Gallery

Open-source favourites

Posted on 20 Feb 2006 at 12:54

Ian Wrigley and Simon Brock reveal the products that make their daily lives that much simpler

This month, we're devoting some space to those open-source products we use most regularly in our development work. Not the really big products like Linux, Apache, PHP and Perl - although we use all of those - but rather the tools that make our daily lives easier.

Audacity

For audio editing, we use Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), which works on Mac, Windows and Linux systems. Audacity is a fully fledged audio editor that supports features like format conversion, live audio recording, speed and pitch changing, background noise removal and much more. The program can import and export audio in a wide range of file formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 (although the latter requires you to download and install another free, open-source library called LAME). Once you have an audio file imported, you can display its waveform and edit it interactively by drag-and-drop and cut, copy and paste. You change the volume of a segment by dragging handles on the waveform, and you can mix multiple sources into a single output file.

One neat set of features allows you to remove background hum, hiss or other constant noise, while an effects section provides tools for manipulating the sound to change the pitch without changing the tempo, or vice versa, which is great if, say, you have a piece of music you want to fit to a fixed-length video, Flash animation or something similar.

Audacity feels like a complete commercial application, and in our experience it's been solid and crash-proof, while offering pretty much everything we need. It's not ProTools, but neither does it cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. Highly recommended for anyone who needs to manipulate audio.

VNC

We've written about VNC (www.vnc.com) before, but it's worth reiterating just how vital this software is to our daily work as developers and server administrators. VNC provides remote access and control to just about any platform you can name - Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X - and from any of these platforms in any combination. VNC's server runs on the machine you wish to control, and its client runs on your desktop machine. Although vnc.com contains many server and client combos, there are many others around. For example, on our Macs, we use Chicken of the VNC (yes, really), which is available from sourceforge.net. This is probably the most actively developed version, although there are plenty of others. That client can be used to control any machine on which a VNC server is installed - we use it to manage our Solaris, Linux and Windows servers. Other developers in our company use Windows or Linux VNC clients to do the same thing, and we've even, in an emergency, used a Palm Pilot as a client.

One of the really neat things about VNC, as opposed to simply opening a terminal session, is that it preserves the state of each session on the server: in other words, you can log on, do some work, disconnect, reconnect later and be back exactly where you left off.

iTerm

This is a Mac-only program, but if you're one of the Chosen People it's well worth downloading. iTerm (iterm.sourceforge.net) is a fully featured terminal emulator that supports all sorts of neat and nifty features - for Ian, at least, it has completely replaced the standard Terminal program that ships with OS X.