An open Studio to Go

While developing for the Live CD crowd is fine, I also think that having access to a fully installed OS is defiantly the best way to go, no matter how you cut it. This proves to be true when trying to edit audio and video.

Open source software developer and musician Richard Bown wanted to make Rosegarden, a popular MIDI sequencer for Linux, available to all people, even if they weren’t fortunate enough to be using an open source platform. That was the genesis of Studio to Go, a Knoppix-based CD that allows Windows users to access a wealth of open source music creation and notation software without installing Linux.

Rosegarden started as a project created by Bath University students Chris Cannam and Andy Green. It was originally written for the Irix platform, but Bown came along to help with a Linux port. Green apparently attempted a Windows port about the same time, but lost the only copy of the source code in a nasty computer crash.

The developers still wanted to provide something for Windows users. “As we progressed with development, we realized there was a need,” Bown says. “I’m a computer guy, but I’m a musician as well, and Chris is very much driven from the score notation perspective. We wanted to make some simple software available. Lots of people look at Linux and think it’s too complicated to do.” [Read the rest]

[tags]linux,knoppix,irix platform,studio to go[/tags]