I hope all my readers enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I've been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you've been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don't worry if your budget's busted - it's all free software, you can't beat these deals.

Dave needs a new 64-bit Linux for his primary audio production machine. What shall he do ? Read on to learn how and why he decided upon the Arch Linux distribution.

The Book

In the first part of this series I introduced SuperCollider3 and its most basic operations. Now let's make things a little more interesting by adding a little randomization, a neat GUI, and some MIDI control. Creating A GUI

Some interesting items showed up under Dave's Christmas tree, including a new book by some old friends, a laptop keyboard (music, not QWERTY), and an excellent Linux audio plugin for high-quality reverb. Dave must have been a very good boy last year.

This article is a brief report on some of the current news and activities going on in the world of Ardour, Paul Davis's superb open-source digital audio workstation (DAW). What began as a labor of love has become one of the most significant projects in the world of Linux audio and in the more general world of Linux applications development.

Wine runs many Windows programs nicely these days, including more and more serious music applications. Dave profiles some of those applications running under the latest & greatest Wine 1.2

In this conclusion to my survey of algorithmic music composition systems for Linux I present Christopher Ariza's athenaCL.

In this part of the series we complete our tour of the Grace algorithmic composition environment.

Dave leads a guided tour of three Linux software packages designed for making music by the numbers.

There's always something noteworthy happening in Linux audio development. This week's news includes reports about a new Linux audio blog, music made by particle acceleration, how to use a laptop as a virtual music stand, synth emulation from the terminal command prompt, and watching the Linux Audio Conference on-line.

This week we look at two popular MIDI control devices for use with Linux sound & music software.

Part 1 of this series introduced arpeggiators in general and profiled the QMidiArp application. This week we conclude our survey with a look at two more arpeggiators for Linux musicians: Hypercyclic and Arpage.