Open source tools of the day

Just was "wandering around" yersterday when I stumbled on a news item http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28560 about Songbird. Songbird is a one stop shop media player.
As the homepage says the vision is to create a media player that can combine the audio on your drives, portable devices, online music stores, online streams and provide a single interface to access them.
And here you go, it does it all in the inimitable Mozilla style. Yep it is based on mozilla code base ! Although Songbird is still in prehistoric stages, the UI offers a sneak-peek of the the things to come.
The media player is in news for the controversies it has raised by promising to provide a open source equivalent to iTunes.


Another open source tool which I would consider a really good one is a mp3 editor tool Audacity. The tool provides direct mp3 manipulation without converting it to wave format.
Audacity provides typical audio editing effects like fade-in, fade-out, cahnge tempo, pitch, speed, filters etc.
The only problem with the software is that when you want to render the mp3 track that you have edited it asks you to point to a mp3 encoder library like LAME.

This is a typical issue tha tyou find in most open source softwares. It would have beem nice if it was tightly integrated with LAME and published. Instead it expects the user to downlaod LAME and install it.