In this final installment to the series I'll double your reading pleasure by presenting two new Linux softsynths. Such a deal, two reviews for the price of one!

In this second installment I'll profile Minicomputer, a subtractive synthesizer with some familiar aspects, unique characteristics, and terrific sounds. Let's take a look under its hood and see what makes the Minicomputer run.

In my next three articles I'll profile three native Linux software synthesizers (a.k.a. softsynths). I'll introduce their basic synthesis architectures and program operations, then I'll guide my readers briefly through the process of creating a new sound for each synth profiled. Our voyage begins with Nick Dowell's Analogue Modeling SYNTHesizer, better known as amSynth.

Movino is a cool new open source project (geared specifically at Linux and Mac OS X) which allows you to send live video feed from your cellular phone to your website. Movino consists of: * A broadcasting application for Symbian S60 phones

LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Kubuntu including a 10' UI -- a complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media. It is stable, easy to use, and requires only the most basic computer skills to get going.

Looking at the software listed at Kokkini Zita it's easy to see where developer Fons Adriaensen's interests lie. He has written one of the best organ synthesizers for Linux, he has contributed to the LADSPA collection of processing plugins, and he has provided Linux sound researchers with some excellent tools for measuring and representing audio signals. He is also involved in improving Linux support for the Ambisonics technology of encoding and decoding multichannel audio.

This week we'll look at what's been going on recently with LinuxSampler, a very cool software audio sampler. I have to say at the outset that this article was tough to write, I was just having far too much fun with the program.

A few weeks ago I promised to bring in some more general news from the world of Linux audio software development. Alas, my plans were ambushed by the happy intrusion of the release of Renoise for Linux, but I'm back on track. As promised, here's more straight reporting on the world of Linux sound and music software, starting with some news about recently released music notation programs.

On January 17 of this year the first beta release of Renoise 1.9.1 was announced. Along with new features and fixes for its Windows and OSX versions, this release includes the first version of Renoise for Linux. This is rather significant news: Renoise is a popular program, with an active community of developers and users in the Win/Mac music worlds, and a native Linux release has been a community priority. The wait is over, so let's see (and hear) what Renoise brings to the Linux audio software party.

2008 is off to a fine start for the world of Linux sound and music software, so this week's story is straight reporting from Studio Dave, with breaking news from various points on the Linux audio compass.

MEncoder has supported video encoding for a long time with the MPlayer Project and FFmpeg, which also now is part of MPlayer. Transcode is a new command-line tool on the horizon for video and audio transformations. Transcode used to give me horrors, but it is much better now. It does take some time to learn its wonderfully unintuitive syntax—the

In this article I've selected what I consider to be some of the past year's outstanding achievements in the world of Linux music and sound software. It's not really a "Best Of 2007", it's just my personal choices for what I found most interesting and significant in the past year.

As promised, the second part of this series presents still more commercially available music and sound software for Linux. Come see (and hear) what your money will buy...

A Win/Mac developer recently asked me what I thought about his plan to create a binary of his application and sell it to interested Linux sound and music people. He asked with some trepidation, having already received a rather critical chorus of objection from some overly enthusiastic Linux users. This man's work is excellent and his software already runs nicely under Wine.

Development of native Linux audio plugins and softsynths may not be so relentlessly rapid as it is in the Windows and Mac sound software worlds, but new things do appear. This week I profile a cool new (well, relatively new) Linux softsynth, William Weston's Phase Harmonic Advanced Synthesis EXperiment, also known as Phasex.