Tools for Music and Media

[Dub]

I've started this thread here in Tools of the Trade in the hope that it will eventually contain a collection of useful information that folks will want to refer back to from time to time.

Anything to do with music and or video tips and solutions for our computers is fair game.

- Dub

[Dub]

The first thing I wanted to share occurred to me as I was listening to Bill Hammond over streaming Internet "radio" last night. At least one Soundhole listener mentioned waiting for Winamp to download. I wanted to jump in and recommend VLC Media Player but realized the information would scroll off as the thread aged and become more difficult to retrieve.

So here it is.

VLC Media Player

This free media player is all you need for all your media files and Internet streams. It's small and lean. It won't fill up your C: drive with unnecessary crap and it won't slow down your computer. You won't have to wait while a player opens and you won't have to leave a "quick start" icon in your system tray.

VLCMedia Player will handle physical CDs, DVD, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WAV, WMA, or just about any media source you can throw at it. It won't take over your desktop or your computer and won't waste time and space building yet another huge catalog of all your media files.

If you'd already installed VLC Media Player when Bill's program started last night, all you had to do was click the Winamp icon on the station page and your VLC Media Player popped right up and began playing the audio stream. Simple, effective and free in all the good senses of the word.

It won't offer to sell you stuff but you probably already know how to buy stuff you want.

I heartily recommend VLC Media Player.

- Dub

[mccoyblues]

VLC is a great little program. I've used it for awhile now. It seems to be able to handle any video format from the Intenet.

[Dub]

VLC Media Player is a good and safe program you can trust to handle all your media files as a default player.

• It does a superlative job of rendering your music and video.
  
• It loads quickly and only opens what's needed to render your media.
  
• It won't try to sell you anything or waste time downloading images of the latest rapper or studio bimbo.
  
• It has many features totally missing in players like iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.
  
• It can notify you when a newer (free) version is available but it lets you decide what to do about that and won't force you into some giant download/installation that keeps you from using your system for twenty minutes.
  
• It's robust and powerful but also very polite.
  

I prefer using Mozilla Firefox as a browser on WinTel systems. With free add-ons (I use Sage) it's also a very nice RSS reader. One of the free Firefox add-ons is FoxyTunes , a nifty player interface that sits in the right hand side of your browser's status bar (bottom of window). Foxy Tunes will let you take better advantage of all the media out on the Net and will use any of a long list of players including VLC Media Player.

With this setup you can listen all day and, using Pandora at least, pop right over and buy any track you happen to want to add to your own library. Amazon sells download tracks for ninety-nine cents each just like iTunes but if you want the entire album, Amazon is almost always cheaper than buying the same album through iTunes. Not only that but Amazon's downloads are not encumbered by digital rights management (DRM) limitations. That makes Amazon downloads doubly superior.

I still use iTunes to search for things I want to buy when I can't find them anywhere else but it isn't the default player for anything. I also use Real Network's Rhapsody player because I was a Yahoo! Music subscriber (when Yahoo! acquired Music Match). But now Yahoo! has turned everything over to Rhapsody so I'm there at least until my subscription expires.

But the VLC Media Player/Firefox/Foxy Tunes/Pandora/Amazon combination seems much better to use than the others as a default setup for media.

- Dub

[Dub]

There was a question about the tools I use to make tabs and scores. I answered the post in the thread but thought we might want a permanent home for these links too. Here's the stuff I use:

• TuxGuitar - Great user interface and features. Multiple voices per staff (a must for fingerstyle tabs). Loads GuitarPro, Power Tab, & TablEdit plus it's own format. Exports LilyPond, MIDI, MusicXML, PDF.
  
• LilyPond - The gold standard for beautiful looking scores like they were when everything was hand engraved.
  
• MUP (for MUsic Publisher) - “Mup takes a text file as input and produces very high quality PostScript output for printed music. It can handle both regular notation and tablature notation. It can also produce MIDI output. It comes with a program called Mupmate that provides a menu-driven interface and integrated editor, but it can also be used in command line mode. It has been in use for music publication since 1992, and is used by musicians all over the world, including music departments at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia, and other major universities.”
  
• MuseScore - Another nice music publisher with some useful features.

Those are the free or nearly free programs I use. I also use GarageBand, Band-In-A-Box, Transcribe! (a must-have) and a couple of Mac only things.

And this link will let you have a whole bunch of printed music.

Enjoy.

- Dub

[Dub]

Rick Waugh started a thread about TuxGuitar that may be useful to people interested in tab programs.

- Dub