Songbird 0.2 goes Beta

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

sometime last night, the Songbird-developers hatched released version 0.2 Test Flight, therefor lifting the Mozilla-based opensource audio-player officialy into Beta. Songbird comes with a built-in Wikipedia-plugin, a cool example of what the integration of browser & player can do: browsing artist-pages in Wikipedia, Songbird automatically offers all linked audio-tracks/samples for playback. the new Audioscrobbler-extension connects Songbird with Last.fm. unfortunately, Songbird is still quite a memory-hog - seems that’s what we need to get used to. binaries for win32, mac osx & linux are waiting for being tried out!

Songbird

open source hardware: x0xb0x

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

while packing & carrying boxes all day long (I’m currently moving to my new apartement), I used the time listening to some SXSW 2006 panels. [I started listening to this great podcast a few months ago - there's more than 90 hours of high-class content, though at some panels audio-quality sucks]. it was on “consumer is the producer: DIY media” where I learned about x0xb0x (pronounced ‘zocks box’), an open source hardware-project by MIT graduate Limor Fried.

x0xb0x is basically an exact clone of the TB303, a synthesizer/sequencer manufactured by Roland in the early 80ies, which later got picked up by protagonists of the uprising house/techno-scene. the TB303’s unique sound eventually led to the development of a subgenre named acid-house. today, music enthusiasts still trade original TB303’s on ebay.

being open source hardware, everything you need to know to build your own x0xb0x is published on the project’s website: circuit board-schematics, firmware, part-lists, software and - most important - instructions on how to transform a bag of parts into a working piece of gear. on the forums, the DIY-community is giving support, sharing mods & hacks and posting music created on the x0xb0x. the x0xb0x is a great demonstration of what could happen if manufacturers started to open up their products to the consumer, similar to what iRobot did with their vacuuming robot Roomba, which is definitely one of the most-hacked consumer-devices today.

linux media center: Elisa

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

preview 0.0.1 of Elisa - an opensource media-center developed by fluendo - was just released yesterday. Elisa currently offers a basic feature-set - playback of audio, photos and video using the GStreamer multimedia framwork, support for infrared remote-controls and support for DLNA-compliant upnp-devices. integration of TV-adapters and PVR-functionality (personal [digital] video recorder is planned but not implemented yet. the most shining aspect of Elisa is its (her?) beautiful 3D-styled user-interface, which can be watched in action on this screencast (Java required).

while Elisa is under development, I recommend checking out MythTV (Linux) or MediaPortal (Windows), both being established and well-supported opensource PVR/media center-solutions.

elisa2.jpg

Songbird 0.2 (almost) released

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Songbird’s source-repository was opened for public access today. Songbird is an opensource audio-player & -manager based on firefox’ HTML-rendering-engine and XUL-framework. besides opening the repository, the Songbird-team released binaries (pre0.2) for windows, linux and mac os (that’s a premiere for linux & mac).

songbird02.jpg

despite looking like a black iTunes-clone at first glance, Songbird introduces innovative concepts for browsing websites containing audio-data. the integrated browser automatically extracts linked audio-files and offers them for one-click-download to the library. the pre0.2 release of Songbird looks promising - if you don’t want to install the software to your computer, I recommend watching these screenscasts to get an impression of its features.

conference: linuxwochen vienna

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

from wednesday (may, 31st) to friday (jun, 1st), the linuxwochen 2006 (”linuxweeks”) are taking place in vienna. the schedule offers a plethora of panels and talks on linux, security and opensource-software in general. if you are in the area, be sure to drop by!