Wednesday 4 March 2009, 10:46 AM
Free needle in a haystack
The plan is to do some voluntary work at the local youth centre, and in the process slip in some Free Open Source Software on the computers. I'll be teaching the young people about how to build a web site, probably using Joomla! to start with. I'll cover basic photo editing using the GIMP, possibly drawing using Inkscape, and maybe even a simple brochure, using Scribus.
The PCs at the centre run Windows XP, and I wanted to see whether there's any free video editing and music creation software for Windows. In some respects, Linux is miles ahead, with the likes of Cinelerra and Kdenlive for video, Ardour, Rosegarden and Hydrogen for music.
There is a very handy web site that compares different FOSS alternatives across different operating systems. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called, other than that it was green and white with a blobby logo. When I googled "free open source software windows", nothing, zero, zilch. What did strike me was that the simplest web site (a list of Windows Free Software called opensourcewindows.org) was top of the list. There's a lot to be said for such simplicity, and a lot to be said for SEO.
I did finally find the web site I was looking for, it's called osalt.com ("open source as alternative"). And I found the avidemux video editor and Traverso DAW :)
Comments on this post
can i suggest for a DAW
that the best open source DAW (proven by musician hype and Computer Music Magazine) is actually called LMMS (http://lmms.sourceforge.net/)
it uses an intuitive interface which users of FL Studio ( a commercial program) will be familiar with, as it is basically an open source copy of the program.
Nick
Hi Nick, That's brilliant, thanks for the link. I've had a quick look and installed it already on my musical thinkpad :)
I'll mail a suggestion to osalt.com as well.
cheers, Jake


