Artsy Tuesday

Grip is a graphical front-end for cd-ripping and encoding tools such as cdparanoia, cdda2wav, and oggenc. It can auto-detect disc insertions, do database lookup of CD title and track information, encode one track while reading another, rip partial tracks, and more.

Installing from the command line: yum install grip
Installing using the graphical installer: Search for grip
Menu location after installation: Applications > Sound & Video > Grip
Command: /usr/bin/grip
Upstream website: http://www.nostatic.org/grip/

The Fedora community includes artists of all stripes, including (I'm told, but haven't yet heard) some great musicians. It figures that Fedora would have some good music tools.

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine. It has a Qt-based MDI-style interface, with mixer, song editor, pattern editor, drumkit manager, and instrument editor subwindows. Included drumkits (sample sets) include GeneralMIDI (emulating a Roland XV-5080) and Roland TR-808. Although I'm not a musician, the interface is straightforward enough that I was able to begin experimenting quickly, starting with the included demo files.

So whether your garage band drummer is on vacation, you've always wanted to express your rhythmic side (or you've just got to have have More Cowbell!), or you're looking for a serious drum machine, Hydrogen is worth a look.

Note: On my F8 system, I was unable to get Hydrogen to work with PulseAudio and had to stop the pulseaudio daemon (killall pulseaudio) before starting Hydrogen.

Installing from the command line: yum install hydrogen
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in the Browse view; use the Search or List view to install hydrogen
Menu location after installation: Applications > Sound & Video > Hydrogen Drum Machine
Command: /usr/bin/hydrogen
Upstream website: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

The Gimp is a fine image editor -- as long as you don't need more than 8 bits per color channel. When your needs take you beyond 24 bits per pixel, you need Hollywood's image editor: CinePaint.

CinePaint superficially resembles an older version of the Gimp, in part because it was originally based on a fork and rewrite of the Gimp about a decade ago. However, a quick look at the "New Image" dialog makes the difference clear: image color precision options go up to 32-bit IEEE floating point. CinePaint also supports the LittleCMS color management system, high fidelity image formats such as DPX and OpenEXR, and a 16-bit per channel printing -- perfect for high-quality photo work.

Ever want a simple volume meter for your PulseAudio sinks (outputs)? If so, pavumeter is the program for you: it does exactly that one thing, with no controls, menus, or options to clutter the display.

Tip: If you have multiple sound cards, you can specify a sink number on the pavumeter command line.

Installing from the command line: yum install pavumeter
Installing using the graphical installer: Applications > Sound and Video > pavumeter
Menu location after installation: Applications > Sound & Video > PulseAudio Volume Meter (Capture) and Applications > Sound & Video > PulseAudio Volume Meter (Playback)
Command: /usr/bin/pavumeter
Upstream website: http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/pavumeter/

Fedora seems to have more than its fair share of image viewers, each optimized for a particular application.

Gliv is an image viewer that uses OpenGL to accelerate rotating, panning, and zooming operations and to provide very smooth fade transitions between images. It's a great tool for quickly putting together a nice-looking slideshow.

Installing from the command line: yum install gliv
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in Browser view; use the List or Search view to install gliv
Menu location after installation: Applications > Graphics > Gliv Image Viewer
Command: /usr/bin/gliv
Upstream website: http://guichaz.free.fr/gliv/

Vector graphics formats such as SVG are perfect for images that will be used at many different resolutions. Converting a bitmapped image such as a scan or a photograph to a vector image can be a tedious challenge; vector editors such as Inkscape provide autotrace tools to help automate this process.

An alternative tool is autotrace, which is a command-line utility that can accept a wide range of bitmap input formats and produce output in several vector formats including scalable vector graphics (svg), encapsulated Postscript (eps), portable data format (pdf), and Adobe Illustrator (ai) format.

The screenshot image today was processed using autotrace from small portion of a 30 megapixel bitmap graphic for which I lost the original vector file; the SVG output from autotrace is being displayed in Inkscape. The conversion command line is quite simple:

$ autotrace input.png -output-file output.svg

However, this is a nice, clean, low-colour input file; autotrace did not fare nearly as well on the Fedora Daily Package logo -- your mileage may vary considerably.

Installing from the command line: yum install autotrace
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in the Browse view; use the Search or List views to install autotrace
Menu location after installation: Not applicable -- run from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/autotrace
Upstream website: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/

GraphicsMagick is a fork of the venerable ImageMagick package, and provides powerful and flexible image conversion, manipulation, and display capabilities. Unlike ImageMagick, which uses separate binaries for various operations (display, convert, animate, compare, and so forth), GraphicsMagick uses a unified binary named gm which is invoked with an operation as the first argument:

$ gm display ~/Pictures/image000.jpg

$ gm convert ~/Pictures/image000.jpg /tmp/sunset.png

Although GraphicsMagick provides capabilities similar to the Netpbm utilities, it can perform multiple image manipulation and format conversion operations using a single process as opposed to a multi-process pipeline. GraphicsMagick can also perform on-the-fly image generation, which makes it particularly useful for web scripts. The image processing features are also available through C, C++, and Perl interfaces (and other languages through extensions).

Installing from the command line: yum install GraphicsMagick
Installing using the graphical installer: not available in the Browse view; use the Search or List views to install GraphicsMagic
Menu location after installation: not available - run from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/gm
Upstream website: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/

PDFCube is a tiny (35k) player for PDF presentations. It provides double-buffered page switching (PgUp/PgDown or space), zoom to the corners or center of a page (h,j,k,l,z), and a Compiz-style animated cube transition (c).

Since repeatedly viewing the cube transition on a large projection screen can be dizzying, the program's author recommends using it only for major topic transitions within a presentation. To accomodate this, you can pre-select the transitions which should be performed using the cube animation on the command line:

$ pdfcube presentation.pdf 5 12

This example would use the cube effect when transitioning from page 5 to 6 and from page 12 to 13, but use a straight jump transition for the other pages. When PDFCube is invoked in this way you can advance from page to page using the spacebar, and the correct transition will be selected for each page.

You can create PDF presentations for PDFCube using LaTeX-Beamer, Prosper, or OpenOffice Impress.

Installing from the command line: yum install pdfcube
Installing using the graphical installer: not available through the Browse view; use the Search or List views to install pdfcube
Menu location after installation: not available - run from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/pdfcube
Upstream website: http://code.100allora.it/pdfcube