Tag Archives: Music

Project Neon: the fastest way to install Amarok 2.0 on your Kubuntu!

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish), Frank has added an interesting post about Project Neon which is the best solution for people who desire to have the new nightly builds service for Amarok. Following the simple instructions contained in Project Neon you will able to enjoy the last developing packages for Amarok 2.0 without waiting the release of the stable version. Project Neon also provides simple instructions to install Amarok 2.0 on your Ubuntu in just five minutes. Last but not least, it is necessary to remember that Amarok 2.0 is not in its final version yet and it could potentially create some serious problems on your PC. To install it just add:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

in your sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) and the install it using the following command lines:

$ sudo apt-get uptdate

$ sudo apt-get install amarok-nightly

Enjoy it!

FLAC: our favourite multiplatform (Linux, Windows, MAC OS X) Free Lossless Audio Codec!

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It is true! MP3 format is the most common format we normally use in our everyday applications but MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm and it is not comparable with the quality of uncompressed audio formats as Monkey’s Audio, ALAC, WMA. This week, in our Freeware page, we posted a brief review about some particular features of FLAC: a multiplatform (Linux, Windows, MAC OS X) Free Lossless Audio Codec. Nowadays, FLAC is well and constantly supported by many music player producer. We compared FLAC and MP3 formats using the “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major – Allegro” by Bach and the results were very interesting. For common listeners (as us) the audio quality was, more or less, the same but when we asked to a couple of friends (authentic music “hooligans”) to describe the difference between the two music files (FLAC and MP3) they spent more than 15 minutes of their (and our) time talking about “tones”, “pizzicato” and something else that I really do not remember at the moment! After the listening, when we compared the file extensions, we discovered that the FLAC file was five times bigger than the MP3 (25.6MB vs 5.1MB)… To conclude, we really think that FLAC represents a fantastic (and the best) lossless format for home stereo systems. On the other side, if you are not a music purist, MP3 could be the best choice for listening music on portable audio devices.

Stixy: a collaborative online application to easily share ideas and more..

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In many collaborative projects it is often necessary to share ideas, images, documents, ect.. but, as everyone could testify: ideas fastly flight away; it is not easy to remember video and photographs and so on… In a traditional office a common board could effectively help to coordinate trends and share photos but when working in internet it is high the possibility that many of this stuff will be lost before next meeting with colleagues. Moreover, now it is possible to use Stixy, a simple intuitive but powerful online application which allows you to display and share all you want (notes, photos, documents, to-do lists and also music) on the web. We tried Stixy (better its Beta version) and we enjoyed it a lot: clean, easy to share and positively influenced the mood in our team. For some more information you can read a brief review in our Freeware Page. Something to try!