UPDATE: OUR TEAM HAS CHOSEN AUDACITY FOR OUR FOSS PROJECT
My teams first task is to find a FOSS project to work with. So we each set out to look for some potential candidates. Through surfing the web to look up information on open source projects, I came across a website called Ohloh.
Ohloh is a free, public directory of Free and Open Source Software and the contributors who create and maintain it...Ohloh is not a forge — it does not host projects and code. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and analytics and search services. By connecting to project source code repositories, analyzing both the code’s history and ongoing updates, and attributing those updates to specific contributors, Ohloh can provide reports about the composition and activity of project code bases, and aggregate this data to track the changing demographics of the FOSS world.About Ohloh
Using it I searched for FOSS projects based on certain criteria such as: project activity, project popularity, and programming languages the project is written in. The following is a rundown of the three projects I looked at as possible choices for our team's project:
1. Audacity
Audacity is a free open source digital audio editor and recording computer software application. Audacity was started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University and had an initial release on May 28th, 2000. Audacity is now in its 2.0.5 version and still has a very active community, with over 70,000 lines of code being added this past November. It is very simplistic compared to proprietary audio editors (i.e. Pro Tools, Garage Band, FL Studios) but can do complex things once you get to know the software. Audacity also supports 32-bit VST (Virtual Studio Technology) and LADSPA (Linux Audio Developers Simple Plugin API) plugins, but not 64-bit or instrument VST plugins. I looked at this FOSS because I have worked with Audacity before in another computer science class as well as for personal use.
2. Ad-Block Plus
Ad-Block Plus is a Firefox extension to remove advertisements from websites and can block other things, like tracking, as well. Adblock Plus was started by Wladimir Palant in 2006 but had spurge in activity around October 2008. Adblock Plus itself has no functionality, in the sense that it does not block anything until it is "told" what to do by its filter lists. These filter lists are essentially an extensive set of rules, which tell Adblock Plus which elements of websites to block. Out of the box, two filter lists are enabled: An ad-blocking list selected based on your language, The Acceptable Ads exception list. You are free to disable these lists, add others or create your own. The reasons I looked at this FOSS is because I use this extension on Firefox myself and it is written mostly in JavaScript, a language I am familiar with.
3. FLAC
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files just like you would an MP3 file. FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations. I have used the FLAC file format in conjunction with Audacity and would love to learn more about how audio file formats work to play back sound. Even though is it written in C, a language I'm not that familiar with, I will have to learn C for an Operating Systems class I am taking this semester as well.
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