The Best Free Software – Part 6
Audio: foobar2000, Songbird, Audacity, Tunes, MediaMonkey, CopyTrans Manager
Video: VLC Media Player, Handbrake, VirtualDub Freemake Video Converter
Audio
foobar2000
foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.
Main features:
* Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND… and more with additional components.
* Gapless playback.
* Full unicode support.
* Easily customizable user interface layout.
* Advanced tagging capabilities.
* Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
* Full ReplayGain support.
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
* Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.
Songbird
Songbird comes to one of the most successful tablets on the market. More than a handset or a player — a great gadget for Android and Songbird.
Features:
Media Importing, Add media to Songbird by importing from your file system or iTunes, Media Playback, Songbird supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac, GStreamer, Songbird now uses GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms, Smart Playlists, Create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set, Web Browser, Multi-language Support.
Songbird includes an integrated web browser with features like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and more, Cross Platform, Songbird runs on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Audacity
Audacity doesn’t stand out for its interface. At first sight one wonders if this program is really going to be that easy to use. In fact, the interface sometimes makes it really hard to work with your tracks, especially when you zoom in on them for a more comfortable editing session. Besides this, I found myself constantly right-clicking on the working area and the tracks too, waiting for some handy context menu to appear but nothing came out.
After these few first minutes struggling with the interface, it’s time to begin having fun. You can open as many tracks as you want by just dragging and dropping audio files onto the program’s interface. Use your mouse to select the fragment you’re interested in and begin working with it. You can perform the basic editing actions (cut, copy, paste) or apply effects to it. The zoom tool helps a lot when selecting small areas, as well as the chronometers found at the bottom of the program’s window. Obviously, you can use the integrated player to check how your work sounds before saving the project.
Download Audacity Here – WINDOWS
Tunes
iTunes is a free application for your Mac or PC. It organizes and plays your digital music and video on your computer. It syncs all your media with your iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. And it’s a store on your computer, iPod touch, iPhone, and Apple TV that has everything you need to be entertained. Anywhere. Anytime.
Mac users are often regarded as very loyal customers, but that’s because they have very good reasons, such as iTunes, to stick to Apple products.
iTunes has become one of the most widely spread music managers today. The release of the iPhone and the new iPod models has only contributed to increase this popularity, thanks to the seamless synchronization of contents between the computer and your device.
MediaMonkey
MediaMonkey is the music manager for serious music collectors and iPod users. It catalogs CDs, AAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, MP3 and other audio files, including contemporary and classical music, audiobooks, podcasts, etc. It offers multiple tools for looking up and editing tags, and an automated library organizer to organize files on the hard drive. It includes a CD ripper, CD/DVD Burner, and audio converter for saving music, and advanced playlisting for creating music mixes.
Its player automatically adjusts volume levels and supports a Party mode that locks the UI for use at public events. It syncs tracks, playlists, and podcasts to portable audio devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, MP3 Phones, and other devices, and supports hundreds of scripts, plug-ins and visualizations to extend its functionality further.
CopyTrans Manager
CopyTrans Manager is a fast, light and free iTunes replacement for iPod and iPhone/iPod Touch. Organize and manage your iPod, iPhone music without iTunes with this perfect free iTunes replacement. Quickly and easily add or delete iPod songs and iPod videos. Improved user experience thanks to new interface and built-in iPod music player. Edit iPod song tag information. Create and edit playlists on your computer or directly on your iPod or iPhone/iPod Touch. This iTunes alternative can be installed directly on your iPod to manage your iPod on the go.Fully compatible with all iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone (including 3GS).
Download CopyTrans Manager here!
Video
VLC Media Player
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, …) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.
It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn’t need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.
Download VLC Media Player here!
Handbrake
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.
Supported Sources: Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted–protection methods including CSS are not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), and some .VOB and .TS files. Most any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.
Outputs: File format: MP4 and MKV, Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding), Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 and DTS pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks).
Download Handbrake here – Windows! | Download Handbrake – Mac! | Download Handbrake – Linux!
VirtualDub Freemake Video Converter
VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
Download VirtualDub (x32bit) here! |Download VirtualDub (x64bit) here!