I’ve heard about MPD as a music player. It is a music player I’ve never really felt like checking out in the past because I was afraid that the config file might be overwhelming. Anyhow, I recently saw a guide to using Sonata and MPD as a music player.
So why the heck do I need two things to play music?
Let me say this: MPD is basically a daemon that runs in the background to make sure that you could play music. Sonata is the graphical way for you to control it. I’ve read so many raves …read more

If you’re a collector like me then you probably have spreadsheets of these things you’ve collected in the past how many months or even years. Personally I only started becoming aware of the need to keep track of all these things. I think it’s partly because I am running out of shelf space. And some of my books ended up on my sister’s shelves. Tsk, it’s really time for me to sort things out!
Tell It to Tellico…
And Tellico will save just about everything you enter in the application. This is not a difficult application to …read more

On Arch Linux
My co-worker now uses Arch Linux. He had problems using the RT kernel of Open SUSE. He’s had too many issues with it so he looked for something else that would answer his needs when it comes to the RT kernel and a look-and-feel that he wanted. He found out about Arch Linux, a simple and lightweight distribution. This distro is known for:

using BSD style init scripts
its binary installation
high level customization
its nice package manager: pacman
text-based installer
being more lenient, compared to something like Debian, when it comes to non-free packages

Newbies might feel that Arch Linux …read more

I am sure that you might have a song or two which you’d like to make into custom ringtones for certain people who frequently call you. The boss could have a ringtone like the Star Wars’ Imperial Death March (especially if he’s always giving you impossible deadlines) or your sister could have a ringtone of her favorite song. It could be anything. Sometimes these tunes are not available or you only want certain segments to be used. In any case, you could do it yourself using Audacity.
Audacity is actually capable of a whole lot more audio editing …read more

If you have a huge collection of music files already, sometimes you realize that you were too lazy to add tags and/or descriptive file names to them. It’s a mess! Especially when you are looking for particular artists or titles or you’re in the mood to create a ‘mix CD’/’mix tape’ But no need to worry! Ex Falso will help you organize your files.

Ex Falso screenshot by Clair Ching, 2008.
Just look for a package of this nifty application in your distro’s repository and voila~! Soon you will have this tool ready to save …read more

There are students from NICGA and the University of NSW who made a clarinet that could be operated by a computer. The description of the robot is that there’s an embedded computer that is connected to brass plungers with rubber nylon feet to control the keys and mouthpiece of the internet. They used Gumstix boards to make the project and those used the Open Embedded Linux distribution. It played “Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Bolero” — the judge admitted that it doesn’t seem quite as “warm” as a human musician playing .
That sounds really amazing, right? …read more

Disclaimer: I don’t have an iPod but some of you might have one. Or you might come across fellow new Linux users who want to ask you about this topic.

HowToForge has a detailed guide on managing your iPod with gtkPod.
It tells you how to do the following:

Configure gtkPod and that you’d have to do it just once.
Load your iPod into gtkPod
Upload music into your iPod
Download music from your iPod
Manage playlists

After reading the guide, you could also read more about gtkPod.