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Slashback with a success story about video editing on Free software, and all-important updates on the MySQL dolphin, MP3 software for Red Hat (why?), the fast-rising Phoenix, and more, all below.

And you don't want your database being a Flipper. MySQL has finally announced the name of their logo dolphin, and the winner is... Sakila! The name, submitted by Ambrose Twebaze of Swaziland, was chosen from 6357 entries "because it represents the global reach of MySQL as well as the friendly, open nature of the company." Slashdot covered the contest back in January, and MySQL listed some of the more popular names submitted back in April.

Perverse incentives are the most fun. Mark Barnett writes in reference to the ongoing pets.com lawsuit story Update: 10/04 00:18 GMT by T : Sorry, that's "PetsWarehouse," not "pets.com.":

"I was one of the settling parties. I did not settle out of fear. I settled because he wanted me to run his banner on my website for 120 days. The settlement did not say anything about the number of times it had to run. I ran it once per day at about 4 AM EST for 120 days. It was my joke on him. I think I got the better deal. I ran the defense fund banner about 1.5 million times versus his 120 times."

Wings for a lizard. Espectr0 writes "Phoenix 0.2 has been released!. Improvements include the return of the sidebar, extensions management and web form autocomplete. It's also a little smaller and faster, and 0.3 will be released in about a week. Get the scoop here."

Unsolicited testimonial. boomerang_56 writes "Wanting to see what the fuss was about, I just installed Red Hat 8. For me, working IEEE1394 features are a must. It was nice to see that now I don't have to recompile the kernel just to have Firewire working. So I downloaded and compiled Kino, and was able to capture from my camcorder, and even control it, without the major tweaks I used to have to do. Then I found out that Cinelerra has been released at version 1.0!!! So I downloaded and installed it via RPM (Pentium II binaries). I had to install an old version of libstdc++-3, but that was easy. No "--force" or the other hassles we used to have to go through. So the first time I fired up Cinelerra, after changing the preferences for IEEE1394 capture, I was impressed to see it actually captured on the first try. I guess the bottom line for this submission is as a user I wanted to say "thanks" for all the developers working on this kind of thing. We all know that besides gaming, video editing is the big killer app. It's really nice to be able to have this kind of power in open source software and not have to boot to Windows just to edit video now. It's not easy enough for my mom yet, but the way things are going, it won't be long. Oh, links... get Cinelerra here (check out the screenshots too). Get Kino here."

Blinkenlampen ueber Paris. fluxdvd writes "In celebration of the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris, Project Blinkenlights has transformed Tower T2 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France into what is claimed to be the world's largest computer screen. The system used to drive the display runs an embedded version of Linux.

Read the story at Linuxdevices.com. They have live streams of the building at night (Paris time) and replay the previous night's display druing the day. It's quite impressive :)"

We mentioned the plans for this display a few weeks ago.

Don't you hunger for a patent-free, royalty-free, better-at-identical-bitrate alternative? The release of Red Hat 8.0 included the notable, intentional ommission of MP3 software, a decision Red Hat made on the basis of possible patent and royalty problems.

Now SnowDeath writes "After two days of trying to get my ALSA install to work correctly in RedHat 8.0 (Psyche), I finally headed over to the xmms website to see if there were any known bugs with ALSA. Low and behold, the first thing my eyes read tells how RedHat Software decided to not include the mp3 plugin in their xmms install in Psyche in fear of pending patent problems. So, do not despair, there is an rpm "update" for this particular problem on the xmms site."

protonman writes "...and you thought emulation was for watching quicktime trailers, playing nintendo games, or just running calc.exe. Think again, Please welcome Winamp Visualization Plugins for XMMS, available now!"

protonman writes "...and you thought emulation was for watching quicktime trailers, playing nintendo games, or just running calc.exe. Think again, Please welcome Winamp Visualization Plugins for XMMS, available now!"

haplo21112 writes "I am working on coding a web front end to choose music from the collections stored on my web servers hard drive, and then stream this music to machine connected to my stereo. Like many people I would think, my music collection is mixed between .ogg/.mp3 formats since I started ripping before .ogg(which I now use) was available. The problem I have run up against is I can find no utility for streaming, that supports both formats, specifically both in a mixed playlist. Mod_MP3 came close, but it turns out that it can handle only one at a time either all .mp3's or all .oggs, the playlist can't be mixed. I looked into the Icecast streaming utilities, but they seem to be mp3 bound at least till the icecast 2.0 release. Has anyone run into this same problem of mixed media, did you come up with a solution that didn't require redoing half your collection in the other format." Ah, if only the problem was that simple...

This is the problem, when a client, like XMMS, connects it negotiates the stream type. After this it just assumes all data after this point is of the same type. At no point can it switch content types. You can use something like a play list which lists multiple connections to simulate playing different formats in a row, the thing is this requires a reconnection to the server each time.

You can blame the two dominant protocols, SHOUT and ICY. One was created for the Shoutcast server and the other was created by the Icecast folks. Neither of them really considered the issue of carrying any other payload then MP3, or more to the point, changing content type in midstream.

At some point it would be great if Vorbis/Ogg became dominant because of the silly copyright restriction with MP3 that make the use of the lame encoder pretty questionable. It still has a way to go though since the code for bit peeling has yet to be finished and until that is completed, to down bitgrade an Ogg stream you have to decode it to some format like PCM and then reencode to Ogg (which is certainly not optimial for real time demands).

nerdguy0 writes "It appears that Winamp isn't just for Windows anymore. Nullsoft has a Linux alpha of Winamp3 out on their site. Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done." Does winamp have better playlist controls then xmms? I've taken to using freeamp just because it has decent playlist controls. I say decent, not good. I want something with a tivo type of intelligence, but everything that claims to do something like this, well, doesn't.

Anthanos asks: "I was recently asked to put together a Winamp and an XMMS plugin to do some pretty cool things. Having never done plugin development for either I went to their respective webpages and began looking for samples and/or SDKs to make use of. Winamp provided very well put together documentation and SDKs, but I can't find anything similar for XMMS. Has any such documentation or guide been put together? All I have found reference to so far are existing projects. I was hoping for the equivalent of 'Hello World!' for XMMS."

Every once in a while, it's good to have someone slap you with a reminder that conflicts which look simple or clear-cut from a distance may not be quite so simple to those in the thick of the action. In this case, artist Baptist Death Ray spills his guts about the problems that widespread MP3 traffic poses to small musicians, in the context of an industry dominated by giants (and remember, not yet equipped for convenient micropayments). Meanwhile, ewhac serendipitously points out one faltering step toward the encryption which is sure to be common in the future MP3 marketplace, and perhaps has a bearing on the musicians' plight Mr. Death Ray describes.

I think that if you spoke with most musicians, you'd be surprised to find out that we hold big record labels in very low regard. Big record labels, owned by larger companies, run by stockholders, are interested in only one thing, and it ain't music. And it ain't musicians, neither. It is, quite simply, profit, and whatever they can do to maximise that profit, they'll do it. I know I'm sounding like Jon Katz here, but in truth a lot of what he says about corporatism fits the music industry perfectly. At the top are rich fat white guys churning out pablum, or thinking up new and creative ways to turn good acts into pablum, because pablum sells more records.

The problem with record labels is, quite simply, that in order to ensure that they make the kinds of money they want to make, they won't take chances. And because they happen to control all the methods of physical music distribution, they're the only game in town. When the only game in town won't take chances, that means that if you want to play, you have to play their game, and you can't take chances either.

Before the Internet, it wasn't even possible to compete against the major labels -- but in the 80s there were still plenty of minor labels willing to cater to your needs. In fact, once upon a time there was a thriving indie music scene -- there were bands able to make a living doing what they did by working with labels who didn't mind challenging music. But something happened: the big labels found out about these small labels, thought they could produce more pablum, and bought most of them out.

Meanwhile, the record industry lumbers merrily along, stepping on all the talent it can find, robbing them blind, making them sign ridiculous contracts that give up most of their rights and bleeding them dry. And a few musicians get fabulously rich in the process -- that's the carrot -- but the rest of the musicians wonder what the hell happened.

That's the problem with the record industry. And one of the biggest problems with a record label is that, despite how much they suck in general, they are phenomenally good at distribution. They know how to get the word out to record stations, they know how to put your CDs in stores, they know how to schedule you on talk shows, they know how to promote -- and they can reach a much, much larger area than you can. One of the biggest selling points a record label has is saying "our distribution network can put your CD in stores worldwide." Every musician wants his music heard worldwide, even if he tells himself he doesn't care. It's part of being a musician.

Here's the theory: the Backstreet Boys have thousands upon thousands of fans in every town they stop in. The Baptist Death Ray, on the other hand, does not. The Backstreet Boys play music that is likely to be played in every city and every town all over the world. The Baptist Death Ray, on the other hand, is a more cultivated taste. So while thousands upon thousands of people in every town might like the backstreet boys, only fifty to a hundred people in every town might like the Baptist Death Ray.

With the Internet, however, this can cease to be a problem. No longer does the Baptist Death Ray have to worry about finding 100 fans at a time. The Internet is distributed, which means among other things that although in reality all of the Baptist Death Ray fans are scattered across the globe, the perception is that they're all hanging out at the Baptist Death Ray's Web site, the Baptist Death Ray pages on Listensmart.com, Mp3.com, MusicBuilder.com, Riffage.com, and Garageband.com. In effect, the Baptist Death Ray has found a viable audience for his music over the Internet that he could not necessarily find via geography.

That is what the Internet should do for independent musicians. And this, my friends, is a genuine threat to the big record labels.

So right now you have musicians like me who make some of our music freely available. We say "listen to this! This is what I sound like. If you like it, why don't you buy the CD?" Pretty simple, not sophisticated, but all new movements start out simple and unsophisticated. In time, this could grow into something the major labels can't stop, and that scares them a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Once upon a time MP3.com talked a lot about this, before they tried to become another music label themselves. They called it a revolution. They were right, but then they went public and stopped talking about it.

But here's the truth: to support yourself on the Internet all you need to do is sell 10,000 CDs a year at $8 a CD. If you're selling through a model like MP3.com's, you can make 40K a year -- not bad for a musician! 10,000 CDs is nothing to a major label. 10,000 CDs sold in a year means the label drops you and never talks to you again. Your album doesn't even go aluminum at 10,000 CDs.

This means that if the public could get used to buying music online, the major labels would be screwed. They're not willing to sell CDs at $8 a pop, and plenty of musicians are willing to sell them for less. That is a revolution -- a revolution where musicians are suddenly supporting themselves based on whether or not their audience likes what they do and buys their work.

Then there's Napster. Napster seems to follow the model where the plucky indie musicians put their music online and compete against the big labels toe-to-toe. The problem is, Napster doesn't compete against the record labels. Maybe the record labels don't know this, but it's true... Napster doesn't compete against the record labels, it competes against those plucky indie musicians.

It's no secret that despite the "rampant piracy" of people trading MP3s last year, the big labels sold more CDs than ever before. People tend to like buying CDs; there's a psychological difference between downloading an MP3 and going to a store and buying a CD. Consumers aren't buying music -- they're buying CDs, with cover art and liner notes and a little poster inside and a few hidden tracks and a few spoken tracks and perhaps a limited edition signed thingie wedged in between the cover art and the CD itself. The record industry makes big stars, and owning the things that a big star sells is part of the job of being a fan. Trading bootlegs is also part of the job of being a fan, but buying the posters, the CDs, the T-Shirts, all that stuff is as well. Record companies will always make lots of money from CDs, DVDs, and any other physical format that comes after.

So yes, while there may be a billion people trading Metallica songs online, Metallica's fans will still buy Metallica CDs, because to their fans, Metallica is the greatest band that has ever lived. Despite piracy, record labels will be able to make money, gobs and gobs of it. Napster doesn't compete with the major labels -- Napster promotes them, whether either side wants to admit it or not.

Who Napster does compete with, however, are the independent musicans. While independent musicians are trying to convince people that they don't need to buy from major labels, that they can buy direct (for less!) instead, Napster is showing people that they don't need to buy music at all. So on the one hand, you could buy ABCDEffigy at MP3.com, on the other hand, you could scour Napster for all the MP3s and have it anyway. After all, the Baptist Death Ray doesn't sell CDs, he sells music. CDs are freakin' expensive. Liner notes and posters and colored cds and limited edition doodads are the kind of promotional, artistic things that record labels excel at, that they use to justify jacking up the price.

Meanwhile, the consumer looks at a Web site where he or she can spend $8 for a CD, and then looks at Napster and sees the entire contents of the album online, free. Pay, or free. It's entropy, people, it all depends on what requires less energy. Right now, maybe spending the $8 is more convenient than waiting two days on a 33.3 modem. When high bandwidth lines are commonplace, however, that will no longer be the case. The worst part is not that Napster makes it easy to pirate music -- No, the worst part is the overwhelming feeling among Napster users that pirating that music is somehow morally justifiable. Most of the arguments I see say that they're not stealing from artists, they're stealing from record labels who don't pay the artists enough anyway. Well, I have news for you, the artists, even if they don't get the amount that they deserve, still get something with every music sale.

So how does the artist make money? Well, the common response from the free music movement is "touring." But you all need to know about touring. Touring is not a good way to make money unless you have a core audience of a certain size. A "core audience" is an audience that of fans who love your stuff, and will go out of their way to see you play. Now, go back to the top of this article and read the bit about the geographical limitations the Baptist Death Ray has, versus the geogrpahical limitations the Backstreet Boys do not have.

Ideologically speaking, the people who defend Napster may very well be on stronger ground than I am. Perhaps copyright and intellectual property has run its course. Perhaps its abuses call for the complete and absolute revocation of any claim that any artist has to his or her work. Perhaps pirating music through Napster is the just the kind of direct action that we need in order to show the labels who, in fact, is boss.

What I see, however, is the death of a revolution before it even had the chance to get off the ground. I feel that even if Napster loses its court case, it's too late to stop the way things are going. Napster and its supports will, one way or another, win. However, the result of that victory will be that artists will depend more than ever on rich sponsors, which is all that a record label really is. You thought mainstream music sucked now? Wait a few years after you've won. It'll suck worse.

Signed,

The Baptist Death Ray
(bdr@baptistdeathray.com)

And in related news, ewhac writes: "CNet reported about a week ago that AOL has announced it will incorporate copy-protection measures into an upcoming release of WinAmp, the hugely popular music player (upon which XMMS is modeled). The copy protection technology, intended to deter music "piracy," is to be provided by InterTrust Technologies, and is also intended to be part of the upcoming AOL 6.0 release. WinAmp was developed by NullSoft, which was acquired by AOL a little over a year ago for about $100 million in stock.

Personal Observation: May we now conclude that AOL is no longer a customer-driven company? Because I can't imagine a single user actually asking, "Please take away my ability to share stuff with my friends." Sounds like it may be time for a Windows port of XMMS ..."

mental666 writes: "Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free general purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC. It sounds great; I've tried it and while the file size is slightly larger than mp3, the quality is there. There's also an xmms plugin in the cvs module. For details check out The Xiph Web site."

Moo-ha-ha. CmdrTaco is on vacation (and sending his e-mail to /dev/null, so please don't even try), so I'm doing Quickies this week. On to the good stuff. DigitalDaedalus wrote in to tell us about the SGI 404 pages. Cute. For those with that not-so-fresh feeling, dodobh wrote in to tell us about the Slashdot Purity Test. No, I won't tell you my score. In the 'ear candy' bin, casret told us that they posted the results of the XMMS plugin contest. Time for some stuff from the 'exploding stuff' bin. Aardappel wrote in about Fisheye Quake, and Kintanon caught my eye with Fun With Grapes. Charles Helfenstein told us about the anti-cubicle. Very cool. Fanmail used the force and wrote in about George Lucas In Love. With all the X-Men hype going on, Link wrote in about Mutant Watch. Smurfy cared to share AIEEE, the Acronym Interaction, Expansion and Extrapolation Engine. fwfr told us about the Sim-William Shatner. You'll need Flash. Last but certainly not least, The Welcome Rain wrote in to tell us about your friend and mine, Robot Frank.

Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days) has released v1.1.0. Currently they only have rpms and source on the Web site, but I'm sure debs will follow. I've attached a feature list if you read more.

• CD Plugin now supports CDDB, and CD Index.
• mpg123 plugin now handles compressed id3 frames.
• OSS plugin got a much better and faster resampling routine.
• Setting for adjusting master volume instead of pcm volume.
• New shortkey, ctrl-n for "No Playlist Advance"
• XMMS can now be made "sticky"
• The Equalizer and Playlist don't show up in GNOME/KDE's task list anymore.
• Reload skin shortkey (F5)
• Option to set the speed of the mousewheel.
• Playlist files are now tried to be recognized by content in addition to suffix.
• Added Fullscreen support for visualization plugins. (in libxmms)
• Added DGA support to fullscreen.
• Added xmms-config command.
• XMMS now handles winamp's .wsz skin files.

Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days) has released v1.1.0. Currently they only have rpms and source on the Web site, but I'm sure debs will follow. I've attached a feature list if you read more.

• CD Plugin now supports CDDB, and CD Index.
• mpg123 plugin now handles compressed id3 frames.
• OSS plugin got a much better and faster resampling routine.
• Setting for adjusting master volume instead of pcm volume.
• New shortkey, ctrl-n for "No Playlist Advance"
• XMMS can now be made "sticky"
• The Equalizer and Playlist don't show up in GNOME/KDE's task list anymore.
• Reload skin shortkey (F5)
• Option to set the speed of the mousewheel.
• Playlist files are now tried to be recognized by content in addition to suffix.
• Added Fullscreen support for visualization plugins. (in libxmms)
• Added DGA support to fullscreen.
• Added xmms-config command.
• XMMS now handles winamp's .wsz skin files.

Jakdaw was one of the countless hordes who wrote with the news that the XMMS plugin competition is now closed to new enteries. You can grab the new plug-ins, tinker around with them, and than vote for your favourite.

Jakdaw was one of the countless hordes who wrote with the news that the XMMS plugin competition is now closed to new enteries. You can grab the new plug-ins, tinker around with them, and than vote for your favourite.

Jakdaw was one of the countless hordes who wrote with the news that the XMMS plugin competition is now closed to new enteries. You can grab the new plug-ins, tinker around with them, and than vote for your favourite.

Olle Hällnäs writes "XMMS team is proud to announce a plugin competiton with prizes. The competition will be held between the 10th of November and will run until the 10th of December. The XMMS team has also releaseed a QSound iQ Effect plugin for XMMS - more details are online, along with a press release. "

Olle Hällnäs writes "XMMS team is proud to announce a plugin competiton with prizes. The competition will be held between the 10th of November and will run until the 10th of December. The XMMS team has also releaseed a QSound iQ Effect plugin for XMMS - more details are online, along with a press release. "

Olle Hällnäs writes "XMMS team is proud to announce a plugin competiton with prizes. The competition will be held between the 10th of November and will run until the 10th of December. The XMMS team has also releaseed a QSound iQ Effect plugin for XMMS - more details are online, along with a press release. "

Olle Hällnäs writes "XMMS team is proud to announce a plugin competiton with prizes. The competition will be held between the 10th of November and will run until the 10th of December. The XMMS team has also releaseed a QSound iQ Effect plugin for XMMS - more details are online, along with a press release. "

SlashNET will be having a forum with the XMMS Project (formerly known as x11amp) today, June 19th, at 20:00 UTC (16:00 EDT) in the #forum channel. Afterward, a log will be available here on our FTP server. Hope to see you there! The IRC server (for those of you who don't know) is: irc.slashnet.org

Crocodile writes "X11AMP chaned name to XMMS (X MultiMedia System) and is now sponsored by 4Front Technologies Read more about it in the press release. You can download xmms .9 final as well. "

Crocodile writes "X11AMP chaned name to XMMS (X MultiMedia System) and is now sponsored by 4Front Technologies Read more about it in the press release. You can download xmms .9 final as well. "