Top 20 Free Linux Multimedia Apps

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Top 20 Free Linux Multimedia Apps
Filed under Download, Featured, Linux, Open source.

Linux has come in leaps and bounds in the past 10 years. It is now possible to use Linux for a complete multimedia solution to create and edit audio, graphics, and video. With these three topics in mind, listed below are the top 20 free Linux audio, graphics, and video applications. These are listed in no particular order. Some of these programs can be compared to ‘paid’ versions in terms of quality. All logos and screenshots are taken from the application’s home page. Enjoy and send me some art when you get done. ;)

Audio Applications

1. Ardour Digital Audio Workstation

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound.

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users. This means implementing all the “hard stuff” that other DAWs ( even some leading commercial apps ) handle incorrectly or not at all. Ardour has a completely flexible “anything to anywhere” routing system, and will allow as many physical I/O ports as your system allows. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. You will also find powerful features such as “persistent undo”, multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren’t available on other platforms.

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hosted at imageshack.us due to size

2. Hydrogen -

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

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3. LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio) -

LMMS aims to be a free alternative to popular (but commercial and closed- source) programs like FruityLoops/FL Studio, Cubase and Logic allowing you to produce music with your computer. This includes creation of loops, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples, having fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more…

LMMS combines the features of a tracker-/sequencer-program and those of powerful synthesizers, samplers, effects etc. in a modern, user-friendly and easy to use graphical user-interface.

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4. Audacity -

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity… Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information.

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

5. Mixxx -

Mixxx is an open source DJ tool designed for both professional and amateur DJs alike.

Mixxx allows DJs to mix music live with a clean, simple interface. Futhermore, Mixxx has a number of key features to help DJs in the mix: Beat estimation, parallel visual displays, and support for various DJ hardware controllers.

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6. ReZound -

ReZound aims to be a stable, open source, and graphical audio file editor primarily for but not limited to the Linux operating system.

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Video Applications

7. Kino -

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.

You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list (SMIL XML format). Most edit and navigation commands are mapped to equivalent vi key commands. Also, Kino can export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Still frame import and export uses gdk-pixbuf, which has support for BMG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, SVG, Targa, TIFF, and XPM. MP3 requires lame. Ogg Vorbis requires oggenc. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 require mjpegtools or ffmpeg. MPEG-4 requires ffmpeg.

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Cinepaint Film Gimp

8. Cinepaint Film Gimp -

CinePaint is a collection of free open source software tools for deep paint manipulation and image processing. CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures. It’s been used on many feature films, including The Last Samurai where it was used to add flying arrows. It’s also being used by pro photographers who need greater color fidelity than is available in other tools.

Studio Users

Studios such as Sony Pictures Imageworks and many smaller studios use CinePaint. Disney, DreamWorks, and Pixar funded Crossover (Wine) to make Adobe Photoshop for Windows run nicely on Linux and that’s what they use. Some studios use proprietary or internally developed tools. CinePaint is open source software. Nobody is obligated to tell us they use it. Studios use many Linux motion picture applications, not just CinePaint. This list of studios using CinePaint is just some we know about.

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9. Blender -

Blender offers a complete range of tools to thoroughly develop 3D animations and design. Its revolutionary, non-overlapping and non-blocking UI delivers unsurpassed workflow. The powerful built-in database system allows instances, scene management, and dynamic linking multiple project files. Anti-aliased fonts feature international translation support.

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10. Cinelerra -

Cinelerra does primarily 3 main things: capturing, compositing, and editing audio and video with sample level accuracy. It’s a seamless integration of audio, video, and still photos rarely experienced on a web server.

If you want to make movies, you just want to defy the establishment, you want the same kind of compositing and editing suite that the big boys use, on the world’s most efficient UNIX operating system, it’s time for Cinelerra.

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11. Synfig -

Video made with Synfig:

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can.

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12. Stopmotion -

This is the webpage for the stopmotion program. Stopmotion is a free application for creating stop-motion animation movies. The users will be able to create stop-motions from pictures imported from a camera or from the harddrive, add sound effects and export the animation to different video formats such as mpeg or avi.

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13. FFmpeg -

FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

No screenshot, FFmpeg is a command line tool. But there is a GUI here, but FYI, I have not tested this.

14. K-3D -

K-3D features a robust plugin architecture and visualization pipeline, designed to scale to the needs of professional artists. K-3D has been written from the ground up to generate motion picture quality animation using RenderMan render engines. We strongly recommend the Aqsis (http://www.aqsis.org) render engine for use with K-3D.

K-3D - unlike other projects - has an ontological foundation which is object oriented, supporting interconnection / visual programming out-of-the-box. Such a framework is a dream to extend on.

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Graphics Applications

15. GIMP -

GIMP is a versatile graphics manipulation package.

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16. Inkscape -

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

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17. Scribus -

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.

Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

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18. ImageMagick -

ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

The functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command line or you can use the features from programs written in your favorite programming language. Choose from these interfaces: G2F (Ada), MagickCore (C), MagickWand (C), ChMagick (Ch), ImageMagickObject (COM+), Magick++ (C++), JMagick (Java), L-Magick (Lisp), NMagick (Neko/haXe), MagickNet (.NET), PascalMagick (Pascal), PerlMagick (Perl), MagickWand for PHP (PHP), IMagick (PHP), PythonMagick (Python), RMagick (Ruby), or TclMagick (Tcl/TK). With a language interface, use ImageMagick to modify or create images dynamically and automagically.

NOTE: ImageMagick is a command line application.

19. Skencil -

Skencil is a Free Software interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes.

A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

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20. F-Spot -

F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop (http://www.gnome.org/).

F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images.

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I hope you found some goodies in this list that you haven’t heard of. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything that you think is better than the above. peace.