A lot of very cool projects get announced each year.  And almost as many seem to peter out and die before ever really getting started.

But that is not so with Buzztard.

Buzztard is an open source project inspired by the Jeskola Buzz music studio software for Windows (which stopped development back in 2000).

The goal of Buzztard is to provide an intuitive way to create music… using just the application itself (a computer with speakers doesn’t hurt either).  Just check out the screenshot to get an idea of how this works.

This is similar (in some ways) to many of the tracker-ish music synthesizers out there.

About a week ago, the team released Buzztard 0.4 adding, among other things, waveform support and an improved look and feel.

There are other applications out there that provide similar functionality on Linux desktops.  Notably BEAST… unfortunately BEAST has not been updated since 2006.

From the looks of things, the next release of Buzztard (0.5) is set to be pretty damned full featured.  It’s already usable in this 0.4 build… but that 0.5 proposed feature-set looks awesome.

If you are running openSUSE or Paldo… you’re in luck, there are pre-made packages available.  Otherwise, well, you’re going to need to bust out your l33t haXorz skillz and build it yourself.

I want to take a moment to tip my hat at the Buzztard developers.  The more quality multi-media software I see, like this, for Linux… the happier I get.