Free Software for Art, Music and Personal Creativity

Musix GNU+Linux version 1.0r4Stable has been released, with many new free software packages, including “dozens of education apps (23 categories), a 75Mb Steinway Piano Soundfont, full printer and scanner support, wengophone, a lot of games, gem, beryl, compiz, konversation, konserve, stellarium, nted, avscan, qemu, development packages, mozilla-firefox-locale (28 languages), manpages (23 languages), Linux 2.6.23-rt1 (when installed) and many more!”

Musix GNU+Linux is “a 100% free multimedia operating system intended for music production, graphic design, audio and video edition, and all kind of tasks. It contains an enormous collection of free (as in freedom) programs that can replace Windows or Mac OS X.”

This is free software: This is a distribution of GNU/Linux that only includes and only proposes free software.

Today's free image is a photograph of El Pilar, Stone Bridge and Ebro river in Saragossa, Spain found at the Wikimedia Commons.The photograph was taken by Gisbertn,

This is free software: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”

The developers of the powerful, free 3-D content creation suite, Blender, have released a fantastic new version, 2.46, which is loaded with new features—including cloth simulation, mesh deform modifiers, improvements in hair and fur, a completely rewritten particle system, and much more. You can download it now.

This is free software: Blender is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Today's free image is the drawing "Studies" by Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini (1550-1571), found at the Art Renewal Center.

This is free software: This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art. The original image comprising the work of art itself is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. Under United States copyright law, originality of expression is necessary for copyright protection, and a mere photograph of an out-of-copyright work may not be protected under U.S. copyright law. This photographic reproduction is therefore also in the public domain.

Last week saw the release of version 1.7.0 of Rosegarden, the popular, high-quality free software package for audio and MIDI sequencing, scorewriting and musical composition and editing for GNU/Linux. According to the release note:

“This release focuses mostly on notation enhancements, although there are also substantial bug fixes in other areas.

“The world of sequencer software for Linux is becoming increasingly well populated with projects designed for different types of user — with the appearance of QTractor, a MusE stable release expected soon, Ardour 3 in the pipeline for studio users, [...] and old favourites like seq24.

“This is great for Rosegarden, as it means we no longer feel we have to please everyone: we are able to concentrate on the area that we find most interesting for Rosegarden, namely as a sequencer for people who also like to work in notation. Of course, all of the other existing features will continue to be supported and to evolve, but we have a clearer focus for the future than we have had.”.

This is free software: Rosegarden is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.

Today's free font is Rotunda by George Williams, found at fontforge.sourceforge.net. George is also the developer of Fontforge, the wonderful free software font creator/editor.

This is free software: This font is released under the SIL Open Font License.

My life's going to be really busy for a few weeks, so I'll probably be only posting here once or twice a week for the next few weeks.

Today's free image is a painting by Congo the chimpanzee, found at Wikipedia.

This is free software: This image is in the public domain, because animals have no copyright.

Blender, the powerful and free 3D content creation suite, includes an HD-capable Video Sequence Editor. Eugenia Loli has published a useful and detailed tutorial on her blog about Video Editing with Blender using the Video Sequence Editor. As she notes in her blog posting, you can also find information on Blender's Video Sequence Editor in the Blender manual and in a tutorial at the Blender Website.

This is free software: Blender is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Today's font is Hopfer Hornbook by liftarn, found at openfontlibrary.org. This font is based on lettering by German artist Daniel Hopfer (circa 1470-1536).

This is free software: This font is in the public domain.