Linux Blog

Audio Tag Editor for Linux - Puddletag

Puddletag is an audio tag editor (primarily created) for GNU/Linux similar to the Windows program, Mp3tag. Unlike most taggers for GNU/Linux, it uses a spreadsheet-like layout so that all the tags you want to edit by hand are visible and easily editable.

The usual tag editor features are supported like extracting tag information from file-names, renaming files based on their tags by using patterns and basic tag editing.

Then there’re Functions, which can do things like replace text, trim it, do case conversions, etc. Actions can automate repetitive tasks. You can import your QuodLibet library, look-up tags using Amazon (including cover art), Discogs (does cover art too!), FreeDB and MusicBrainz.

Supported formats: ID3v1, ID3v2 (mp3), MP4 (mp4, m4a, etc.), VorbisComments (ogg, flac), Musepack (mpc), Monkey’s Audio (.ape) and WavPack (wv).

RAW Image Converter for Digital Camera - Rawstudio

To get the best quality out of your digital camera, it is often recommended that you record your pictures in RAW format. This format is mostly specific to a camera and cannot be read by most image editing applications.

Rawstudio will convert your RAW files into JPEG, PNG or TIF images which you can then print or send to friends and clients. You can also upload photos directly to Picasa, Flickr and Facebook galleries. It has a graphical user interface, so you can simply open a RAW file and experiment with the controls to see how they effect the image.

The normal workflow would be that you first convert your RAW files and then use an image editing application to further work on your images. Rawstudio itself is a highly specialized application for processing RAW images, not a fully featured image editing application.

Rawstudio Feature List
* Intuitive GTK+ interface
* Full DNG Color Profile support
* Batch processing
* Tethered shooting
* Various post-shot controls (white balance, saturation and exposure compensation among others)
* Easy and flexible copy&paste settings between images

Simple and Fast GTK2 Audio Editor - mhWaveEdit

mhWaveEdit is a graphical program for editing sound files. It is intended to be user-friendly and robust. It does not require a fast computer.

Even if mhWaveEdit was originally built for editing wav files, it's also possible to load and save in a few other formats. mhWaveEdit always supports wav and raw files, but if it's compiled with the libsndfile library, mhWaveEdit supports a couple of other formats as well.

If mplayer is installed, mhwaveedit can open all formats that it supports, for example the soundtrack of a video file. Since mplayer is only a player, these files can not be saved back after editing, you have to save the file into a supported format.

mhWaveEdit Installation:
You can install mhWaveEdit along with additional audio format support using the below command:

sudo apt-get install lame vorbis-tools mhwaveedit

Testing Linux System for Stability and Performance - System Stability Tester

System Stability Tester tries to test the system's stability by calculating up to 128 millions of Pi digits. It supports multiple calculation algorithms. For the moment only two have been implemented. The Quadratic Convergence of Borwein and Gauss-Legendre, the algorithm SuperPi uses.

The testing process includes the creation of two or more threads. After each step of the calculation, the results of all the threads are compared. Any differences between them are reported. There is also the option for single threaded calculation, but in this case there is no stability check. This is useful for benchmarking purposes only. The calculation of Pi itself is multithreaded since version 0.7.2, for the Borwein algorithm only.

What System Stability Tester can do in brief
* Calculate up to 128 million digits of Pi.
* Create up to 32 threads.
* Recognize the CPU model, manufacturer and operational frequency.
* Compare the calculation results of all the threads after each step and issue a warning if something went wrong.
* Run continuously for up to 50 turns and log the results after each step and each turn.
* Record the calculated digits of Pi in a human readable text file.
* Single threaded calculation of Pi for benchmarking, similar to the well know SuperPi benchmark.
* Check-sum validation over the result.
* Provides graphical and command line user interfaces.

All-in-One Performance Monitoring Tool for Linux - Nmon

nmon is a systems administrator, tuner, benchmark tool. It can display the CPU, memory, network, disks (mini graphs or numbers), file systems, NFS, top processes, resources (Linux version & processors) and on Power micro-partition information.

Data is displayed on the screen and updated once every two seconds, using a dumb screen. However, you can easily change this interval to a longer or shorter time period.

The nmon tool can also capture the same data to a text file for later analysis and graphing for reports. The output is in a spreadsheet format (.csv).

Installing nmon:
Open the terminal and type following command

sudo apt-get install nmon