I have been the proud owner of a Philips FW-V795 for the past couple of years and at the time, it was called the Next Generation MP3 Hi-fi Systems with ‘Smart’ Surf/Sound coupled with 6000 watts of PMPO + 1600 watts Acoustic Bass Energy, MP3-CD playback, PAL/NTSC. 9 screens preview, 3-way magnetically shielded speaker system, MP3 songs list display on TV screen and all that *jazz*

I realize NOW that I could have spent all those boring weekends in my private disco, if only I knew how to lets say .. make seamless transition between tracks and crank it up a notch. And guess what? It turns out you CAN with freeware like KraMixer and Dekstasy. So put on your dancing shoes and give it a try!

KraMixer DJ Software v1.0.3 (Windows)

This software duplicates to a hardware DJ system, with two decks and controls. It comes with a fancy sound engine called FMOD (FMOD is the sound engine used by KraMixer and is also used by Playstation 2 and XBox game authors. It is proven to be one of the fastest sound engines available today. and has automatic BPM counters, so you can enter BPMs by hand and match two tracks. It allows real-time recording into MP3 format, automatic BPM matching, support for MP3, WAV and OGG file formats, a variable frequency range (from +/-1% to +/-49%), and 8 built-in sound effects (including Echo, Flange, Reverb and Compressor). These effects can be used while transitioning from one track to another.

DJ Music Mixer v3.6 (Windows)

This is a straight-up emulation of a Hardware DJ deck, with playlists on the left and right for selecting your two tracks. Features include MP3 and WAV player with two independent decks, and beat-sync display, pitch control, and fast-seek mode. There is a crossfader, which is the most important control for any DJ. It basically is a fader that moves to and fro horizontally, and plays the two tracks on the left and right deck depending on its position. If the fader is moved completely to the left, the left track alone will play. It also has an autofade function.

DeKstasy v1.3.6 (Mac OS X)

This one is different. While it is aimed at DJs of all levels, amateurs and absolute beginners will love it, as it has a more friendly GUI, where the tracks run horizontally and display their waveform. There is a lot of automatable stuff, and you can also beat match your two tracks with just a few clicks (there’s no need to listen for BPM matching). You can play MIDI beats with your main tracks, so all you remixers might want to try this one.

UltraMixer (MAC OS X, Windows & Linux)

UltraMixer is a DJ mixing software which enables you to mix digital music in various formats such as MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV or CDs in real time. All you need is a sound card. The DJ’s turntables are replaced by two digital SoundPlayers, the “vinyls” are available within seconds through the integrated FileArchive. No matter whether you want to use UltraMixer for a professional gig or at a private party or as virtual jukebox in restaurants, hair studios or medical surgeries – it will prove the right choice! There are three versions of UltraMixer available: the Free-Edition and the Basic-Edition for private users and the Advanced-Edition for high demands and commerical use. ENJOY!

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Yesterday, I upgraded gutsy to the most awaited release from the ubuntu community — Hardy Heron  (Strong fearless bird?) And it is sweeeet! Heres my rendezvous story with Hardy so far. First you will notice Hardy boots up pretty quick, this has been brought about by implementing file prefetch and other optimisations in this release. Another prominent change is you can install on an existing filesystem without overwriting your /home! Pretty useful, don’t you think? And for the star of the show, our precious Xorg 7.3 now sports the ‘Bullet Proof X’ feature, which will go into a graphical safe mode if anything goes wrong with X.. pheww.. I have been there and not much of a command line junkie I tell ya!

So first things first – get the MadWifi drivers to work for my card, no problems there! Easier to setup compared to my experience with NdisWrapper+KDE. My kubuntu partition was detected and I instantly began copying all my files and installing software, eager to move on with the switch.

I should mention I am a little new to the GNOME environment but I love the look and feel despite what some might say about the rusted brown theme. So after configuring Compiz to suit my desires, I decided to ramp it up a little and try the tailor made for linux docks : Avant Window Manager and Kiba. In support of popular belief, AWM does take more of a simplistic approach, not much 3D stuff going on there but easier to work with and install. Whereas Kiba was all flashy with its special effects + more crash prone. *sob : why can’t I have both?*

So what do you do next? Go surfing on your brand new Mozilla Firefox 3 of course, the tides of Web 2.0 wash over you. Helping you enjoy this experience is the auto complete list that appears when letters are entered in the location bar, no longer being confined to web addresses but spreading on to into your bookmarks, history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive. The interface though hasn’t changed much except for the Ubuntu theme that is packaged with it. Faster page loads and smaller system footprint comes to you with this bundle of joy!

The only problem I have faced up till now was with the bluetooth pairing and my camera (which IS a 3rd party driver issue really) hopefully and eventually it will go as smooth as everything else did. So thats all for now, here’s a screenshot of my desktop to back up my claims And a list enumerating additional features :

[Long Term Support (LTS) release, Linux kernel 2.6.24, Xorg 7.3, Better Tango compliance; Compiz usability improvements; Tracker integration; Brasero disk burner, Transmission BitTorrent client and Vinagre VNC client by default, World Clock Applet, Firefox 3 Beta 4, PulseAudio by default, integration of Rt2x00 wireless drivers, automatic grabbing and releasing of the mouse cursor when running on a VMware virtual machine; Wubi installer included into the disk.]

For detailed release notes : [Ubuntu 8.04 Beta]

Ever wondered – - what happens when a guy tricks his girlfriend into using Linux (to perform seemingly ’simple’ tasks) for the first time? If so, then this might prove to be an interesting read for some.

It gives an insight into how ready Linux is for the desktop, though some people might argue that this isn’t a test of ‘usability’ for Ubuntu, this is a test of Ubuntu’s similarity to Windows. And any non-savvy user might face similar obstacles on OS X or an OS they aren’t familiar with.. while some believe Linux hasn’t made it far enough to be even compared to OS X when it comes down to the UI. So now, you can read on and decide.

[ The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment ]