OSSPACK

Traverso DAW (digital audio workstation) is an easy to use, open source multitrack audio recording and editing suite with a great user interface. You'll find yourself doing more work in half the time thanks to the unique interface geared toward both the home user and profession musician; instead of endless menus and submenus, Traverso uses both the mouse and the keyboard together for precision and speed.

The consistent, rather stark interface and the many tools let the user work without the need to learn a lot of applications. Learning Traverso is as easy as using it! Audio sources are kept in their original state as filters are applied resulting in non-destructive editing. The "History" feature allows for unlimited changes and lets the user create as many tracks as desired; Tracks supports one or two channels and any number of mono or stereo audio clips you need.

Traverso's realtime audio processing gives smooth, uninterrupted playback of audio as well as superior recording. Read/writes are accomplish with lockless ringbuffers for the very best process execution, resulting in low latency and high performance. The on-the-fly, transparent sample rate conversion means the end of converting your audio files to your audio card's sample rate. This feature saves time and aggravation as well as opening new creative possibilities.

Traverso has impressed users with its stability and long list of exceptional features.

Here's a great little multi-tracker for a little less than usual due to a factory misprint!

phpBB is open source flat style forum software written in PHP programming language. It supports most major database systems, enabling smooth and problem-free installation. Once installed, the forum can be set up in minutes and the large customizable features won't take much longer than that to set up.

phpBB has a templating system that keeps it separate from HTML code to make customizing easy. There are different styles in the database to download as well as add-ons such as rank images, avatars and more. The styles have been put through intensive validation processes in order to minimize installation and ensure quality.

Administrators will like the easy to use, modular design panel that lets them spend a fraction of the usual time on admin tasks. Custom profile fields, ranking, smilies and unlimited levels of sub-forums are just some of the features that phpBB provides to make your forum everything you want it to be. Forum admins will also appreciate security features such as permanent and temporary bans, word censors, user logging, warnings, blacklisting and post moderation.

Members will enjoy the abilities of single and multiple posting, opinion polls, instant messaging capability, address books and a searchable member list that can be confined to registered used if desired. Each member can customize the appearance of the forum to their own preferences.

phpBB provides support through a message forum and IRC with international support that's multilingual.

Osalt.com launches a new category for educational and science related software. This new category will list free open source software alternatives to proprietary products.

The software listed will be for students as well as school administrators. Also there will be software that focuses on elementary school and high school (k12), college and university. Simulation software and educational games will also be included in the new category.

You can access the new category through the categories or directly here.

Today we launch with four open source products - but hope that we will soon be able to add many more. The four products are:
Moodle
Sakai
FlightGear
Octave

Enjoy our new offering - and please let us known if you have any comments or suggestions for more open source software alternatives.

Octave, a freely redistributable software, is used for numerical computation with an interactive environment. Students pick up the basics quickly, comfortably using it within just a few hours. High-level language application intended primarily for numerical computations and other numerical experiments using a language that is compatible with Matlab. It is customizable with user-defined functions written in Octave's language or C++, C, Fortran or others.

Octave is not a utility limited to the classroom. The courseware package can be used for many other things from chemical reactor design problems, to enabling students to solve realistic problems. It's used worldwide in commercial applications, research and teaching. Octave also keeps pace with Matlab, adding functions as they are developed.

Octave can do arithmetic for real, complex or integer-valued scalars and matrices, it solves sets of nonlinear algebraic equations, integrates functions over finite and infinite intervals, and integrates systems of ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It can be run on nearly any platform and has LSODE and DASSL built into the interpreter.

Octave provides support via a mailing list for questions not adequately dealt with in the 575 page manual. The interpreter works in along with gnuplot and Grace software, creating two-and three dimensional plots, graphs, and charts that can be saved or printed.

Since Octave was built to be compatible with Matlab it shares many of the features. These include powerful built-in math functions, extensive function libraries and built-in support for complex numbers. With its user-friendliness, this open source application has proven to be very useful to teach programming to students who haven't studied computer science.