.org/grip/.
Kaffeine is a multimedia application that supports many audio and video formats. For more details, see http://kaffeine.kde.org/.
KsCD is a CD player application for the KDE desktop. Its user interface is very similar to that of a normal hardware CD player. For more details, see http://docs.kde.org/en/3.3/kdemultimedia/kscd/.
MPlayer supports many media formats and can also save all streamed content to a file. For more details, see http://www.mplayerhq.hu/.
RealPlayer is a proprietary cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats. For more details, see http://uk.real.com/player/.
Totem is the default multimedia player for the GNOME computer desktop environment. Totem is fully integrated with GNOME Nautilus. For more details, see http://projects.gnome.org/totem/ or read Chapter 21, Playing Videos with Totem.
Xine is a multimedia player for Linux that supports different front-end player applications. Another important feature is the ability to manually correct the synchronization of audio and video streams. For more details, see http://xinehq.de/.
The X Multimedia System 2 (XMMS2) is an audio player for Linux systems that supports audio and video formats. For more details, see http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/wiki/Main_Page/.
See above for Banshee.
Brasero is a disc-burning program for the GNOME Desktop allowing users to burn audio and data CD/DVDs on the fly. For more details, see http://projects.gnome.org/brasero/ or read Chapter 23, Burning CDs and DVDs With Brasero.
K3b is a CD and DID authoring application for the KDE desktop environment for Unix-like computer operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks and contains a built-in DID ripper. For more details, see http://www.k3b.org/ or read Chapter 22, Burning CDs and DVDs With K3b.
See above for Grip.
KAudioCreator is a front-end tool for ripping audio CDs and encoding WAVE files. For more details, see http://www.icefox.net/programs/?program=KAudioCreator.
Sound Juicer is a front-end application to the cdparanoia CD ripping library. It allows the user to extract audio output from compact discs and convert it into audio files that a personal computer or digital audio player can understand and play. It supports ripping to many audio codecs. For more details, see http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer.
Audacity is a digital audio editor application. Its cross-platform allows users to mix tracks, apply effects to them, and export the results to WAV or Ogg Vorbis. For more details, see http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.
ALSA mixer is the mixer program for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). It is used to configure sound settings and to adjust the volume. It has an ncurses user interface and does not require the X Window System. It supports multiple sound cards with multiple devices. For more details, see http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page.
LilyPond is a music sheet editor. Because the input format is text- based, the user can work with any text editor to create note sheets. Users do not need to tackle any formatting or notation issues, like spacing, line-breaking, or polyphonic collisions. For more details, see http://lilypond.org/web/.
MusE is at the moment a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities. The project works on a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux. For more details, see http://www.muse-sequencer.org/.
Noteedit is a powerful score editor for Linux. It creates sheets of notes and exports and import scores to and from many formats. It features a graphical user interface. For more details, see http://noteedit.berlios.de/.
Rosegarden is a free music composition and editing environment. It features an audio and MIDI sequencer and a score editor. For more details, see http://rosegardenmusic.com/.
Kino is an easy and reliable digital video editor with export to many formats. The program supports many basic video editing and assembling tasks. It captures video to disk in Raw DIV, AVI, and Quicktime formats. For more details, see http://www.kinodv.org.
xawtv is a TV viewer and recorder suite. It supports both analog and digital audio and video broadcasts using either a TV tuner or a Satellite receiver card DB-S. For more details, see http://linux.bytesex.org/xawtv/.
kdetv is a TV viewer and recorder application for the KDE desktop supporting TV using a tuner card. For more details, see http://www.kdetv.org.