Open Source: It's the future

Ok, I'm not going to start preaching about the whole concept of open source here, but I just want to say that I am beginning to admire its concept. In the good old days of Kazaa and Napster, and I'm talking about the good old days, when you could download, say, the entire $9,000 Adobe Font Folio for free while exponentially doubling your music library in a single night, you could find anything and everything you wanted. But then it got ugly and people started getting their nasty viruses all over the place, and then, yeah, the music industry got their lawyers all mixed up in it, and then it was just all gone. We could blog for hours about this. The point is, is that sharing as we know it is over and done with, and now there is a new kind of sharing, and that's called open source. For a taiko-related story about the greatness of open source, go here and read about what ON Ensemble are doing.

What I just wanted to say, was that open source is coming up with some fabulous innovations. And today, the fabulous innovation du jour is Audacity. Audacity is a free audio editing software program. The reason why I think it's just the greatest thing ever to happen ever, is that I was using, ahem, let's just say, a borrowed version of an unnamed audio editing software program. This borrowed version of the software has bugs and inconsistencies and didn't come with all the add-ons which would make it useful to me. But Audacity has everything an amateur like me needs to get going with turning my minidisc recordings into works of art. It has online help, tutorials and documentation, and the ability to run on almost any operating system--that's right mac and pc and linux! And did I mention? It's FREE! If you have any interest in this sort of geeky thing, then get Audacity.

Now I just need to figure out how to use it.