Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [166]
X-CD-Roast
One of the first graphical CD burner applications was X-CD-Roast. Although newer applications may offer a more intuitive wizard interface, it is still a reliable and functional program. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-4.
Figure 9-4. X-CD-Roast
K3b
K3b is a popular KDE CD burning tool. It presents a file manager interface similar to popular Windows CD burning utilities such as Easy CD Creator. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-5. You can find an introduction to K3b in "Burning CDs with K3b," in Chapter 3.
Figure 9-5. K3B
Gcombust
Gcombust is a graphical burner application that uses the Gtk toolkit. The project's home page is http://www.abo.fi/~jmunsin/gcombust. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-6.
Speech Tools
Speech synthesis and recognition have applications for accessibility and specialized applications, such as telephony, where only an audio path is available.
Speech synthesis devices fall into two major types. Dedicated hardware synthesizers are available that act as a peripheral to a computer and perform the text-to-speech function. These have the advantage of offloading the work of performing the speech conversion from the computer, and tend to offer good-quality output. Software synthesizers run on the PC itself. These are usually lower cost than hardware solutions but add CPU overhead and are sometimes of poor quality if free software is used.
Rsynth
The Rsynth package provides a simple command-line utility called say that converts text to speech. It is included with or available for most Linux distributions.
Figure 9-6. Gcombust
Emacspeak
Emacspeak is a text-based audio desktop for visually impaired users. It offers a screen reader that can be used with a hardware or software text-to-speech synthesizer. More information can be found on the project's web site, available here: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/emacspeak.
Festival
Festival is a software framework for building speech synthesis systems. It supports multiple spoken languages and can be used to build systems programmed using the shell, C++, Java, and Scheme. The home page for the project is found at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.
IBM ViaVoice
IBM offers a Linux version of the ViaVoice speech SDK that provides both text-to-speech conversion as well as speech recognition. This is a commercial (nonfree) software product.
Image, Sound, and Video Editing and Management Tools
This section describes some of the popular tools for editing images , video, and sound files, as well as managing image collections:
The GIMP
The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is intended for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It has been in active development for several years and is a very stable and powerful program. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-7. The official web site for the GIMP is http://www.gimp.org.
Figure 9-7. GIMP
CinePaint
CinePaint, formerly called Film Gimp, is a painting and image retouching program designed for work with film and other high-resolution images. It is widely used in the motion picture industry for painting of background mattes and frame-by-frame retouching of movies. CinePaint is based on The GIMP but has added features for film editing, such as color depths up to 128 bits, easy navigation between frames, and support for motion picture file formats such as Kodak Cineon, ILM OpenEXR, Maya IFF, and 32-bit TIFF. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-8. The CinePaint web site is http://www.cinepaint.org.
Figure 9-8. CinePaint
Gphoto2
Gphoto2 is a set of digital camera applications for Linux and other Unix-like systems. It includes the libgphoto2 library, which supports nearly 400 models of digital cameras. The other major components are gphoto2, a command-line program for accessing digital cameras, and Gtkam, a graphical application. The project's home page is http://www.gphoto.org. A screenshot of Gtkam is shown