Note: this post is about high-quality audio under Linux; however, the set-up will work just as well on a Windows or Mac machine.

Historically, sound has always been a weak point for Linux, with many devices refusing to work due to a lack of drivers. The appearance of Ubuntu improved matters, but I have always found support for high-quality audio to be lacking. However, the development of USB sound cards has made a big difference and I have finally found a way to get high-quality audio on Ubuntu on a budget. The set up I’m about to describe will give you fantastic, detailed sound for music listening for around $200.  Briefly, the recipe is

1. use an external USB soundcard

2. get a line-out signal from the soundcard and

3. use active monitor speakers, NOT multimedia speakers

The sound card

There are two main reasons to use a USB sound card. Firstly it means that the digital-to-analog conversion is taking place outside the computer, where it can’t be affected by all the electrical noise inside. Secondly, the quality of the conversion (which will ultimately determine the quality of the sound) is far better than can be achieved by your computer’s built-in sound card.

The best low-cost USB audio device I have found is the FIIO E7, which you should be able to pick up for around $80.

It’s actually designed and marketed as a headphone amplifier, but it’s perfect for our purposes because it’s actually a high-quality USB soundcard as well. It is recognized by Ubuntu as a USB audio device so it doesn’t need any drivers and will work out of the box.

The line-out signal

Because the E7 is designed to drive headphones, you can’t take the output and use it to drive a pair of speakers. Instead you need to get a line-out signal which you can feed to an amplifier. There are two products that let you get a line out signal from the E7 – a rather cool looking separate headphone amp, and a line out dock.

The headphone amp looks extremely cool, but will set you back another hundred bucks and take up a chunk of space on your desk.  The line out kit (called the L7), on the other hand, costs ten bucks and does the job perfectly.

It clips to the bottom of the E7, then you plug a USB cable in one side, and get a line out signal from the other side. This will allow us to use the DAC part of the E7 while bypassing the amplifier part.

Active monitors

Now you have your line-out signal you need a amplifier and a pair of speakers. The best value solution is a pair of active speakers (also called powered speakers); these have an integrated amplifier so you can connect them directly to a line out source. Active speakers come in two main flavours. Multimedia speakers are designed for computer games and movies, so they tend to be loud and dynamic, but are lacking in detail for music. A much better choice is a set of monitor speakers; these are specifically designed to accurately reproduce music and are often used for recording and mixing.

M-audio make a few models of budget speakers that are ideal for our purposes. I am currently using a pair of AV40 speakers . They are nicely sized, comfortably loud enough to fill a large room and have wonderful sound reproduction.

If you need something smaller there’s a very similar model with slightly less power which will take up less room. Alternatively, if you want to go larger, the next step up would be the Bx5A, which has a slightly bigger speaker – handy if you listen to a lot of bass-heavy music – but comes at a hefty price.

Setting up

Hooking up a system like the one I’ve described above is very simple. The L7 plus into the bottom of the E7, then the USB cable runs from the L7 to your computer. The line out cable runs from the other side of the L7 to the active speakers. Be sure to arrange your speakers for best sound from your normal listening position – follow a guide like this one and you can’t go wrong.

A set up like this should keep you happy for a long time; the only thing I have found I needed to upgrade is the line out cable which goes between the L7 and the speakers. The supplied one is a little loose, but even a high-quality gold-plated, shielded cable is only about $10, will sound great, and will last practically forever.

I recently needed to perform some batch operations (add a couple of borders and resize) on a bunch of photos, and I came across this interesting app.  Essentially it lets you chain operations together to make a processing pipeline, then point it at a directory of images to process.  You can then save your set of operations to use next time.  A really nice and unique interface, I thought.

I’ve been using Linux to manage, edit and print my digital photographs for a few years now, but it’s only in the last few months that the available software has really come together.  Here’s a quick guide to what I’m using, why I like it, and what the alternatives are

Photo management

A.k.a DAM (digital asset management).  I use DigiKam 0.10 (the official 0.10 version has just been released) because

• It has a very nice, logical user interface with multiple tabbed panes
• It reads metadata nicely from raw files (and will soon be able to write)
• Very quick tag searching
• It’s easy to integrate with other apps (see my post here)
• Manages both raw and jpg files

Alternatives: F-spot, Picassa

RAW conversion

The best software I’ve found for raw conversion is Bibble – currently version 4.10, but looking forward to version 5 which is in development. It’s not open source, but I use it for the following reasons

• Very fast, takes advantage of multiprocessor machines
• A great range of plugins that I couldn’t live without
• Flexible output batches to allow you to customise a really quick workflow
• Integrated noise-reduction software (a simplified version of Noise Ninja)

Alternatives: RawTherapee and RawStudio are both promising open source projects.

Printing

Another piece of non-free software – Turboprint.  Printing has never been particularly easy on Linux, in my opinion, but this piece of software makes it much slicker.

• Fully colour managed printing with custom colour profiles
• Integrates with GIMP
• Gives you ink and printer status updates

Alternatives: Most linux distributions ship with GutenPrint, which takes care of printing on most printers, but the experience isn’t so good, and you have to take care of colour management at the application level.

Any comments about your own workflow?

PS Selling a digital camera? Check out this article on my new blog – 10 tips for selling a digital SLR camera.

In the etsy forums I’ve recommeded the software Inkscape to several people who were looking to make banners, business cards, flyers etc.  There are not many tutorials available for Inkscape, so I thought I would share one – how to make a simple banner like the one below (note the similarity to mine!)

A quick note before we start: I’m going to assume that we have a background image that we want to use, and it’s already been cropped to 760×100 pixels.  The reason for this is that, while Inkscape is great for laying out images, it’s not that great for editing images (hopefully the difference will become clear).  So, crop your image to 760×100 using GIMP/Photoshop/Picassa before starting this tutorial.  If you’re not sure how, just leave a comment saying which software you’re using and I’ll add instructions to future versions of this tutorial. Here’s the background image I’ll be using – pebbles on a beach from a recent walk.

1. Create a new document with the right dimensions

Right-click  here and choose “save link” to save the Etsy banner template file,  then open it in Inkscape.  Alternatively, create a new document (File -> New -> Default) then edit the properties (File->Document Properties) and under Custom Size set the width to 760 and the height to 100, then set the Units to px from the drop-down box.

Because the banner we’re making is quite small, it’s best to view the document at 100% (View->Zoom->Zoom 1:1).

2. Add the background

Go to File>Import and find your background image, then click Open.  You should see your image has been added to the current document, but it’s probably not the right size or in the right place.  Bring up the Transform window by clicking on Object->Transform. The Transform window should show up on the right of your screen. First we’re going to make the background the right size.  Click on the Scale tab, then type 760 in Width and 100 in Height.  Make sure your background image is selected (it should have a dotted box round it) then click Apply.  Your background image should now be the same size as the black rectange which represents the whole document.

Now to centre the background image so that it takes up the whole of the document.  Make sure it’s selected, then bring up the Align and Distribute window by clicking Object->Align and Distribute.  We want the background image to be centred both horizontally and vertically in the page, so make sure Page is selected in the Relative To drop-down box, then click these two symbols.

The background image should jump to its proper place and cover the whole document.

3. Add the center stripe

To add the stripe down the center of the banner we need to draw a rectangle.  Don’t worry about the shap or position – we’ll set those later.  Select the rectangle tool and drag to create a new rectangle.

It will probably be bright blue with a thick black border.  We’ll change that later on; for now, we’ll leave it as it makes it easier to see what we’re doing.  We want the rectangle to be 760 pixels wide (the whole width of the banner) and 50 pixels high (half the height of the banner). Select the rectangle and go back to the Transform window, and enter the width and height in the Scale tab like you did before.  You’ll have to make sure that Scale Proportionally is NOT ticked.  Then use the Align and Distribute window just like to did before, to center the rectangle horizontally and vertically.

You should have a big blue rectangle covering half of your background image. Now to give it that nice transparent effect.  Select the big blue rectangle and click on Object->Fill and Stroke to bring up the (you guessed it) Fill and Stroke window. In the Fill tab, move the R, G and B sliders all the way to the right, to give you a white fill.  Then move the A slider to about 200 to give you the transparency (experiment with this one to find a look you like).

Move to the Stroke Paint tab and click on the X to choose no Stroke.  The black border round the rectangle should disappear, giving you something like this:

4. Add the text

Select the Text tool then click and drag to create a text box.

As with the rectangle, don’t worry about the size or position at this stage.  As soon as you have drawn the box, you should see a flashing cursor in the upper left corner.  Type your text here, then select the text and choose a font and size from the drop down box near the upper left of the screen.

Press F1 to switch to the cursor tool, and you should be able to click and drag your piece of text around.  Instead of trying to position it manually, though, it’s better to use our old friend the Align and Distribute window, exactly as we did for the background image and the rectangle.

5. Export the file as a PNG

You’re done! Save your document (you have been saving after each step, right?) then go to File->Export Bitmap and choose a filename ending in .png.  Upload your new banner to Etsy and see how it looks.  For my example, I noticed that because of the font I used, the ‘g’ and ‘f’ letters were outside the transparent rectangle, so I increased the height to 60 pixels to accommodate them.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for improving this tutorial, please leave them as a comment.

The photo management application for KDE, Digikam, can read most (all?) raw camera formats, making it a very useful tool for cataloguing collections of raw files.  To make your workflow run smoothly, you need to be able to open files in your preferred raw conversion software from within Digikam, which might need a bit of setup. It took me ages to find this online, so I’m posting it here in the hope that others might find this useful. I’ll use the example of adding Bibble Pro, a raw converter that is available for linux. The executable name is bibblepro.

To make bibblepro show up in the open with menu, we have to tell KDE that we want to use this program to open raw photo files.  To do this we need to use the KDE system settings tool.  In (k)ubuntu 8.10, we run the command systemsettings. In other distributions I believe it’s called kcontrol.

Within the system settings tool go to File associations.  You might need to click on the Advanced tab. Click to expand the Image section of the Known Types on the left and select the raw file type you need to open (e.g. x-pentax-pef for Pentax raw files).  Check that the Filename Patterns box contains the correct extensions (.pef and .PEF for Pentax raw files).  In the Application Preference Order box you can see the list of applications that KDE knows can open .pef files. Click the Add button and type the name of your application in the box (e.g. bibblepro) then click OK. You should now see the application listed in the Application Preference Order box. Close the system settings tool and restart Digikam.  Right click on a raw file of the type you specified, and you should see the new application in the Open with menu.

If you need to work with raw files of several different types, you’ll need to add the application to the Preference Order box for several different entries in the Known types.