[syndicate] BOOKS I LIKE - some reviews of books I've been reading and using:

[Pall Thayer]

> Speaking of which, I've now been using Fedora from RedHat, problem free,
> for quite a while. I would switch fully to linux, but it's terrible for
> multimedia video applications, relatively poor for sound as well. There's
> no Quicktime for linux, except a version which runs Quicktime uncompressed
> - which isn't all that useful. On the other hand, for text, programming (I
> think, not being a programmer), 3D modeling with Blender, Gimp image
> manipulation, etc. etc., there's nothing better and it's absolutely
> stable. And the number of Net tools, of all sorts, available makes it
> indispensable. I again want to mention the Zaurus PDA, which I take with
> me everywhere, and do a fair amount of my work on - and it's linux-based;
> you can download just about everything you need for it (for example, I
> have Kismet, perl, dig, pico, wget, etc. etc.).

I beg to differ. There's a dearth of good resources available for sound on
Linux. Topping the list in my book is Pure Data (http://www.pure-data.org) a
visual programming environment for interactive sound (like max/msp). For
multitrack recording, mixing and mastering there's Ardour
(http://ardour.org). Softsynths? Plenty. From tb303 emulators to software
samplers, everything you could imagine. Or maybe all you're looking for is a
simple organ with drawbars etc. (http://horgand.berlios.de) . There are even
specific Linux distributions for sound work, the most wide-spread being the
redhat based Planet CCRMA distro
(http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/) . This link
(http://linux-sound.org/) will point you in the right direction.


Pall Thayer
artist/teacher
Fjolbrautaskolinn vid Armula
http://www.this.is/pallit
http://www.this.is/pallit/isjs
http://www.this.is/pallit/harmony
http://130.208.220.190/panse