Digg Founder, Kevin Rose Joins Google!

Wow! I remember Kevin as a young kid on TechTV back in the day… now he’s a millionaire and moving to Google. Dewd.

Kevin Rose Joins Google

Digg founder Kevin Rose has been hired by Google, according to sources close to the situation.

Rose’s mobile app incubator Milk yesterday announced it was shutting down its only product, Oink.

Google is not outright buying or ‘acquiring’ Milk, the sources explicitly said, but Rose and some others from the company have been hired. It’s not clear what will happen to Milk after Rose joins Google.

UPDATE: More people familiar with the deal said the rest of the Milk team is joining Google, with employees netting $1 million to $2 million each. although I’m still trying to nail down the value of the overall transaction. Milk investors are getting their initial investment money back plus a little extra, sources said.

Google declined to comment, and Rose did not reply to multiple requests.

Rose’s first day at Google is to be this Monday, the sources said.

Rose has an avid online following, stemming from his days as a host on TechTV and the long-running podcast ‘Diggnation.’ Though Oink — which was a local recommendations app — may not have succeeded, it was able to hit 150,000 downloads in its first month.

That kind of ongoing fan engagement could be a boon to Google+, which has been criticized for low engagement and tricky user accounting.”

Audacity – The Best Free and Open Source Audio Editor at 2.0!

This is one of the best, most useful, and most used (by me) utility ever! Audacity! Universally touted and used by both amateurs and professionals, this great editor is now at the full blown version 2.0! No longer in beta! Awesome! Get it!

Audacity 2.0

“Audacity 2.0 is our current version. It has dozens of new features, developed in the 1.3 series. It replaces all previous versions, especially 1.2.6 and 1.3.14. See New Features in 1.3 for changes during the 1.3 series. See also Release Notes for more details.

Some of the major changes in 2.0.0 over 1.2.6 are:

Many effects significantly improved, especially Equalization, Noise Removal and Normalize. Vocal Remover now included plus GVerb on Windows and Mac. VAMP analysis plug-ins now supported.

Improved label tracks with Sync-Lock Tracks feature in the Tracks Menu. Multiple clips per track. Tracks and selections can be fully manipulated using the keyboard. Many more keyboard shortcuts.

New Device Toolbar to manage inputs and outputs. Timer Record feature. New Mixer Board view with per-track VU meters.

Automatic Crash Recovery in the event of abnormal program termination.

Fast ‘On-Demand’ import of WAV/AIFF files if read directly from source. FLAC now fully supported. Added support for optional FFmpeg library for import/export of AC3/M4A/WMA and import of audio from video files.

Interface

Fixed playback speed and synchronization problems when dragging clips or tracks between tracks having different sample rates.

(Windows) Removed a crash risk where shortcuts could be used to record or import in one project while importing or exporting in another.

Imports and Exports

Fixed crashes when changing the sample format of read-directly WAV or AIFF files using the Track Drop-Down Menu.

Fixed a crash importing MP3 files that had duplicate metadata tags (this is a bug in current libsndfile which has been patched in Audacity; MP3 files mislabeled as WAV which have duplicate tags will still crash Audacity on Linux if Audacity has been compiled against an affected version of system libsndfile).

Fixed an issue where excessively high or corrupted sample values in the audio could corrupt exports from the start of the problem for the rest of the file, and could corrupt the rest of the project.
(Linux) Fixed Audacity could not be compiled against FFmpeg 0.7.x and 0.8.x.

Effects and Analysis

Fixed crash on launch when using “Ambisonic Decoders (PC)” VST plug-ins and other plug-ins that enable additional floating point exceptions.

Fixed Plot Spectrum background could be transparent on some machines.

Bug fixes for Click Track, High Pass, Low Pass and Vocal Remover.

Chirp, Tone and Silence generators now remember their settings.

Other miscellaneous bug fixes

Changes and Improvements

New Interface preference to show the track name in the display (this is off by default).
Longer default Playback preference for effects preview and preview before cut.
Restored use of Page Up and Page Down to scroll horizontally.”