Linux Shareware

June Linux Freeware

A Web log file analyser plus a selection of sound utilities.

By James Morris

Section Index

Products in this section:

Windows: WinZip 7.0 SR-1, Pacquet Builder 2.0.1, TurboZip 3.0.1, Archiver Shell 6.0, FreeZip 1.4.7, WWPack32 1.12

OS/2: Electronic Teller 3.13, CHECK+ 2.1, BanK 1.1.0b, Money Tree 1.0b, PM$tock

Mac: Address Book 4.0.8, New Note Pad II 1.7.2, TypeIt4Me 4.7.0, Text Cleaner Lite 1.5, JustMail 1.0.6, MailSiphon 1.0, EpsonShare 1.0

Linux: Webalizer 1.22, Synaesthesia, Freeamp, Cdparanoia, BladeEnc

Other Workshop Files: Windows Workshop, C++ files, Java files

Webalizer 1.22

This is a free Web log file analysis package that's simple to install and operate, and produces a range of useful, slick-looking reports in HTML format.

When running a Web site, the first thing you want to find out is how many people are using it, but this is impossible to do with accurately. Web analysis packages can only estimate the number of requests sent to a server and Webalizer generates an initial summary page showing monthly statistics for the current year. The number of HTTP requests ('hits'), actual files requested, the volume of traffic and requesting sites are displayed in colour-coded bar graphs.

Figures for each month are summarised and include information about the most popular parts of the site, referring pages, browsers used and domains from where requests arrived. If you don't have DNS lookups enabled on your server (it slows things down), you'll need to use an external utility to resolve the IP addresses recorded in the log file such as 'logresolve' as provided with Apache.

Webalizer can also perform incremental analysis on log files that are rotated on a regular basis. It saves information from previous runs and uses it for cumulative reporting. This feature is essential for anything more than the most trivial of sites.

To generate graphical HTML reports on the fly, Webalizer makes use of the amazing GD graphics library. This is included as a package with modern distributions and is otherwise available from http://www.boutell.com/gd/.

A brilliantly conceived and implemented program.

Download the version for your operating system here:

Linux

Publisher:

Bradford L. Barrett

Requirements:

N/A

Links online:

http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/

Rating:

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is an application that graphically represents sound from a CD or line input source, and is available with an SVGA or X11 interface under Linux and FreeBSD. Developed as a visual accompaniment to music, Synaesthesia is also a fully featured CD player in its own right.

When started in CD player mode, it displays a black background with a series of icons on the left . From these, you can control the operation of the CD player, volume levels and display intensity. This user interface, while strange at first, does make sense when you get used to it.

The visual display comes alive with the music, with sparkling clouds of light responding to its spectral and spatial components. To try and describe what this looks like is very difficult, so it's best to install and run the application to see first hand. Suffice it to say that Synaesthesia is intriguing and mesmerising to watch.

Download the version for your operating system here:

Linux

Publisher:

Paul Harrison

Requirements:

N/A

Links online:

http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/~pfh/synaesthesia.html

Rating:

Freeamp

Freeamp is a totally open source digital media player that has a modular design allowing a high degree of flexibility. Currently, Freeamp plays MP3 files -- highly compressed audio streams providing very good quality sound.

While still in a relatively early stage, Freeamp provides all of the basic features needed to play MP3s as well as support for playlists and network-based media servers such as Shoutcast and RTP.

The architecture allows plugins for different media types to be implemented, and for the user interface to be readily modified.

The default interface looks like an in-dash car stereo device, with a simulated LCD display. Buttons are provided for playing, pausing, stopping and selecting tracks, while a dial on the left is used for volume control. On the right is a handy dial that enables you to seek through the track in a 'jog' fashion, where the more you move the dial, the faster it goes.

Freeamp looks great and works well. The development effort is being co-ordinated with a great deal of thought and for long term usability, and while Freeamp may not have every conceivable bell and whistle just yet, it looks very promising.

Download the version for your operating system here:

Linux

Publishers:

Freeamp team

Requirements:

N/A

Links online:

http://www.freeamp.org/

Rating:

Cdparanoia

One of the ways in which music makes its way from a CD into a file on a PC is through a utility known as a 'ripper'. Cdparanoia is a CD ripper that goes to great lengths to deal with problematic drives and imperfect media. It does not have a flashy interface, although there are a number of front ends that can make use of the application (try http://freshmeat.net for more information on these).

Operation is generally straightforward. As a command line application, you can rip a CD track into a WAV file quite simply with an invocation such as 'cdparanoia 2 demo.wav'. This will digitally copy track two from the CD in your drive into the specified file, with no analog processing in between.

Due to the nature of CD drives and media, this can be a time and resource intensive process. Output files are likely to be very large, so be careful about filling up filesystems.

You may specify a range of options to the application for different output formats (including AIFF and raw PCM), and manage a number of hardware related issues if needed.

A status line is provided showing the overall progress and the various states of the application as it runs.

Please note that copying and redistributing tracks from CDs is almost always a copyright violation, and is a practice that is explicitly not condoned by the author of this article in such cases.

Download the version for your operating system here:

Linux

Publisher:

Monty

Requirements:

N/A

Links online:

http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb.mit.edu/user/xiphmont/cdparanoia/

Rating:

BladeEnc

BladeEnc follows on as an application from a CD ripper such as Cdparanoia above. It takes a digital audio file in WAV or AIFF format and compresses it into an MP3 stream and writes it to a file.

This is also a command line application. It takes options for the MP3 bit-rate (128 is usually considered a reasonable figure to start with, higher being better) and settings for other MP3 parameters, along with the name or names of the input files.

Output files may also be saved together in a specified directory. While the source is not yet available, binaries for Linux are available freely, and the author of the package plans to release sources at some stage.

Again, the caveat regarding copyright applies here, as mentioned above for Cdparanoia.

Download the version for your operating system here:

Linux

Publisher:

Tord Jansson

Requirements:

N/A

Links online:

http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/encoder/

Rating: