Linux software suggestions

[Peter Alcibiades]

After saying to make the acquaintance of the command line one should probably
offer some reading.

The short version is Linux Phrasebook by Scott Granneman.  The long form
reference version is the O'Reilly Linux in a Nutshell.

Anything by Carla Schroder is worth reading.

Here's an example of why you'd bother.  You have an audio track, compressed
in some lossy way, and want to extract a few sections and put them together
in one new track. 

You can do it with point and click in Audacity of course.  But... Audacity
will import it into its own format and you'll then export it in a playable
format.  So you will recode, and this will affect quality.  What you want to
do is simply cut out and join without any recoding.  You won't readily find
a way of doing that in Audacity.  There may be one, but I haven't found it. 
But in the command line?

You just locate the start and end points and cut them out into temp files,
then concatenate the temp files into one new file in the same coding using
ffmpeg.  If you want to do this regularly you write a small script to take
source, time and file inputs and do the rest automagically.

The command line is full of this stuff - it lets you get at all the options
that the gui layer on top of it doesn't provide for.  This is really the
difference between Windows and Linux (or Mac also since its Unix based).  In
Linux the gui on utility apps is often just passing your point and clicks in
the form of commands into the shell.  But by the nature of gui interfaces
this only lets you get at a very small percentage of what the shell can
actually do.

Its not that you have to use the shell.  You don't, any more than you do in
Windows.  But its there.  Its like in Windows they have extracted the wheat
germ and said you don't need this or want it, and then fed it to the pigs,
and when you realise what is not there, your morning toast seems a bit
tasteless.



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