Fields of Gold

I’ve only recently opened Eva Cassidy for myself by browsing Amazon. I liked the clips they have for pre-listening and ordered 4 CDs: Eva by Heart, Time After Time, Imagine, Live at Blues Alley. The latter contains the real gem, “Fields of Gold”. It is a Sting song, but how much better it sounds in Eva’s version. It is just her clear voice and a storm of emotions filling your heart.

Technorati tags: Eva Cassidy

LiveJournal tags: Eva Cassidy

Freeware Series-3

Here is my new post about free audio-video and graphic utilities. They could all be found on freeware sites like Freeware Files and File Hippo, or freeware section of Snap Files. There you can find links to home pages to software authors. I recommend going there to check for various additions, skins, plugins as well as possibly other useful utilities and software gems.

Last time I mentioned K-Lite Mega codec pack. It provides every imaginable codec you may need to watch video files and listen to audio ones. My next task was to rip CDs to my hard drive. You can actually do it pretty well with the standard Windows Media Player. The only thing to choose is the format you wish your files saved. I always prefer Windows Media Audio Lossless that rips CD tracks into .wma files that are said to be perfect (lossless) copies of originals. There are options to rip them to WMA files with compression (sort of MP3), or WAV files. I’d prefer WAV, as I rip only tracks that I need to burn on my compilation audio CDs and WAV files are the size of the original CDA file on the CD. But when burnt on an audio CD WAV files do not play on my stereo. So, WMA lossless is my option.

There are many other CD rippers that can be found online. But most of them rip into MP3, WAV, OGG and WMA compressed files. Most modern audio players (or multimedia players) can rip CDs, but again you have to check which output formats you get. Audiograbber is considered one of the most popular rippers (in my experience supports only MP3 and WMA compressed). Most rippers (but not all) have the function of connecting to free Internet databases to get album information. This works when you are online.

Once I got an MP3 collection of tracks that I wanted to convert to WMA lossless and burn onto a CD. That was a big task as it turned out. I used dBpoweramp Music Converter (called “a Swiss Army knife for audio). But I had to download WMA codec pack from their site, otherwise it converted only to MP3 or WAV formats. But with WMA codec for dBpoweramp Music Converter things went better. You can download more codecs from the site to be able to convert into other formats. Only MP3 and WAV conversion is included in the exe file.

The software you will need to rip your DVDs onto your hard drive, then decode and encode into other formats to be stored or burnt further is DVD Decrypter and Gordian Knot. DVD Decrypter lets you rip your DVDs onto the hard drive. Gordian Knot is used to manipulate with what you have ripped. There is a smaller automated version of Gordian Knot. But for better results and ability to intervene into the process the standard Gordian Knot is recommended (it is found on Source Forge).

One more thing is Orange CD player. It is a one-button-in-your-system-tray player of CDs. When you insert a CD into your drive and start Orange CD player it plays your CD and there is just one button in your tray. One click on the button pauses playing, another – resumes it. Right-click of your mouse gets the menu which includes among other things the tracklist with playing time. You can download album info from the Internet and/or edit it manually. There is Orange CD Catalog that lets you see your entire collection and edit the database more easily. But it is shareware and the free trial version functions only for 30 days. Anyway, that was enough to compile a catalogue of my CD collection. There are two big minuses with this software. The quality of audio is a bit poorer than in Windows Media Player and Orange CD Catalog can be opened only with Orange CD Catalog or Orange CD Player.

One more audio player that I found is AIMP Classic, which is said to provide even better quality than a popular WinAmp. Personally I use Orange CD Player or WMP when I want better sound. But AIMP may be a very good option too.

When it comes to burning CDs there is an option to do it using Windows OS without any other software, but it is a longer and less pleasant way. There is always the omnipresent Nero, but it is no longer present on my computer. I use Infra Recorder which does the same job and takes only slightly more than 7 MB of my hard drive space. It can burn data, audio, mixed CDs, data and video DVDs. It has a good interface (nothing shining but everything is there). It can burn onto extra capacity CDs (up to 900 MB) and both 4,38 and 7,96 GB DVDs. There is one more utility that does the job and takes  less than 1 MB of space on your computer: DP_DVD_Burner. Despite the name, it can burn CDs too, but it support only 650 or 700 MB CDs and 4,38 DVDs. So Infra Recorder is a much better option. But for the tasks most of you do (burning onto a 700 MB CD) you can consider that too.

Down to graphic utilities. The one to make me see my pics is Picasa. It is free and allows you to see all (or chosen) graphic files with a pleasant interface. It has the options for working with graphics too. Not anything professional, but if you want to make a colour pic black-and-white or vice versa, change the colour scheme, slightly edit your pics, then it is there. The only drawback is that Picasa keeps thumbnails of the files that it shows and if there are many of these, than the Picasa folder in Documents and Settings can be quite big too (in my case more than 100 MB). But it is a very good software. And it has a better interface and usability than other graphic viewers. But you may prefer something like Irfan View or others.

When you need to resize your pics there is always Microsoft Picture Manager (included in the Office suite), but when you don’t have it there are other utilities to do the job better or worse. One of them is Resize.

For working with graphics there is Paint.NET that is developed as a freeware but much more functional replacement of standard Paint part of the Windows OS. I uninstalled the default Paint and switched to Paint.NET. I guess it can do most of what others do for at least a hundred bucks.

Sometimes we have pics in RAW format (for example from Canon cameras). These cannot be viewed by default in Windows Explorer (unless you download a free RAW Viewer from Microsoft site). They can be viewed in Picasa without problems. But you may use another trick and convert them into .JPEG format by using a free utility called Yarc. It can be found somewhere on the Internet (though the project is already closed) and it requires no installation. All you have to do is drag and drop a RAW file into the Yarc icon on your desktop and you get a .JPEG copy of it.

One more thing is working with icons. I once changed my Windows OS interface adapting it to the one of an Apple computer (Apple screen and ObjectDoc are the examples of how to do it). Then I decided to change most icons. Not a big deal. You can find icons and icon packs for free somewhere like Deviant Art. But sometimes you need to slightly change an icon or convert a .png image into an .ico one. IcoFX is of help here.