Funded by it’s Kickstarter campaign, Museopen as released several professional recordings of classical music into the public domain. If you’re looking for classical music for a backing soundtrack or just enjoy listening to classical music, check out the site! There even more music done by other submitters as well.
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Museopen Releases More Public Domain Classical Music
Friday, August 17th, 2012
How to Create a 70-Computer Computer Lab for Free
Tuesday, August 14th, 2012What a great story of a teacher picking up open-source software as a noob and doing good by creating a computer lab for his school…with zero budget! My favorite quote comes at the end; “in a digital world, teachers are responsible for making students ‘better digital citizens’.” What a great example of rethinking ethics and responsibility in a digital world.
OmniVFX DemoReel – A Fully Open Source VFX Pipeline Demo
Thursday, June 21st, 2012If you think that you can’t do amazing video production work for your church or non-profit with a free and open source VFX pipeline, you need to see this!
So, why are you paying all of that non-profit, donated money to buy commercial software when you can get professional results with free and open source software? Maybe you should consider a change.
Or if you think you can’t afford the expensive production software from Adobe or others, you now know that you have free and open source alternatives that give professional results!
Use Blender To Add Effects To Your Videos
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011Just saw this pointer to a couple video compilations showing some of what is possible these days with Blender 2.55, the open source animation, compositing, and many-other-things-multimedia software. If you’ve been wanting to do some more advanced stuff, but can’t take the financial hit of After Effects or Cinema 4D (or anything else really) it would be worth it to try out the latest Blender. It’s not for the faint of heart though, it’s a serious program with serious power. Take a look!
Welcome Lightworks to the Open Source Family – a Professional Non-Linear Video Editor
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010I just wanted to welcome Lightworks into the open source family of software. It is still in process of being fully open-sourced, but the first step has happened and you may now freely download the same application used to edit Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Centurion and Shutter Island. Not a bad resume, I think. Right now, Lightworks is Windows-only, but since there isn’t an easy to use non-linear video editor on Windows in the open source world, it’ll be great to add that support.
Let me know your thoughts if you end up checking it out. I will be waiting until Linux is supported which will hopefully end up on their road map eventually. But, still a really great addition to the suite of tools of pro video editing. Thanks, Lightworks!
Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Centurion and Shutter Island
Jokosher – Simple Multitrack Audio Production
Friday, October 22nd, 2010As I was reading a review of the latest Ubuntu, I noticed a reference to Jokosher.
Jokosher is a simple and powerful multi-track studio. Jokosher provides a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio, and has been specifically designed with usability in mind. The developers behind Jokosher have re-thought audio production at every level, and created something devilishly simple to use.
I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself, but if it’s included in Ubuntu then it’s normally pretty stable and ready to go. The good news is that it also supports Windows (I can’t tell about Mac support) for those that haven’t started drinking the Linux kool-aid yet.
For those that try it out, please let me know what you think good and/or bad, so we can help make the project better or let people know about a great cross-platform, free and open source audio application.
Over the next few months, I’ll try to carve out some time to pull it down and look at it to do a more detailed review.
10 Free (and usually open source) Desktop Productivity Apps
Monday, October 4th, 2010Just a quick post to let you know about 10 free desktop productivity apps that aren’t OpenOffice. Most of them are open source and have been mentioned here, but all of them are free as in $$$ (not free as in freedom). Hope it helps you see what great tools are out there for you.
Kdenlive Open Source Non-linear Video Editor 0.7.8 Released!
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010The latest Kdenlive has been released. It has a ton of features that I’ve been looking forward to namely track effects, on-monitor effect editing for some of the more advanced effects, and lots of tools for color correction. If you’re needing an alternative to Final Cut Pro or other non-linear video editor, give Kdenlive a look. I’ve been very pleased and it keeps getting better. Thanks to all the developers for adding so much into this release! They’ve really done a great job of hitting the areas I’ve thought were weak (without me even asking 
). You guys are awesome!
ps. Although I’ve read up on all the new features from their blogs, I haven’t been able to to actually spend time to check them out personally. If you do, please comment!
Best Open Source Software of 2010
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010If you’re just getting into open source software, one of the best places to start is the BOSSIE Awards. You’ll get only the best applications and also a little bit more info about what each does. Hope you find it helpful!
Phatch – Simple Image Editing and Batch Processor
Friday, July 2nd, 2010So, I’m still going through all of the Libre Graphics Meeting videos and today I watched a short tutorial on Phatch, a batch image processor. Basically, it’s a graphical ease of use layer on top of many command line tools such as ImageMagick or the scripting languages of other open source graphics applications such as Gimp, Inkscape or Blender. It’s also a batch processor making it a snap to edit many files all at once.
It serves as an image “recipe box” rather than an editor. Therefore it allows you to save how you edit one image so that later you can come back to that recipe and rerun the edits simply, whether after a lunch break or a year later for another project. It also shows the power of mashing open source applications together to get huge productivity gains with a minimum of effort.
Phatch makes it easy to do effects you see all across the web such as reflections, rounded corners and perspective changes. It also allows you to mix and match them in any order. This has got to be a huge time saver for website image content managers. I’m sure I’ll be using it in the future as I start to develop the look and feel of this blog.
It’s probably also helpful for those of you that aren’t very tech savvy. Phatch can function as a quick way to do more complex effects without having to figure out all of the intricacies of a more powerful image editor like Gimp or Photoshop.
Since it was already in the Ubuntu software repositories (the repositories are basically an “app store” for open source software where everything is free), I had it installed in seconds. I tried it out and it worked just like the video showed. Looks like Windows and OSX are supported, but still don’t have a standard installer. Help them out if you get a chance to get the installers tested out so that it is easier to use for your non-techy friends! Here’s a great opportunity to contribute.
Really the only downside I saw was that their website was obnoxiously littered with Google ads which made it hard to figure out what was content and what wasn’t.
Hope it comes in handy! Let me know how it goes!
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://opensourcechurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fsfmember.png){kind=small}
