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Audacity
Audacity is an audacious, free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:. Recording Audacity can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from cassette tapes, vinyl records, or minidiscs. With some sound cards, it can also capture streaming audio.
Editing
Effects
Windows' Sound Recorder, on the other hand, just, er, records sounds ... and looks like this:
Sad, really. :(
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Ashampoo Burning Studio
Ashampoo (strange name, brilliant software), make excellent products. They do all they can to promote them as well, including making earlier versions available to the public free!
Their Burning Studio software (available here) is all the software you'll ever need to take care of burning your data to disk (translation: committing your audio tracks and/or files, etc, to disk for permanent storage). I've used a few different CD/DVD burning programs over the years, and this is one of the best (no, actually, the best). Very easy to use, very straightforward, and absolutely dependable, which is more than can be said for some others, more well known. Here's a description from their site: Multi-disc file backup and restore on CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs; create compressed backup archives with powerful password protection; split archives automatically across multiple CDs, DVDs or Blu-ray discs; restore archive contents to their original locations; integrated Audio CD ripper store your audio tracks as WMA or WAV files; new option for setting the number of copies you want to burn (available for all disc formats); discs can now be verified immediately without being ejected first (if the drive supports this feature); numerous other small improvements that make the program easier to use and more effective; burn files and folders on data CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray discs; burn Audio CDs from WAV, MP3, FLAC, WMA and Ogg Vorbis files; burn MP3-CDs from your MP3 files; burn Video DVD, Video CD (VCD) or Super Video CD (S-VCD); create and burn CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc images; burn speed and other options can all be set automatically. Free Ashampool programs There are several other free programs available from Ashampoo. If you fancy any of them, get them from here: They include:
I'm not suggesting you actually need any of these, just letting you know they're available. Check on their site to read more about the programs and what they do. |
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Rocketdock
Fed up with all those icons spoiling your nice clean desktop? Use Rocketdock and they'll all be consigned to a clever little auto-hiding docking facility, which you can have docked wherever you choose - top of the screen, bottom, right edge or left. (Note: once you've installed Rocketdock, the icons only need a single click, not a double click.) Actually, the original icons will still be there onscreen as well, which kinda spoils the effect. But don't worry, it's easy to clear them away. Just right-click on the desktop and select 'Arrange Icons By' in the menu that pops up, and then, from the flyout menu click on 'Show Desktop Icons' and they'll disappear from sight. They'll still be there actually, but not visible, which is handy if you need them at some time in the future (which is quite likely). If that happens, just go the same route I just outlined, only this time, when you click on 'Show Desktop Icons', they'll reappear. Magic! |
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Ccleaner
Ccleaner cleans the crap out of your computer system (that's the 'C' in Ccleaner!). It scans for unused, unnecessary files and zaps 'em, and in double-quick time. Here's a list of its features from the download site:
Features CCleaner is our system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! Additionally, it has a feature that uninstalls programs (and does it faster than Microsoft's 'Add or Remove Programs' tool), a registry cleaner (you don't have to understand much about it, just let it do its job), and a view of your Startup list, in which you can delete or disable things that are not needed (the fewer things you have automatically starting up with Windows, the faster your system runs). PC World "CCleaner searches through a number of programs and removes useless files. It's highly configurable, allowing you to select which problems to look for and which items to ignore." LifeHacker "You might be surprised at how much disk space it can recover - in fact, it managed to clear out 1.6GB of crap from my PC." "Does the job that advertises it would do. I don't need much more when it comes to cleaning my computer." |
Adobe Reader
Adobe Reader is the industry standard software for displaying documents onscreen. Their PDF software is probably on 90% or more of computers worldwide. You can create a document with a word processing program, but you wouldn't want to display it that way to your readers (unless it was just a letter). If you've put together a report, or an e-book, you want your readers to view it in the best possible way. Adobe Reader provides that.
Reader can display the document in various ways, and you can zoom in, or make the text as wide as the page, view two pages at once (like a physical book layout), etc, just to suit your reading style. You can bookmark parts of the document, and view the chapters or sections in a sidebar (or dismiss it from the screen), and if you create a document in Adobe Reader you can be sure people everywhere will be able to view it in the best possible way. PDF, by the way, stands for Portable Document Format. Download the latest version here.
Reader can display the document in various ways, and you can zoom in, or make the text as wide as the page, view two pages at once (like a physical book layout), etc, just to suit your reading style. You can bookmark parts of the document, and view the chapters or sections in a sidebar (or dismiss it from the screen), and if you create a document in Adobe Reader you can be sure people everywhere will be able to view it in the best possible way. PDF, by the way, stands for Portable Document Format. Download the latest version here.
FastStone Image Viewer
If you need a decent image editor program to view your photos, you can get a really good free one from here. With this program you can view your photos individually, you can view them in a slideshow (to which you can add music if you like), you can zoom in and out, you can resize them, you can correct 'red eye', you can add a border, you can add text, and speech bubbles, and thought bubbles, you can rename the images, you can adjust the colouring, brightness, contrast, etc, and you can crop the pictures to cut away any unsightly bits you'd rather lose. You can have the thumbnail images as big or as small as you want, you can have the background any colour that suits you, the list of options just goes on and on. Everything you could want from an image-editor, and it's all free with FastStone.
There are some other very good free ones, such as IrfanView, but I'm familiar with FastStone, and I know it lacks nothing in terms of features.
There are some other very good free ones, such as IrfanView, but I'm familiar with FastStone, and I know it lacks nothing in terms of features.
Calibre
Calibre is free software to help you keep all your ebooks organised. You might think you don't need it, but if you start to accumulate ebooks you're going to have to find a way to keep them organised or things get a bit messy, and you won't come up with a better way than this.
Calibre is getting more popular all the time due to the fact that it is the perfect solution to this problem. It sorts ebooks by title, author, rating, and more, plus you can tag them as you like. It will convert ebook formats for you easily and painlessly. It will even sync with some ebook readers, or you can choose to use the built-in viewer to read your ebooks on your computer screen. |
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