Useful and Free Softwares
It’s been almost two years since I last cleaned and reformatted my desktop pc. Every time I reformat, I also re-install all the softwares I always use. Recently, I browsed my start menu and found out that there are a few programs/softwares that really stick its usefulness to me. Here are my list of useful and often free softwares.
Irfan View is a free graphic viewer and simple photo editor for the pc. I use this as an alternative to Photoshop when only doing simple image manipulations. It supports more than 100+ image formats, including common ones such as JPG/JPEG, GIF, Animated GIF, BMP, PNG, ANI/CUR, ICO, and even PSD (Photoshop Format). This is not only restricted to viewing images but you can also view audio and video format here using its plugins. Supported audio and video formats are: AIF, AU, SND, MED, MID/MIDI, MP3, OGG, RA, WAV, ASF, AVI, MOV, MP4, MPG, MPEG, WMA, WMV. (Freeware)
MediaCoder is a universal audio and video transcoder. I use this mainly to convert batch MP3 to WAV to MP3. I still haven’t used the full potential of the program, but it serves my purpose of converting audios. It also supports a lot of audio and video formats for converting. (Freeware / Open Source)
Media Player Classic, I like this because it can play almost all video formats even FLVs (Flash Videos). It seeks out the codecs in your computer so that you can play any supported video files from your pc. I mainly use this to play DVD/DVD-9 videos. And it loads faster than WMP and consumes a lot less resources. This is based on the old windows media player source. (Freeware / Open Source)
Winamp, the ultimate media player. This is the most used software in my pc. Playing all my MP3’s and saving them into playlists. It also supports many audio and video formats, popular ones like MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, and ACC. You can also play streaming files here. I use this as my primary audio player, while Media Player Classic is my primary video player. (Freeware)
VirtualDub, this is a software that I keep installing and re-installing. I keep installing it again and again because when my other video editors didn’t get the right process I want, I turn to VirtualDub. I didn’t use Media Coder to convert videos because I’m having problems setting up the right properties for transcoding. VirtualDub is the simplest way to convert videos, that is to AVI to say the least. VirtualDub was originally designed as a video capture utility. I use it to convert various format videos to AVI, using xvid codec for clean, high quality, and small sized videos. (Freeware / Open Source)
Directory Lister, useful in creating a list (TXT or HTML) or the files and folders in the selected directory. I use this to create a huge list of my backup files in my DVD/CD backups so that I can view all of the files located in each CD/DVD, saving me the time consuming task of placing each of them one-by-one on my dvd drive. (Freeware)
Filezilla, the FTP software I use to upload my files on the web. Not much to say, but it does it work fast and efficient. (Freeware / Open Source)
Firefox, the most secure and feature-packed internet browser. The only browser you’ll ever use. Nuff said! (Freeware / Open Source)
FeedReader a feed aggregator for rss and atom feeds. In Layman’s term this is an RSS reader that also supports atom feeds. I just recently installed this software and all I can say is WOW. Instead of using online feed readers such as Google Reader or My Yahoo, I used a desktop based software so that I can still read the feeds while I’m offline. (Freeware)
Azureus, a bit-torrent client written in Java. The only software I use for downloading torrent based files. The only downside is that it uses a lot of system memory. But all in all, the program works perfectly, even recovering files caused by a sudden blackout. (Freeware / Open Source)
Frostwire, peer-2-peer client and downloader. Previously I used Limewire, but when Frostwire came out, I switched. Frostwire, assuming from its interface, uses the same source code as Limewire. I only use this when I’m looking for a specific MP3 music to download. But I turn to Azureus when I’m downloading batches of MP3 albums. (Freeware / Open Source)
From the list, most of my softwares are video and audio editors and transcoders. I invest a lot of my time (when I’m using my pc) on multimedia applications. Since I like music and videos, I studied its different formats and ways of transcoding and re-encoding them. Other media related software I use, but didn’t list because its not free, are: Audio Catalyst, Cool Edit 2000, GIF Movie Gear, Riva FLV Encoder, ImTOO 3GP Video Converter, Fraps, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Corel Photo Album 6, Nero, Ulead DVD Movie Factory 6, Windows Media Encoder, ImTOO YouTube Video Converter, SwishMax, Adobe Premier, AMV Converter.
How about you, what’s you most used free software?
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