Amsterdam Music Composer

Amuc is a Linux application for composing and playing music. The current version is 1.7 (june 2009).

It works like this:

Tune fragments are entered graphically. These are combined into a complete tune by means of a script file.

Five-bar staff or piano roll display.

5 different built-in instruments, 6 mono synthesizers, synthesized drums, sampled instruments.

For the composer there is help available with scales and chords.

Tunes can be exported as WAVE or MIDI files, or as human-readable scores in postscript format.

MIDI files can be imported.

WAVE files can be read and transformed to notes.

Support for USB keyboard.

Interface with Jack (the Jack Audio Connection Kit).

Amuc is written in C++. It is a lightweight application, not needing a GUI toolkit or an unusual library (required: X11, alsa, xft, cairo). Speedy operation: maybe this is the fastest tool to explore musical ideas and to create a complete piece of music.

Also a binary Debian package is available.

Downloads:

Source code: amuc-1.7.tar.gz
Debian package: amuc_1.7-1_i386.deb
Manual (also included with the source code)

Some tunes created with this application:

Shanty (arrangement: van Bergeijk) [ogg]
Angry [ogg]

X11 Basic

A Basic Interpreter with X11-Graphics capabilities.

X11-Basic implements a structured BASIC programming language with X11-graphics. The structure of the language is similar to the ATARI ST GFA-Basic.

A Basic Interpreter with X11-Graphics capabilities.X11-Basic implements a structured BASIC programming language with X11-graphics. The structure of the language is similar to the ATARI ST GFA-Basic.

Download Deb

Find location of the program in Ubuntu

It’s rather trivial task for people who use Ubuntu for a long time but newbies usually have problems with adding program to startup if location of the program is unknown or it is required to specify full path to the program somewhere e.g. when opening attachment in mail client. There are two most popular ways to find this out:

1. which gedit
2. type gedit

Both will show full path to certain program (gnome editor in our example): /usr/bin/gedit:



Read more: http://www.linuxscrew.com/page/9/#ixzz1D4sLEdSt

New Ubuntu graphics and video apps

Here are some graphics and video apps that appear to be new additions to the repos.

Skencil, a vector drawing app

Xaraxtreme another vector drawing app

Lombard, a video editor

Add ImageShack upload button to Picasa

Enter this code in a terminal.

picasa picasa://importbutton/?url=http://imageshack.us/picasa/imageshack-photo-uploader.pbz

click on yes, you should see the button appear at bottom of Picasa window

Frodo 4.1

What is Frodo V4.1?

Frodo V4.1 is a free, portable C64 emulator for BeOS, Unix, MacOS, AmigaOS, RiscOS and WinNT/95 systems.

Some of the emulation's features:

• This emulator focuses on the exact reproduction of special graphical effects possible on the C64, and has therefore relatively high system requirements. It should only be run on systems with at least a PowerPC/Pentium/68060.


• Frodo is capable of running most games and demos correctly, even those with FLI, FLD, DYCP, open borders, multiplexed sprites, timing dependent decoders, fast loaders etc.


• 6510 emulation: All undocumented opcodes, 100% correct decimal mode, instruction/cycle exact emulation.


• VIC emulation: Line-/cycle-based emulation, all display modes, sprites with collisions/priorities, DMA cycles, open borders, all $d011/$d016 effects.


• SID emulation: Real-time digital emulation (16 bit, 44.1kHz), including filters (only under BeOS, Linux, HP-UX, MacOS and AmigaOS).


• 1541 emulation: Drive simulation in directories, .d64/x64 or .t64/LYNX files, or processor-level 1541 emulation that works with about 95% of all fast loaders and even some copy protection schemes.


• Other peripherals: Keyboard and joystick (real joysticks (only under BeOS, Linux and AmigaOS) or keyboard emulation).


• The full source code in C++ is available.


• Frodo is freeware. Why pay >$40 for a C64 emulator?

Hardware supported:

• BeBox or PowerMac with BeOS Preview Release


• Unix systems with X11R6 or Linux/SVGAlib (Tcl/Tk 4.1 recommended)


• 68k or PPC Macintosh with System 7.5


• Amiga/DraCo with 68040/68060, AmigaOS 3.0 and a graphics card


• Acorn computers with RiscOS 3


• Intel x86 system running Windows NT/95

You can get the source of Frodo V4.1b here: http://frodo.cebix.net/

To download the current version of the V4.x sources via CVS:

$ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.cebix.net:/home/cvs/cebix login

(password is "anoncvs")

$ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.cebix.net:/home/cvs/cebix checkout Frodo4

there is an autogen.sh script in ./Src that creates the files necessary for building which are not in CVS.

It prompted me to "make" and all I had to do was chmod +x the binaries and move the Frodo.Glade file  in ./Src/glade to /usr/local/share for the settings window to activate when the binary ran.

sudo cp Frodo.Glade /usr/local/share/

Create a ramdisk

I hope many of you will agree that sometimes it’s really good idea to have some small amount of RAM mounted as a filesystem. It may be necessary when running some bash or perl script that handles, say, thousands of small files so it’s much more effective not to waste computer resources on reading/writing data on hard disk but keep those files directly in memory. This idea is known as Virtual RAM Drive or ramdisk and can be setup in Ubuntu or almost any other Linux distribution using the following commands under root (to become root in Ubuntu use "sudo -s“):

# mkdir /tmp/ramdisk; chmod 777 /tmp/ramdisk
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=256M tmpfs /tmp/ramdisk/

where 256M is amount of RAM you wish to allocate for ramdisk. It’s clear that this value should be less than amount of free memory (use “free -m“). BTW, if you specify too many MBs for ramdisk Linux will try to allocate it from RAM and then from swap so resulting performance would be very poor.

Read more: http://www.linuxscrew.com/2010/03/24/fastest-way-to-create-ramdisk-in-ubuntulinux/#ixzz1CoUqIJH9

http://www.ubuntuka.com/ubuntu-ramdisk-ramdrive-easy-way/