Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts

Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla Review

Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla ReviewIf I didn't already know MVC, Joomla 1.5 and had made components before I think this book would be useless.If you have dabbled in developer code however and Joomla 1.5 this is a great resource.
This book lacks examples of building finished components.
If it combined the style of other books like learn joomla 1.5 as well as having this great resource of information it would be worth solid gold.
Without it and without a good index It takes time to find what you are after. Once you find it however it always provides great, accurate information.Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla Overview

Want to learn more information about Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer) Review

Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer)
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer) ReviewThe book content is ok, but too basic. Instead of 50 pages of Examples of "successfull sites", maybe the author could have expanded on some of the examples. For example, the example on MVC patterns is so simple as to be meaningless. If I wanted to "study the Joomla source code" as the author suggests, I wouldn't have spent money on a book.
The downloaded example source code doesn't match the book and often doesn't quite work.
I did learn quite a bit about Joomla, but I always had the nagging feeling that the book wasn't finished and was rushed to print.Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer) Overview

Want to learn more information about Professional Joomla (Programmer to Programmer)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers Review

The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers ReviewGIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program to give it its proper name, is a graphics-editing program broadly similar to Adobe Photoshop in terms of functionality. The GIMP is an open source program that can be freely downloaded and installed on most computers, including maps. But on the downside it doesn't come with a manual, so figuring out how to use GIMP can be tricky.
But 'The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects' isn't simply a book explaining what all the different tools and features do. Michael Hammel pitches this book quite a bit higher than that, focusing instead on how to use GIMP to perform a variety of useful and common tasks. From trick photography to building graphics for web sites, Hammel leads the reader expertly through nicely illustrated tutorials. The end result is more than simply a better understanding of the program, but a richer appreciation of what the program can be used to do.
There are six chapters, the first of which introduces many of the basic concepts. Although there is some attention given to where the relevant tools are found and how to use them, the focus here is on what they do and why you need them. Fundamental to success with any graphics program is understanding how different tools work when applied together, and Hammel finishes off this chapter with a set of multi-function tutorials that underline this point.
The second chapter concentrates on manipulating photographs. These include softening images, adding motion effects, and creating reflections. In each case the process is taken step-by-step, with clear text and relevant screenshots. At this point it's also worth mentioning something about the layout of the book. No Starch has really done a good job here. The book is wider than it is tall, and each page holds two columns of text. The flexible binding lets the book stay open at any page. As a result, it's an easy book to use alongside the computer.
The next chapter is about creating artwork for web sites. These include things like tiles for web page backgrounds, buttons, tabs, and menu bars. The first tutorial in this batch is all about creating glossy, gel-like buttons of the type Macintosh users will be familiar with. One of the later tutorials looks at the ubiquitous rollover buttons, though from the perspective of creating the actual artwork required rather than the necessary JavaScript or CSS coding. That said, if you use a WYSIWYG web page layout program like Freeway, you probably won't need to manually any of that sort of code to your page anyway; all you need are the graphics.
Like all the other chapters, the web design chapter finishes with a collection of useful tips. Some of these should be required reading for any web designer, and it's great to see the author lay them out fair and square.
The fourth chapter is very unusual but actually makes a lot of sense. It's a chapter devoted to creating advertising. While no substitute for a degree in marketing, there's some great stuff here for anyone who needs to produce things like packaging and posters. Small businesses attracted to GIMP by its low cost will likely find this chapter worth the price of the book alone. On the other hand, some of the tutorials in this section are only incidentally useful for advertising purposes though, and could be just as relevant to anyone creating computer artwork. Again, there's a wrap-up section with a slew of useful tips and tricks.
Chapter five brings text into the mix. This chapter kicks off with some tutorials covering things like neon, metallic, and gel-like text, among other typographic effects.
The last chapter is specifically for software developers, and illustrates the ways in which GIMP can be used to design and prototype application interfaces. While a clever and potentially useful chapter, what was obviously missing from this section of the book was something on designing icons for programs. The book then rounds off with a detailed index.
For $45 this isn't a cheap book, especially when you consider that GIMP itself is free and comes with its own online guides and tutorials. The question is whether having things laid out clearly and logically in a nicely illustrated book justifies the cost. In the opinion of this reviewer at least, the answer is yes. For the GIMP user looking to go beyond simply cropping and resizing digital images, this book is highly recommended.The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers Overview
The GIMP, an image editor whose power and ease-of-use rivals that of Adobe Photoshop, is one of the world's most popular free software projects. Artists and designers have relied on the GIMP since 1995 to retouch photographs, composite multiple images, and create new artwork from scratch.

The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects shows you how to harness the GIMP's powerful features to produce professional-looking advertisements, impressive photographic effects, as well as logos and text effects. And author Michael J. Hammel, who has used the GIMP since its first public release, won't mince words or waste your time. His extensively illustrated, step-by-step tutorials are perfect for hands-on learning and experimentation. After a crash course in using the GIMP's interface and core tools (such as brushes, patterns, selections, layers, modes, and masks), you'll learn:
Photographic techniques to simulate ripped edges, create sepia-toned antique images, swap colors, produce motion blurs, alter depth of field, and even fix rips in an old photo Web design techniques to create tiled patterns, navigation tabs, rollovers, and fancy buttons and borders Type effects to create depth, perspective shadows, metallic and distressed text, and neon and graffiti lettering Advertising effects to produce movie posters and package designs; simulate clouds, cracks, cloth, and underwater effects; and create specialized lighting Interface design tips for creating textures, navigation bars, and buttons
Whether you're new to the GIMP or you've been playing with this powerful software for years, The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects is sure to teach you some new tricks.

Visit the book's companion site for additional tutorials and resources. http://www.graphics-muse.org/artistsguid​e/


Want to learn more information about The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery Review

Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery ReviewBlender3D Blender is one of the most popular open source and free 3D creation suites.
Many professionals use Blender in their daily work, for architecture, movies, or 3D modeling and animation in general.
Blender is a very powerful tool that can give you professional results with no cost. But learning how to use it is not easy for everyone.
This book, "Blender 2.49 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery", by Allan Brito, comes to solve this problem.
Written in understandable language, makes using Blender simple and easy.
Albeit the author tells us that this is not an introductory book to Blender, the fact is that someone that is not familiarized with it at all can read the book, follow what it says and end being a skilled modeler.
Modeling inorganic shapes is an excellent way to master 3D modeling. And this book can give you all the keys for doing it as a professional.
Its author is Allan Brito, a Brazilian architect specialized in information visualization that works with Blender to produce visualization and instructional material.
He teaches 3D modeling, animation and multimedia at Mauricio De Nassau College (Brazil).
This is a book that can be valuable for architects, game designers, 3D artists, and movie makers. But also for every 3D fan that wants to model, animate and render interiors, buildings, furniture, and much more.
It covers everything from modeling objects, cameras, exporting, optimizing, post-production retouch with the GIMP, lightning, texturing and materials, adding virtual humans to scenes and other objects to increase realism, developing your own libraries to work faster, use YafaRay to render photorealistic images of your works, animation, video-tours...All this is teach through 14 chapters. Chapters 1-5 tell you how to build your own 3D models. You will learn how to use very specialized modeling tools that Blender has, like Loop Subdivide or Remove Doubles. Also, you'll master the proportional and precise editing of architectural models, even how to create curved walls on building interiors.Chapter 6 tells how to add furniture models, giving you some Internet addresses where you can get reference images to use.
In chapters 7 and 8 you can learn how to apply materials and textures. There's even explanations on how to create glass material, and self-illumination.Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12 deal with rendering and lighting, teaching you things like UV mapping (attach a texture to particular portions of a 3D mesh), volumetric shadows, and radiosity.
Number 13 is about how to use camera and create animation and videos.Finally, chapter 14 is a quick guide to post-production retouch of your rendered images in GIMP, the free image editor.
In addition, the publisher -Packt Publishing- pays a royalty to Blender project, so buying a book from Packt Publishing you are indirectly supporting the open source project of that book (in this case, Blender). This way, you help the developers by helping yourself.
There are two kinds of people that may find this book useful: the skilled user that wants to get the most of Blender when modeling architecture scenes, and the user that wants to start using Blender but also wants to reach a high level on these skills.
In both cases, this is a complete book that has all that you need.Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery OverviewThe book consists of a lot of exciting examples, which are shaped using the various features of Blender. It provides step-by-step instructions leading you to realistic models of buildings, landscapes, and more. A collection of amazing screenshots will add excitement to your learning experience. You can build realistic 3D models that can be used while creating different animation projects. The printed version of the book is in black and white, but a full color version of the images is available for download here. The eBook version, available from Packt,is in full color. This book is for architects, game designers, artists, or movie makers who want to create realistic buildings, interiors, and scenery using Blender 3D, a free, open-source graphics tool. This book is not a general introduction to Blender, but focuses on developing expertise on the architectural aspects of the tool. You need not have prior knowledge of Blender.

Want to learn more information about Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery Review

Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery ReviewBlender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery
Compared with a other Blender books in this price range the book performs rather poorly: the images are only BW and it has NO CODE associated with it (though the announcement on Amazon says so)- neither .blend nor .py files and the book's download page offers only a .zip files with a color version of the images for which you have to hand out your E-mail address ....
The level of expertise is for beginners; it gives a short introduction to Blender's interface which is too short for newbies and unnecessary for the more exprienced user.
Then it details the steps to model a simple multi-floor building as well as some "modern" furniture with UV mapping and radiosity. The animation part gives hints for the video sequence editor and logic bricks to produce a walkthrough as well as using the Gimp for postproduction.
The book seems to be written for an older Blender version,as there's still mention of the old UV/Face Select mode, though it could have been updated as the publisher seems to "print it on demand".
As this is the ONLY book about doing architectural modeling in Blender it receives two stars - one for its uniqueness and one for the instructional part.
I would consider buying the book again only at less than HALF the price considering the quality of print and the missing code mentioned already.
Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery Overview

Want to learn more information about Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Joomla Bible Review

Joomla Bible
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Joomla Bible? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Joomla Bible. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Joomla Bible ReviewThis is far and away the best overview on Joomla, how to deploy a website in Joomla. This is not a book on how to develop in Joomla. The intended audience is someone who will be building Joomla websites, administrating them and doing mild customization in the HTML/CSS arena. Not a book about PHP programming or Joomla's MVC architecture (shame to even use that term, as Joomla MVC is horrific!).
Joomla is a great product for the right audience and this book is perfect for them!Joomla Bible Overview

Want to learn more information about Joomla Bible?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach Review

Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach ReviewI bought this book because I needed to use GRASS and R to produce maps with the results of statistical analysis. Though I am an experienced programmer, I had never used R neither any GIS. The tutorials available on the Internet were enough to learn R, but GRASS was a brick wall.
After reading and trying the examples until page 200, I found myself able to work with raster and vectorial maps. Since I was completely illiterate on GIS, I learned in the book how the raster and vector data are organized, how to alter and combine maps and how to manage the vector databases. The sections about R and GRASS integration was very useful. Although it was of no particular interest to me, there are several sections about spatial analysis tools, 2D and 3D output, image processing and GRASS programing.
The book is not an exhaustive descriptions of the commands, which should be found on the GRASS documentation. It is more like a hands-on tutorial that makes you familiar with the system and the commands, even if you are novice. It will also be useful for people familiar with the graphic interface of other systems who need to start working with the command line.Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach OverviewThoroughly updated with material related to the GRASS6, the third edition includes new sections on attribute database management and SQL support, vector networks analysis, lidar data processing and new graphical user interfaces. All chapters were updated with numerous practical examples using the first release of a comprehensive, state-of-the-art geospatial data set.

Want to learn more information about Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition Review

The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition ReviewGood sysadmins know the technical details. They can resurrect a dead server, understand the intricacies of sendmail or the Windows registry, and recite all of the types of DNS records by heart. They own copies of the UNIX System Administration Handbook and refer to them regularly. They are good sysadmins, and will contribute solidly at an intermediate level.
Great sysadmins know all of that and what is in this book. They are the ones who go on to become the senior sysadmins and consultants, have fabulous careers, and are respected by their bosses, co-workers, and customers.
There is much more to a technical job than simply the technical skills. Don't buy this book to learn how to run a system or you will be disappointed. Do, however, buy it to learn how to be an effective professional systems administrator.
It is also useful for a manager of sysadmins who is either non-technical, or has never been a sysadmin himself, as it is a good introduction to the issues and concerns that sysadmins need to face.
Limoncelli and Hogan cover many topics, including:
- Trouble ticket systems
- Desktops and Servers (how they're the same, differ, etc.)
- Administrative networks (why bother?)
- Requirements (gathering, tracking, etc.)
- Standards and centralization of services
- How to do debugging (not "you see this problem, do this" but rather learning the process of doing good debugging)
- Fix things once, not over and over again
- Security policies (including management and organizational issues for a variety of organizational profiles)
- Disaster Recovery (again, not how to backup data, but why you'd want to, legal issues, etc.)
- Systems Administration Ethics
- Change management and revision control
- Maintenance windows: what they are and why they're good for both you and your users
- Centralization versus Decentralization
- Helpdesks: sizing, scope, processes, escalation, etc.
- Data centers (many physical facility concerns that sysadmins don't often think of, including how to move a datacenter)
- Managing non-OS software (commercial and free)
They will help you answer questions like
- Does server hardware really cost more? Do we go with a few expensive servers or many cheap ones?
- What does "redundancy" actually mean?
- Why would we spend money on backups? There's never been an outage...
- What do I do when asked to do something illegal?
- How do I communicate and schedule large system changes?
- How do I do a safe server upgrade?
- They want to decentralize the sysadmin group -- what do we do?
- How do we move our datacenter?
- What sort of policy issues are there with email?
- How do I deal with my customers abusing printers?
- What do we have to worry about if we're implementing remote access (e.g. dialup modem banks) for our users?
Finally, they close with an entire section on Management:
- How to deal with cost centers, management chains, hiring, customer support, and outsourcing.
- How to manage your customers perceptions and your team's visibility
- How to manage your own happiness (time management, communication, professional development, managing your manager, etc.)
- How to be a technical manager, how to work with non-technical managers, manage your own career growth, etc.
- How to hire good sysadmins, recruiting, interviewing, soft skills, technical skills, employee retention, etc.
- The special concerns around how to fire sysadmins (often problematic, given their higher level of access)
They even have a chapter for non-technical managers who are in charge of sysadmins (this entire book would be very useful to give to a non-technical manager who doesn't really 'get it'.)
The book closes with three appendixes:
A. The Many Role of a System Administrator
B. What to Do When...
C. Acronyms
Appendix B is particularly useful, answering a wide variety of questions with solid, practical answers.
The skills and concepts in this book are the make-or-break in many careers. They turn you from just another sysadmin into a star performer, sensitive to your customers and the business, able to interact with a wide spectrum of people.The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition Overview

Want to learn more information about The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor Review

The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor ReviewThere are times when a book reviewer reviews a book because it's something they have a passing interest in, or it is something they know they should be doing and want to learn more. Then there are those books that relate to something so familiar and so every day, that it's easy to build an expectation for the title. For me, audio editing on behalf of the TWiST podcast is a nearly daily thing (at least five days a week), and Audacity is my tool of choice for doing audio editing, partly by chance but more recently by familiarity. Is there a book out there that would keep my interest on the subject?I'm happy to say that "The Book of Audacity", written by Carla Schroeder, and published by No-Starch Press, is just such a book. You don't have to be a computer aficionado, but it certainly helps. You don't have to be a musician, but it certainly helps there, too. You don't have to be someone who enjoys a witty and sometimes mildly sarcastic writing style, but again, it certainly helps. If you are the special geek that fits all three of these categories just mentioned, then this book is a gem!The Book of Audacity is platform agnostic, but shows a number of approaches to using it on a number of platforms (with a special section specifically focusing on Linux). Audacity is free and cross platform, and the author spends plenty of time trying to make the users feel comfortable tackling the various topics.Many books are written to describe the process of recording and producing music, but they often devolve into an impenetrable treatise on sound theory and issues of interest to professional audio and signal processing engineers, leaving many of us everyday folks interested in recording behind. Carla is careful to not do that here. Often her tone is irreverent, humorous, and at times downright snarky, proving this isn't your typical audio recording book, and that's all for the better.The Book of Audacity uses multiple projects to help the user get the most out of the program and appreciate many of the finer details the application provides. Some of the projects will have varying amounts of interest, but the chapter long focus on many of these projects allows the reader to get in-depth enough if they want to focus on that particular aspect, or skip to the next chapter if they are not.AUDACITY FROM START TO FINISH
This section gives a good overview of the program and how to get a quick understanding of many key features. It's not an in-depth tutorial, but the first time user will feel comfortable after perusing this chapter.BUILDING A GOOD DIGITAL SOUND STUDIO ON THE CHEAP
Think that you will have to break the bank to create a "recording rig"? In many cases, it's as simple as using the hardware already in your computer. If you want to get more involved, there are additional items that can be used, and I appreciate the level of personal detail Carla provides in showing the equipment that she personally likes using, including audio interfaces, microphones and digital recording devices.TRANSFERRING VINYL LPs (AND OTHER LEGACY MEDIA) TO CD
This chapter may be skipped if this project isn't relevant to you, but there's a lot of good information in here regarding how to get external audio into your computer and then work with the audio to create master CD's. Topics like dynamic range, recording levels, fixing pops and clicks, dealing with clipping, dealing with separate tracks, creating fade-ins and fade-outs, and mixing down and creating the final audio CD are covered.CREATING AND EDITING LIVE TRACKS FOR CD
If you have an interest in recording live music, especially if you use a modern flash based digital recording device, then this section is for you. It covers the technical details of recording a live performance, whether that be using the digital recorder to record the live room or getting a feed from the board directly. It also covers such things as how to interact with the sound crew and generally be a net positive in the experience (these are the little things that set this book apart from many other audio books, in that it covers some of the finer personal interactions, not just using an audio tool). Methods for dealing with recordings made at different times and different places are covered so that the end result sounds as consistent as possible.AUTHORING A COMPILATION CD
This section covers taking audio from multiple audio sources and creating a compilation CD (or for those of us of an older generation, a digital "mix tape"). Using multiple audio formats, ripping from CD's and DVD's are covered, converting MP3s to uncompressed WAV files, and covering the details needed to get the tracks to a consistent sound level, determining track order, and creating a seamless production so that the final product can be mixed down and burned to a Red Book format CD are discussed.AUTHORING SUPER HIGH-FIDELITY AUDIO DVDs
DVD audio is a high end sound approach that takes advantage of the space a DVD allows to let the person doing the recording use even higher quality audio samples and audio formats (uncompressed WAV, AIFF, FLAC, etc.) This section walks the user through the process of producing an audio DVD and highlights tools that will help the process go smoothly.CREATING PODCASTS
So far, most of the projects have been dealing with single track (mono or stereo) sequences. This is the first section that gets into multi-track recording and covers my bread-and-butter topic, podcasting. You'll learn how to mix multiple parts together, including using intro music, creating a duck down track for theme music and having it drop when the announcer speaks, cleaning up verbal ticks (how to deal with "ums" and "ahs" and the like), as well as exporting to a format that is high enough quality for listening purposes but minimizes the size requirements for easier downloading.BECOMING AN ONLINE STAR
So you have gone to great lengths to produce audio for various purposes. Now what do you want to do with it/. In this chapter, the topic of getting your work out into the public space is covered. Ever wondered what it would be like to be a signed musician, Do you even want to go that route? Do you need to? Can you forge your own path? This section answers those questions as well as how to go about developing an online presence, how to get your work out to those who want to listen to it, whether or not you should use Digital Rights Management on your files (personal choice, I generally say "don't", but your mileage may vary), and dealing with the issues surrounding copyright and fair use.MULTITRACK RECORDING
While the section for podcasting goes into the basics of multi-track recordings, this is a deep dive into how Audacity allows for multiple channels to be recorded (and the equipment necessary if you want to do it "live"), dealing with and ordering multiple tracks, getting the levels right, using the internal mixer and equalization tools, labeling tracks to keep track of what's happening and where, how to move various tracks around and group them together, as well as how to construct custom mix downs so that instruments are panned and ordered in the mix the way you want them to be.MAKING YOUR OWN RINGTONES
If you are tired of paying for ring-tones for your cellular phone, or just want to know how to make them for the fun of it, this section is for you. It discusses creating a short recording, using dynamic range compression so that the recording can be optimized for the small speaker inside a phone, and then converted to the file format that your phone will support and allow you to upload it and use it as a ring tone. Again, it's an example of a project that shows how Audacity can be used for a range of audio options.AUDACITY PLUG-INS FOR SPECIAL EFFECTS
One of the great advances Audacity and other audio tools provides is the ability to use effects that used to require lots of outboard gear. Signal processing allows for very basic details such as dynamic range compression and signal leveling, but also lets the user go to town with interesting effects such as reverb, digital delay, tremolo, phase shifting, distortion, etc. Using these effects effectively is more challenging than just setting an effect and applying it. Many effects on a given track will cause additive effects and knowing how to deal with them is important. It's also possible to use the effects to create electronic drum sounds and other approaches (there's an entire effects language called NyQuist that is covered a bit in here as well).FIX-ITS AND CLEANUPS
Ideally, we will do the best we can to get clean and focused audio recording, but sometimes the source material is not perfect or we have little control over some of the issues that arise in the recording process (live interviews, noisy rooms, sudden volume changes, etc). This section deals with the ways to handle the inevitable "clean-up" jobs we will face from time to time. Simple tasks like cutting out sections or trimming silence are covered, as well as more advanced topics like splitting audio tracks, performing noise removal (and dealing with the effects of that), how to effectively use leveling and normalization, waveform repair using the draw tool, modifying tempo and performing pitch correction, and using compression effectively are all covered here.CONFIGURING LINUX FOR BEST AUDIO QUALITY
For those who are using Windows or a Mac, this section will probably not be relevant. For those using Linux distributions,...Read more›The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor Overview

Want to learn more information about The Book of Audacity: Record, Edit, Mix, and Master with the Free Audio Editor?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...