A small Linux success story

[Darkelve]

My first 'success story' was when plugging in my digital camera to the USB port. Windoze did not recognize it, did not have the driver installed and constantly asked me for the WinXP CD-Rom. I have it, but I don't keep it close. Also WinXP didn't have an image viewer that satisfied me. Sure there's Windows Viewer for Images & Faxes, but it doesn't have the functionality I needed, especially for managing albums (of course) and advanced slideshow features. Digikam and Gwenview were already installed and fit the bill nicely. Also, SuSe picked up my USB mass storage cam. right away.

 

Next task: record a song, then transform it to mp3 (I'm trying out home music stuff).

 

My goal was to record a song though a microphone, capture it to hard disk, edit it and convert it to an mp3. Both Windows and Linux detected the microphone I bought just fine, except I had to raise the volume in SuSe through Kmix. Tried the Windows Audio Recorder (or something like that) first, but it only allowed me 60 seconds of recording per file! And no other features. So I booted into Linux again and discovered I nice little program called Audacity. Recording was trivially easy, although I did have to alter the input to microphone (originally I thought the recording didn't work). Then I edited out the parts at the start and end, where there was noise from switching the microphone on and off. Working with it was really intuitive. Then I wanted to export it to mp3, but I couldn't at first because libmp3lame wasn't installed.

 

So I grabbed and RPM for Lame from the internet, installed it from Konqueror with right-click 'Install with Yast' and it was OK. Of course I knew which package I needed, where to download it and it was available as a (SuSe) RPM. I agree these last steps could've been made easier, but with the experience I gained as a Linux user, it was very straightforward. After that, exporting the song as an mp3 was easy as pie.

 

Audacity is great, open source, and it came with the system. It showed me that Linux really is 'getting there', bit by bit, and I'm now all the more motivated to check out other software proggies and maybe create my own songs someday. This experience gave me confidence one day, with the help of Linux and OSS software, I'll get there. I'm actually excited about the possibilities now.