Harmattan is a set of conky themes that display a desktop widget on Ubuntu desktop with information of date and time, weather forecast, network speed, and system resource usage.
For those who want to try this conky theme, here’s a step by step how to setup guide:
1. First of all, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and install conky if you don’t have it via command:
Many moons ago I covered a neat audio tool called PulseEffects, which made it easy to modify the sound output of any app on a global or per-app basis.
As you may infer from the name, PulseEffects was built around and designed for PulseAudio. Most major Linux distributions have switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire for their audio handling.
Enter Easy Effects, a successor to PulseEffects that sports a modern GTK4 interface, and an expanded set of features that enable to function as a powerful audio effects processor for PipeWire applications. It offers an equalizer, limiter, and compressor (among others) and a built-in spectrum analyser.
Want a system-wide equalizer? You got one!
Thus, Easy Effects works with anything that makes sound on Ubuntu — be it videos you stream from YouTube or Amazon Prime in Firefox, sound from native applications like music players, through to the immersive soundtracks in your favourite Linux games on Steam.
You can apply equalizer adjustments to music played on Ubuntu in your favourite music player (e.g., Spotify) without affecting ALL of audio on your system. Similarly, you could apply an effect that does affect all your system audio, e.g., to unlocking richer sound from your hardware.
Effects will only affect the apps you want
In addition to sculpting sound output, Easy Effects is able to apply audio effects to sound input (e.g., microphone). This is a great way to add real-time effects to audio in a call, stream, presentation, or podcast. Or, in my case, just to amuse yourself!
Effects (usually, though they may vary by distro) available OOTB include:
Auto gain
Bass enhancer
Bass loudness
Compressor
Convolver
Crossfeed
Crystalizer
De-esser
Delay
Echo Canceller
Equalizer
Exciter
Filters (various)
Gate
Limiter
Loudness
Maximizer
Multiband compressor
Multiband gate
Noise reduction
Pitch
Reverberation
Speech Processor
Stereo tools
As well as having lots of control over each effect you’re also in control of the effects order, and you can turn off any effect at any time without removing it (and losing your modifications), and save settings to re-use at a later date.
High Quality Presets Available
Now, I am not an audio expert. I don’t really know what all the switches and sliders and effects in this app do — but thankfully, I don’t need to.
Pre-made audio presets are available to download from the developer’s EasyPulse repo. Simply download a config, load it into the app, and bam, you can instantly benefit from audio optimisations made by someone who knows what they’re doing!
Install Easy Effects on Ubuntu
You can install Easy Effects on Ubuntu direct from the repos in Ubuntu 22.10. This is recommended as it ensures the version of the app you install plays nice with the version of PipeWire on your system. Run a sudo apt install easyeffects to get it.
If you fancy fiddling with the most recent release, or on other versions of Ubuntu, you can get Easy Effects on Flathub. I tried this build on Ubuntu 22.10 and received a warning that my PipeWire version was too old to play nice with the app — I ignored this and it worked fine for me, but YMMV.
PreSonus has made Studio One, their powerful digital audio workstation, available on Linux for the very first time!
Studio One is a (closed-source) all-in-one DAW that lets you
create music from scratch using virtual instruments, loops, and
composer tools; capture audio from connected instruments and other audio
equipment; and mix, master, and export compositions to professional
standards.
It offers a fully-featured multi multitrack recording and editing
environment where you can record, arrange, and edit row after row of
audio and MIDI tracks; and use advanced automation, effect chains, and
plugins to sculpt, manipulate, and play round with how ‘sound’ sounds.
Studio One can handle more than just music
I’ll admit most of this DAW’s features are lost on me as I’m not a
music producer. But if you are, if you’re a musician, a podcast maker,
or someone wanting to amp up their audio workflow using the same tools
the “pros” use, Studio One is worth looking in to.
Studio One joins Bitwig, Tracktion Waveform, and REAPER, and FOSS faves Ardour and Audacity,
in catering to music makers on Linux. While preferences towards
proprietary software differ, seeing yet another big-name DAW add
official support for Linux is, to my mind, a big deal.
Get Studio One for Linux (Beta)
Studio One 6.5 on Ubuntu 23.04
The Studio One 6.5 Linux beta explicitly supports Ubuntu 23.04 with
Wayland only. It also requires an Intel Core i3 or AMD A10 processor (or
better), a Vulkan 1.1-compatible graphics card, and a fully functional
JACK audio server.
ProSonus isn’t providing any official support for the Linux beta
right now, and there are a slew of known issues and feature limitations,
most of which are noted on the Studio One Linux support page.
Although Studio One is not free software it does offer a free tier
called “Prime”. This is (surprisingly) liberal, with unlimited audio and
MIDI tracks and access to a decent selection of effects. It’s just not
easy to find – so you’ll have to sign up and select a free demo first.
Beyond that, a $99 ‘Artist’ edition ads in more tools and allows you
to use 3rd-party VSTs and AU plug-ins; or you can opt for a Studio One+
subscription to access ‘Professional’, which includes costly effects
like Melodyne, cloud storage for projects, and access to masterclasses and online content.
If you’re interested in sampling Studio One to see how well it runs on Linux — and you really
do need a good computer to get the most from it — do take advantage of
the free plan/demo first (and be aware that features/apps in other plans
may not work on Linux anyway).
To download the Linux build sign-up for a MyPreSonus account (free), select the free 30-day Pro demo option in your account settings1, then download the .DEB file from your account page (and any of the .soundset files you think you want/are available to you).
Then install like you would any other DEB (the app requires a number
of Qt dependencies and online activation during first run, so make sure
you’re online when you’re setting it up).
Flacon extracts individual tracks from one big audio file containing the entire album of music and saves them as separate audio files. To do this, it uses information from the appropriate CUE file. Besides, Flacon makes it possible to conveniently revise or specify tags both for all tracks at once or for each tag separately.
Features: Supported input formats: WAV, FLAC, APE, WavPack, True Audio (TTA) Supported out formats: FLAC, WAV, WavPack, AAC, OGG or MP3 Replay Gain analysis: ALBUM-gain and TRACK-gain modes Multi-threaded conversion process Automatic character set detection for CUE files Generation of the pertrack CUE file in the output dir
Ubuntu
Ubuntu users can use repository at launchpad. Open up a terminal and input these commands:
A major update to Tube Converter is now available.
If you’re not familiar with this GTK4/libadwaita app, it’s a GUI tool
that makes it easy to download videos from YouTube (assuming you have
permission, etc) and a number of other popular video streaming sites.
Tube Converter is powered by the popular yt-dlp engine,
providing a sleek, user-friendly front-end to many of that tool’s
features. It lets you download multiple videos at a time in a variety of
formats, including MP4 and WEBM, and audio-only MP3, FLAC, and WAV.
Latest Tube Converter Features
There have been a couple of sizeable updates to Tube Converter of late (including a C# rewrite) and that trend continues. Tube Converter v2023.5.0 gets a brand new backend that, the developer of the app says, greatly improves its stability — and we all appreciate that.
Clear completed downloads
Additionally, the app now provides options to stop all downloads;
retry all failed downloads; and clear all queued downloads. These are
useful on their own, but combined with the pre-existing queue features,
make managing all downloads, active, failed, and completed, easier.
If you’re keen to download videos at a specific resolution you’ll appreciate that Tube Converter now lets you pick specific resolutions for video downloads instead of giving you transcribed qualities of Best, Good, Worst, etc.
Select resolution when downloading a video
Want to take Tube Converter for a ride?
The recommended way to get the app is to install Tube Converter from Flathub
as this supports pretty much every modern Linux distro out there,
though if you’re on a Linux distro that supports it you can also get it from the AUR, and a Tube Converter snap is available from Canonical’s Snap Store.
For years I have struggled getting my Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 802.11AC NIC USB stick to work on Linux. Below are how to enable these drivers. I got the wireless USB stick on eBay and it comes with an install disk. But the installation was just too technical. Below are the how to terminal commands to enable this. Now I can enjoy the 200GB download speeds my ISP is providing. Enjoy.
Note: For my Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 802.11AC NIC USB stick, the commands are:
