It's a Wrap!

It sounds so base for me to say this, but multimedia really is about song and dance, dog-and-pony shows, and gratuitous flash and pizzazz. Judging from everything I've seen out there, our appetite for yet another adventure into sight and sound isn't abating anytime soon.

I've shown you a few of the more popular and useful tools to explore Linux sight and sound, but your own appetite for more will likely take you well beyond these pages. On that note, I'm going to give you another handful of Linux tools to excite the ears and eyes.

In the world of audio, check out KMid (command name kmid) for playing those MIDI files. What makes this program particularly fun is that it is a karaoke player, as well. Plug the words karaoke, midi, files, and download into a Google search form, and you should find plenty of files. Just load them up in KMid, click Play, and you are the next international singing sensation.

Hint

Why not enter the words: gg: karaoke midi files download into Konqueror's Location field for a quick Google search?

In terms of video playback, another great DVD player is Ogle (command name ogle). This one probably isn't on your distribution disks, but you can pick it up at the following address:

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/

What Ogle has going for it that xine doesn't (at this time, anyhow) is support for on-screen menus, such as you have with your home DVD player.

Feeling creative? Would you like to take a shot at writing your own music? A number of decent music notation programs are available for Linux. They include NoteEdit and RoseGarden, to name a couple. Links to each follow in the Resources section.

Just as there seems to be no end to the number of songs that humanity can create, so it is with software to manipulate sound. If I haven't mentioned it in this chapter, it certainly isn't because it doesn't exist. Check out the Sound and MIDI Software for Linux site at http://linux-sound.org.