Gnome Multimedia

Linux.com features a review of the Exaile music player.
This new music player for GTK+ and GNOME aims at a featureset similar to the popular Amarok player, but tightly intergrated with the GNOME desktop. Its also another application showing the quickly growing popularity of using Python as an application development language. Be sure to check out the review for information about the status of Exaile and also take a look at the Exaile homepage at www.exaile.org.

On behalf of the Rhythmbox developers, I'm proud to announce the newest release of the Rhythmbox 0.9 series, which includes a large number of fixes, improvements and new features.

Notable new features include:

• Further improvements to plugin infrastructure and more plugins
• Tag writing and ipod-write support turned on by default. Note that gst-plugins-good 0.10.4 is recommended for ID3 tag editing, and Ogg Vorbis tag editing requires a plugin from the cvs version of gst-plugins-base
• Local file support for album art plugin
• Gnome-keyring support for storing DAAP password
• and many, many more improvements, bug fixes and new minor features. See
  below details.

Read the rest

BMPx is a GTK+ media player rewritten from the ground up on the foundation of BeepMediaPlayer. Originally started as a "behind doors" project, BMPx aims high and will get there very soon. Version 0.30.x was launched just days ago in a totally new form that drops the old Winamp-style look, bringing a more iTunes-like interface that will soon support SVG themes. Let's see what the lead developer of BMPx (Milosz Derezynski) has to say about his creation in this detailed question-and-answer session.

BEAST/BSE version 0.7.0 and BSE-ALSA version 0.7.0 are
available for download at:
http://beast.gtk.org/beast-ftp/v0.7/

This is a development version of BEAST/BSE, the BEdevilled Audio SysTem
and the Bedevilled Sound Engine. BEAST is a powerful music composition
and modular synthesis application released as free software under the
GNU GPL and GNU LGPL, that runs under unix. BSE-ALSA is an ALSA driver
for BSE.
The "Bedevilled" portion of the names has no religious background,
refer to the About page for more details:
http://beast.gtk.org/about

Last-Exit is a Gtk/C#/GStreamer based player for the LastFM radio station.

It has most of the useful features that the official player has including

• Stream support
• Station searching
• Tagging
• Journalling
• Access to subscriber features

It also has more powerful searches for stations including Neighbour's
personal stations, users stations and fan stations.

Further information and screenshots available at:
http://www.openedhand.com/~iain/last-exit

Serpentine 0.7 was just released!

Serpentine is a simple to use and very porwerful cd audio recording application.

Serpentine features a simple to use HIG compliant interface. It aims to do one thing and do it right: writing audio CDs. It accepts a big range of audio (and video) formats thanks to the excelent GStreamer framework. It also tries to integrate well with other application, accepting full Drag N Drop from applications like: Nautilus, Rhythmbox and even Firefox!

I want an audio player that will do everything that Apple's iTunes does..... including working with my iPod ..... and do it natively on Linux. That's a tall order. I've tried many fine Linux programs..... KDE's amaroK, RealPlayer 10 for Linux, Xine, etc. .... but none have scratched my itch.

Read the rest | Banshee Screenshots

Linux.com reviews Thoggen: Thoggen is a new DVD ripper/backup-tool for Linux that encodes video into the free Ogg Theora format. Unlike its rivals, Thoggen is easy to use, and its built-in support for the Theora codec instead of the patent-restricted MPEG-4 and derivatives makes it worth looking at.

Read the rest

James "Doc" Livingston wrote: Rhythmbox Breakdown is the weekly (ha! last posted four months ago)
summary of what's been happening in the world of Rhythmbox. For those
who use cvs and follow the rhythmbox-devel mailing list, it will provide
a summary of what's been happening and things that haven't been
discussed on the list. For those who don't, it will let you know all the
juicy new features (and crack) that we've been up to.

Rhythmbox 0.9.3 gained support for all mass-storage audio players (auto-detected if HAL knows about them, or via .is_audio_player). What it doesn't have is support for playlists on all those players. Last night we committed support for reading playlists from PSPs, and we want to add support for the rest.

If you have an audio player which uses playlists (and isn't an iPod or PSP), you need to run to bugzilla and tell us about it. If you do, we can the next version of RB support many more players.

With all the discussion currently going on and all the nice looking demo movies being made a lot of you are probably interested to learn more about XGL and AIGLX.
Free Software Magazine has a nice article on the subject discussing the two technologies and giving some background on the history of X and accelerated 3D rendering.

Linux.com takes a look at the Banshee music player created by Aaron Bockover and Novell. Banshee is a GTK+ and GNOME music player built using Mono and C# and is quickly gaining popularity. Check out the article for more information and details and then test out this great music player.

Sweep, an audio editor and live playback tool, just released its new developement version 0.9.0, featuring the switch to GTK+2 for its interface.

The new version also improves mp3 detection and loading, adds a new SVG icon, updates its Spanish and Polish translations, and includes several minor tweaks and improvements.

In a review in August 2005, Linux Format wrote about Sweep: "Sweep is excellent. [...], it is not functionally bloated and slow. It’s fast and efficient." and continue "[Sweep is] a step ahead of the competition, which is what you’d expect from an editor used at Pixar."

Screenshot tour

Download

PenguinTV is a full-featured RSS, podcast, and video blog reading tool written in Python. It can be used by itself to download and view media, or you can copy the media files and a ready-made playlist to a portable mp3 player.

After several months of development PenguinTV has hit 1.0. The changes from .92 are minor, but the number is so much rounder! If you haven't tried PenguinTV before or it's been a while since you upgraded, now is the time to give it a whirl.

Muine is a music player for the GNOME desktop that focuses on being very easy to use. Two new versions of cool plugins for Muine have just been released.