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.

a ringtone made using Audacity

Audacity is actually capable of a whole lot more audio editing features but as I am not really using them yet, I am not very familiar with them. For now, let me share how I made my own ringtone.

1. I installed Audacity. Of course it has dependencies too so it’s good if you check them first. This is especially for those of you who have a lot of mp3 files.
2. I loaded the song of my choice. Audacity converted that.
3. With the selection tool, I dragged the mouse pointer to the starting time and ending time of the song I wanted to use. If you are not too sure about the time of the song, then you could actually drag the mouse on top of the bar with the time and have it play that segment. When you have decided the part to select, put the mouse pointer over the part with the spiky lines. Take note of the timing. Drag the pointer within the area from the start time to the end time. It will be greyed out by Audacity so you know.
4. I selected the trim tool. It’s the one with the wave in between the sideways T-like things. This will give you only the part you selected earlier.
5. I used the time shift tool to move the segment to the beginning of the time.
6. Lastly, I converted the file to mp3 via the Export command on the File menu.

It’s the simplest way I know to make a custom ringtone. There’s probably fade in and fade out somewhere. The moment I figure out how to use it, I’d definitely let you know.

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 you from mess!

Ex Falso has three main panes. One is for viewing the directories/folders that you have on your computer. The one below it is for the songs listed down. And the last one, which is the main pane, will have various tabs that will let you manage the information on the files.

You could do the following:
1. Edit tags one by one, or by batch.
2. Give tags based on the filenames.
3. Assign track numbers.

You could assign various tags, even your own tags, if you want to. There’s an Add Tag feature, after all. Sometimes when adding tags, I mistype labels or the tag type so it looks silly when I read the tag type “artst” so I have to change that in the Tags tab of the main pane.

Note that it seems like you need to save your changes in one tab before they are reflected in the other tabs. Aside from that you need to do some other thing first before they are reflected. It seems to not immediately load the changes that a user makes. There’s a Preview button you could click so you could check out the changes anyway.

Have fun re-tagging your files!

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? You could even view a video clip of the robot in action. For more details you could refer to the article in Computerworld.

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.