Useful free applications and utilities.
I thought it would be useful to bring over a topic I originally posted on the old forum which lists a lot of the free applications and utilities that are available to download.
So here is the list from the old forum. Feel free to add more of your own recommendations to the thread.
Graphics Apps
IrFanView - http://www.irfanview.com/ - A free Image viewer utility which is very fast and also allows you to quickly trim and alter images and convert them into other formats. Also includes batch convertion.
Audio Apps
Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ - Free audio editor which has a large range of options and functionality. Based around a wave form editor, it has the ability to edit multitrack compositions, record from any input and export to lots of different formats including MP3 and OGG, as well as lots of filters to clean up and alter audio. These even include hiss and click removal for when sampling in Record and Tape recordings for archive purposes.
CDex - http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ - A great music ripper. A while ago I went through all the different music ripper utilities I could find and thought this one was the best. It is completely free and much faster then any others I tried. It also does a great job of getting the right information about each track from the CDDB database.
MediaMonkey - http://www.mediamonkey.com/ - This is a great Audio/Media library utility. It is very powerful and is a great library manager for managing all your Music files. I looked around for some time at different ones available before decided to use this one. It's much fater then WMP10 at accessing and creating it's database, and it has lots of interface customization and supports aubum art, has a great MP3 tag editor, supports direct playlist to CD burning, can sync with mobile devices and can rip audio too (although I tend to still use CDex for this).
Deliplayer 2 - http://www.deliplayer.com/ - The Windows port of the Amiga mod player Delitracker, this audio player can play most music mod formats from the Amiga and many other systems including the C64 SID chip tune format. Invaluable for any Amiga and retro system fans.
Internet
Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ - Although some still say Opera is better. For me Firefox has been the best Web Browser since it's launch. It is the only browser to render pages based on true HTML compliance and it's extensions structure can increase it's functionality and options way beyond other browsers.
Also see my pinned topic on Firefox extensions to see some of the best additions to this great browser.
Opera - http://www.opera.com - Sometimes more stable than any other browser, it also has a lot of functionality built in that other browsers such as Firefox need extensions for.
FileZilla - FileZilla is a great free FTP client. They also have free FTP Server version of it. I haven't really messed around with the server software but the client is very easy to use, well featured, and stable.
SmartFTP - http://www.smartftp.com - This has been the best ftp client around for many years now. It is the fastest of all I have ever tried, has browser like bookmarks, and a really nice download and upload queueing system.
Flashget - http://www.flashget.com/en/download.htm - This free download manager works very well and is a good utility to have when downloading large files in case your connection times out and you can then resume the download instead of needing to start it again. It can also be integrated into Firefox well using the Flashgot extension.
Putty - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ - This will only be of use to server administrators and web site developers with SSH/Telnet access to their hosting servers. It is a telnet/SHH client to allow you to remotely connect to servers to open shell sessions and control servers directly for administration and backup.
Compression utilities
IZArc - http://www.izarc.org/ - This is the ultimate compression utility. I used to have WinZip, WinRAR and WinACE all installed at once to gain full control over ever type of compression format, but with IZArc I no loner need any of them. It's faster than other compression utilities and aupports all the formats.
WinRAR - http://www.rarlab.com/ - Don't bother installing WinZIP, just install WinRAR instead as it can then handle both rar and zip compression formats.
ZipZag - http://www.zipzag.com/index.html - This is a very advanced archiver utility that can handle over 250 different extension types including Linux and Amiga compression file formats. It can also use Total Commander plugins to expand it even further, giving it the ability to handle extra formats such as ADF, ADZ, D64, DMS, HDF, HDZ, IMG, PP and PPM. So for users needing to handle Amiga files this is very useful
Security
AVG Antivirus from Grisoft - Updated several times a week and completely free. Protects your computer to the limit.
Outpost Firewall - http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpostfree/index.php - I've been using the Pro version of Outpost for a long time now and consider it the best software firewall you can buy (unless you start paying for enterprise level software). For general home use Agnitum also offer a Free version that works perfectly for general computer uses.
Video
D.I.K.O - http://www.vmesquita.com/en/index.htm - A great DivX/XviD to DVD converter.
This package takes a lot of different freeware software and combines it into an easy to use frontend to convert video files into DVD ISOs ready for burning. It does a very nice job and can even add subtitle .sit files into a DVD too. It also supports menus and multiple movies on a single disc if they will fit.
DVD Decrypter - ftp - A great program to rip commercial DVDs. It's also got it's own DVD burning engine and tends to burn DVD ISO images more accurately than both Alcohol and Nero.
It's name is due to its ability to remove all region encoding and copy protection as it rips the disc. Sadly it's development was stopped by the movie industry because of this ability and most, if not all of it's download locations were removed. The good news is I have it on the ftp if you need it http://209.85.62.23/html/emoticons/wink.gif
For certain newer DVDs with tougher copy protection, DVD Decrypter does not work, so you can instead use DVD Fab Decrypter. It works very much the same as DVD Decrypter in that it rips the files of the DVD straight to the hard drive and removes the copy protection and region coding. Its also free.
DVD Shrink - http://www.dvdshrink.org/ - A great utility to copy a large DVD onto a normal 4.7GB DVD-R.
It works by taking an image of the DVD stored on your HD and letting you go through it's contents and recompress it's video into a lower quality to reduce it's file size. You can also delete unwanted language soundtracks and DVD extras to fit the main movie onto the disc easier without losing too much quality.
I tend to use DVD shrink in combination with DVD Decrypter. I first rip the DVD to the HD with Decrypter, then use DVD Shrink to reduce its size to fit a blank DVD, then burn the smaller ISO to a disc using DVD Decrypter again.
DVD Identifier - http://dvd.identifier.cdfreaks.com/ - This is a piece of software i have found very useful over the last couple of years. Especially with DVD writing. It offers a reliable method of accurately identifying the disc's real manufacturer.
DVD discs are manufacturers but a small number of dye companies around the world (Ritek, Prodisc... etc). These discs are then bought by the actual disc sellers and branded with their own disc labelling and packaging. The quality of a disc is purely down to which dye the disc is using, not the branding on the discs label. DVD Identifier will tell you who manufactured the actual disc's dye.
Why do you need to know this? New discs released might be using a new dye type from a certain manufacturer. Your DVD writer might be using a firmware version which doesn't know this new dye so will not let the disc be burnt at it's full speed. Once you know the dye make and version you can then look for newer firmware for your DVD writer to allow the disc to write at full speed.
Another reason is reliability. If I am using a brand of blank disc and it works really well with hardly any coasters then I take note of it's dye. That way when i go to buy more discs it won't matter which brand I buy if it has the same dye make. Using this method you can save money as you don't necessarily have to purchase the same brand disc again.
Equally if you find a pack of discs are not writing well and keep failing or producing read errors when you use them after burning, then you can look up the dye make and avoid it next time.
VirtualDub - http://www.virtualdub.org/ - This is a free video editing application. It's not on par with commercial offerings but is still good enough for basic capture and editing of video files.
VirtualDubMod - http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/ - Based on VirtualDub, this takes the program and adds additional support for extra file formats, as well as multiple audio stream support. It also works with another free package called AviSynth for extra file support.
MPEG Streamclip - http://www.squared5.com/ - This is a converter for QuickTime files, MPEG-1/2/4 files and transport streams (.ts and .m2t). It provides high-quality conversion of movies and MPEGs into several useful formats. It is compatible with most editing applications and DVD authoring tools.
You can use this to Play, Edit, Convert, and Export video between formats.
And the beta adds support for PVR, TPo, VDR and more types of MOV files.
As well as all of the utilities I posted in the original thread, thanks has to also go to JT, PG, and LowercaseE for their suggests which are included above. Please add more if you have any.
Misc
ReadPlease - ReadPlease is a neat utility not unlike the Amiga "Say" program. Its got male and female voices as well as different nationalities and accents. Some sound more realistic than others but most all of them sound more "real" than the Say program. Its fun to copy crazy song lyrics (like Cannibal Corpse or something) into the program and then play them back using a female accent. Not really a useful utility, but it does provide some good entertainment.
