Slashdot Mirror

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

For audio, there is FreeAmp.

FreeAmp plays MP3 and Ogg.

Open Source projects have a shelflife of two years. Then they die.

Why two years? That's how long a filthy lunix geek has to buy their pathetic little domain name for. And of course, two years later, the project is dead and so is the website.

Fucking cunts.

Do you think Winamp might go the way of Freeamp which has to be renamed to Zinf (zinf is not freeamp) so as not to infringe on trademarks?

Zinf is based on the FreeAmp® source code. However, AMP® is a trademark of PlayMedia Systems, Inc., and therefore the original name of the project cannot be used anylonger. On this website the old project will be referred to as FreeA*p.

FreeAmp

I sure hope it is better than the winamp for mac. That one was not very good last time I messed with it. I ended going back to iTunes when I was running a Apple OS. Xmms is just fine on Linux PPC/x86/etc.

Freeamp used to annoy me but it has grown on me as it has developed. Maybe the linux winamp can do the same but it will still probably take a back seat to xmms in my book. YMMV.

I've been a happy EMusic subscriber for months now and I can't see getting rid of it.

WinAmp is bloated spyware

FreeAMP It's GPL, its availble for Windows & Linux, and it's music managment system (My Music) simply rocks.

"...The Cactus Data Shield proprietary technology was developed in-house by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the fields of information security, physics, mathematics, electronics, cryptography and algorithms." (Midbar Technologies, cited from the linked article at cdrinfo.com)

1. Midbar should make sure there's a graphics designer on the team next time. This is the ugliest player skin I've seen in a long time. Gaaaack.

2. If they're so smart, why didn't they think of actually including the track names instead of just "Track 01", "Track 02" and so on? Get a fucking clue, guys.

3. Somebody please explain to me how to issue the Prodigy's "Music for a Jilted Generation" (playing time over 78 minutes) using their fscked scheme. Answer, probably: it isn't possible - so what we get is shiny silver discs at the same price as before, but with less total playing time.

4. Including a player which relies on a proprietary and soon-to-be-obsolete software and hardware platform is simply brain-damaged.

5. "Nobody has ever won an argument against a customer."

Raymond

I'd much rather have a wireless network connected device capable of streaming the music off of my home machine and various other places on the net based off of my listening preferences. The thing I like about the radio is its ability to introduce me to new music. The thing I hate about the radio is its complete inability to know my preferences. Freeamp is a step in the right direction, but I still haven't managed to get any decent recommendations from it. Music Match makes an attempt as well, but their interface is practically unusable to me. And neither recommendation system is in the form of a net-enabled portable unit yet. *sigh*

Edna sounds like it could do what you want.

Basically its a smallish python program that acts as a, tiny, webserver - generating lists of all your songs, and streaming them to your clients browser - where you have XMMS, or Freeamp setup to play the stream.

I suppose if the music is already on the same machine as your webserver then it may be a bit redundant to have a second server - but Edna is neat, (this is the one program that made me start hacking Python...).

Even more important, users should download XMMS, which supports Vorbis on UNIX or FreeAMP which supports Ogg Vorbis on UNIX and Windows via a plugin.

Then (and this is the most important bit) go to BBC and use it to stream content.

I use http://www.freeamp.org/

I say who cares. We have XMMS, FreeAmp, and a whole host of other players. If your gratitude is based on the fact that WinAmp has better playlist controls, then do us all a favor and write a patch for one of the existing open source players. I'll admit that I haven't actually checked out the link, but are they making the source available? I doubt it, and so I say again, who cares.

I'll stick to Freeamp thanks. The Playlist manager ("My Music" as they call it) is the best I've seen for any player, and the iterface is nice & clean.

I started using Freeamp after Xmms started doing strange things when I tried to use it with the kernel OSS drivers, and I've never looked back. I can get the same player for Linux & home, and WinNT at work.

Remember kids, Freeamp!

Do what I do and use Obsequium at obs.freeamp.org

It runs on a Linux box and has a web interface. It also multicasts the stream over your network.

It requires a bit of effort to make it work, but it has been great for me.

I think that collaborative filtering is a much better solution than a recommendation system, although only time will tell. The advantage of a collaborative filtering system is that it can be passive, not requiring any explicit input from users. The software can just examine your playlist, and (anonymously) upload the information to a server. (perhaps a username and password so you can identify the same user repeatedly, but no way to tie the username back to anything else)

If you want to get fancy, you could even hook a Gnutella client up to it, and have a virtual custom radio that downloads and plays music that it thinks you'll like. (except, of course, that would be illegal ;-))

I think the FreeAmp project is a great one; it's a cross-platform, GPLed, music player that even supports Ogg Vorbis.

It just needs a little love.

To make a smooth, free collaborative filtering system, we really need a free software implementation of music fingerprinting software, along with an open, non-profit database of songs. MusicBrainz is headed in that direction, but, they to, are tethered to Relatable's technology.

Does anyone want to step forward to work on music fingerprinting software, who is interested in using it for the good of consumers, without catering to the recording industry?

How about a collaborative filtering database for music? If you were willing to settle for per-CD resolution, it'd be pretty straightforward to add this technology to FreeCDDB.

-- Agthorr

Relatable's "player" is Freeamp, a very popular and well-known open-source player.

Relatable's "database"... you are probably thinking of MusicBrainz, another open-source effort which is really, really cool.

If you were to review the websites, you would see that relatable doesn't own either of these efforts, and are only associated with them through open-source goodwill. Their library is open-source LGPL. The folks behind musicbrainz were motivated to participate in it for the same reasons that you are pissed off at CDDB.

tune

There already is a series of systems which integrate mp3 players and fairtunes. The first of which is freeamp 2.1rc5, and there is a fairtunes plugin for winamp, so infact your ideal situation exists and currently works!

Here's a quick comparison between Amazon and Fairtunes.

• 15% transaction fee (Ours is 3.5%)
• Receive money only if you're American (We don't discriminate)
• Lose your privacy (We respect it)
• $1 minimum transaction (Ours is $0.25)

We also have a Winamp Plugin so *you* (not us) can track your music preferences and then quickly and easily send money to an artist, or you can use the integration in FreeAmp.

Fairtunes isn't just for musicians! I.e. Look at Linus Torvalds who has received $175 from Slashdot readers.

The power of Fairtunes is that you can send money to anyone. Even if they don't ask for it!

Matt.

What does all of this have to do with napster and you? Well, freeamp allows you to download/stream music from emusic fairly easily (for a fee--something like $10 a month). So, if the napster distribution channel dries up, they become a quite attractive alternative. No more crappy searches, no more little red dots beside the songs, linux integration, artist-tipping support. Now, I'm not saying that emusic's actions here are good or bad, but do have a legal approach to digital music, while napster/gnutella/etc are questionable at the very least. They do support an open source project as well.

Relatable does something similar to this already.

If you're using the stunning, portable, MP3 player FreeAmp there is the option of "signaturing" all the MP3's in your playlist.

The intention is that then you can do automatic lookup of them on the Relatable site - and I suppose perform automatic MP3 info tagging.

Organization is the real key. have all of your music organized in folders for every artist, then by subject, like Pop, Classic, disco, 60's etc. Navigating is simple: when in navigation mode you move the controller right to go deeper into directories (or left to go up) then scroll up and down to see the songs in the directory.

That's the one problem they'd have to overcome to get me to buy this. MP3s have these nice little ID3 tags that allow for very nice organization. FreeAmp is the only player I know that organizes MP3s this way. In an ideal world, to play an 80s collection, I would only need to do something like:

select MP3 where 1980 <= YEAR and YEAR < 1990

Using a directory structure to navigate non-hierarchical data just isn't the way to go. MP3s were designed with that in mind, but no one's been paying attention. Use a little DB to organize this, please.

If AOL kills winamp, then more people will switch to freeamp, a free and superior project. I'll be the first to lose no sleep.

I've hit against this problem so many times .. from the other direction.

If I'm using a program that has a missing feature I really want .. I'll spend a while knocking it up, and submit it to the author.

95% of the time the developer will ignore my mail, and not even respond.

(Of course there are exceptions, like FreeAmp gave me write access to the repository on the strength of one context diff ;)

Even more depressing, though, is the number of times I've sent people diffs/patches to allow their Linux based apps to compile/run on Windows - these are almost always ignored.

Seems to me like lots of developers don't care about feedback. I'm always ecstatic to receive feedback on any of my code .. good or bad, and I've applied several patches random people mailed me ..

You might want to check out Ogg Vorbis

I'd definately recommend this, it can be played on the open source, player Freeamp - which runs on Solaris, Linux, BSD, and Windows.

Well now that Sonique is on Linux, We can look forward to RMS screaming about how their source license violates the GPL. I'm tired of his communist antics. That bastard.

Note, I am not a very good troll, for better ones, see the troll homepage.

Thank you.

Freeamp, on the other hand, is a completely open source, GPL'd MP3 player, and it's already available for Linux and Windows. Plus, the themes are entirely controlled by an XML-based description file and a few bitmaps. I stopped using WinAmp when AOL announced it was going to include anti-piracy measures of some kind.

Do the right thing. Use Freeamp instead. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's getting better daily, and it's OPEN SOURCE and FREE SOFTWARE, so you can do whatever the hell you want with it!

Freeamp, on the other hand, is a completely open source, GPL'd MP3 player, and it's already available for Linux and Windows. Plus, the themes are entirely controlled by an XML-based description file and a few bitmaps. I stopped using WinAmp when AOL announced it was going to include anti-piracy measures of some kind.

Do the right thing. Use Freeamp instead. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's getting better daily, and it's OPEN SOURCE and FREE SOFTWARE, so you can do whatever the hell you want with it!

That feature is already available. Take a look at the current versions of freeamp www.freeamp.org

Also it's supported by a major online music provider e-Music.com so I think it actually has a chance of sticking arount.

subsolar

-----

Plus, IIRC, EMusic sponsors projects like FreeAmp, which is actually one of the best MP3 players I've ever used. The playlist interface is quite different from WinAmp, but nice when you get used to it. Try it out, you'll be surprised. And they're gradually adding features, too. I think the newest beta can do CD audio. And, just looking at the page, they're working on building Ogg Vorbis support in.

Look at FreeAmp. It's open source, and has pre-built versions for Linux and Windows.

Sounds like it may be time for a Windows port of XMMS ..."

Or freeamp, which is already there for W32, and most likely won't be pulling any of these stunts, either.

---

FreeAmp has been doing this for a while, now. There's an option to check for updates automatically on start.

http://www.freeamp.org

Meaning future downloads of a dumbed down interface for your Aunt Gladis or a NIN mozilla chrome with inbuilt mp3 player.

If you can't hack Mozilla assembling a Chrome helps to do your bit to make Mozilla a better browser (...than IE :). If you want to learn more about chromes try Mozillazine's chromeZone.

Now somehow the RIAA has got to force all players to support the SDMI standard, which they may just do, suppositivly the new RIO'S will use SDMI as will most other players, possibly even winamp.

Which is all the more reason to switch to an MP3 player where you can remove the check for the SDMI information.
Freeamp.
The more people use it, the better it gets.

I speak for PCDocs

GQmpeg is nice, although it does have some issues with the frontend-to-mpg123 interface; namely, you start to hear MP3's about a half-second after they begin, and sometimes the buttons go dead for whatever odd reason. X11Amp didn't have at least the first problem when I tried it, IIRC . . .

Another one to mention is FreeAmp. It's also GPL'ed (sponsored by GoodNoise even), and has its own built-in decoder engine. A few ppl here mentioned Nitrane-- well, check this puppy out. It has a superhyperoptimized 128Kbps decoder: whereas mpg123 uses ~8-9% of my K6-2 300, freeamp uses just 0.1% (assuming top ain't lying). It should be even better now, now that NASM 0.98's been released . . .

The $400M seemed to be for both companies, no? I'm guessing that the vast majority of that went to Spinner.com, seeing as that A) Spinner was already traded and is a pretty considerably sized company and B) notice how Nullsoft is moving but nobody else is?

It's important to realize here that this does not mean that MP3s are going to become open. Everybody already knows about Icecast and FreeAmp, and AOL acquiring Nullsoft has (duh) nothing to do with the MP3 format as a whole. This is not about formats, it's about AOL acquiring media properties to be able to best serve its customers with a really neat, compelling multimedia experience. Go look at Wired Planet -- this is what I see AOL pulling off, but with a huge amount of music content.

I understand the anti-AOL sentiment. I, too, was there in the first part of this decade and felt the Internet shift when morons from Joe4422@AOL.COM started posting to sci.physics. But this may be part of an image shift, too. AOL isn't just a crappy service provider any more. They own a very hefty chunk of the world's software Intellectual Property now, including some very neat companies they picked up with their acquisition of Netscape. Give them some credit. They're a different company now, or are at least trying to be. And hey, I'd sure like to get bought out for a few million, vest, and then leave -- wouldn't you?
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)

Use FreeAmp
www.freeamp.org

What they need, though, is some cdindex-aware players - I haven't seen any yet. I'm going to take a look at patching some existing players to use it, but I'm a lame coder - I'm sure someone could do it in an hour as opposed to my month or two of effort. :)

Best of luck to freecddb and cdindex... I hope that one or both succeeds.

The Freecddb people might want to look at coordinating with the CDIndex people. For one matter, both projects look like they're aiming to accomplish the same goal. For another, CDIndex has as a stated goal, "Create GPL like license to cover the data that is inside of the CD Index. (If the GPL can't cover the data.)" I like that setup much better, as it would insure that no one could buy up the database and claim that they owned the freely submitted data and could do whatever they wanted with it.


--Phil (Besides, I think CDIndex is going with a better protocol than CDDB.)

Get it, use it

I've got this up and running already -- check out The CD Index project home page.

I've just done that. Go check out the CD Index Project home page.

Or contact me at rob@goodnoise.com