Digital Music

Making digital music is easier than ever these days with the hardware and software currently available. If you want to experiment without spending any money, here are some freeware audio apps along with links to tutorials and free sound samples.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Acid Xpress is the free, 10-track version of ACID software, a loop-based music production tool. ACID XPress software will give you a taste of what ACID Pro and ACID Music Studio software have to offer. To make the music creation process especially easy, ACID XPress software has built-in Show Me How tutorials that help you step-by-step using interactive wizards and guides.

Every week download the free 8pack project. An 8pack project is an ACID file that includes eight loops arranged into a song. 8pack projects illustrate how a song is constructed in ACID software, and how easy it is to combine loops from various Sony Sound Series™ Loops and Samples libraries. Every week there will be a new 8pack project to download — for Free!

Check out the rest of the website at Acid Planet.


Buzz is the first ever "easy to use" free modular software based music studio. Imagine having a studio with over 300 pieces of gear. Now imagine fitting it on a laptop or home PC. It sounds like a dream to any Musician, but its completely possible with Buzz. For example, if you wish to run 3 Physical Modelling synths and a Drum Machine through 2 seperate Stereo Delays, into a Mixer, through a Compressor and Parameteric EQ, and finally out to your speakers - no problem. Lay down your synths, connect the wires and you're done.

Tu2 is a phrase sampler which means it will make music and sound out of samples you feed it. Tu2 has 4 built-in sound-generating units to let you construct your own loops. Tu2 will stack samples, loops and soundbites for you. You can slice 'n dice them, mutilate them, filter them, remix them and put effects over them.

Mixmeister BPM Analyzer is a free beat extracting tool. It requires registration at the site.

Loops.net is a resource site for Loopers, DJs and Musicians. It features links to free sounds, samples and soundfonts.

SampleNet is a treasure trove of free loops, samples and sounds.

The FreePlay Music Library is a comprehensive collection of High End Broadcast production music, available online, spanning all the popular musical genres.

Other online souces for legal sound samples are:

Power Samples

Sonic Implants

Sounds FX

Tweakheadz Labs

Waveform DK

MIDI files are available from:

Music Tutorials are available for free for those that require more traditional methods of playing and composing music:

Computer Music is the UK's biggest-selling music technology magazine, and this website is designed to offer a taste of what's in the mag. The site offers all sorts of music and interactivity as well as advice, reviews of the latest gear and news as it happens, all in a clear, easy-to-understand, techno babble-free way.

Electronic Musician is another music technology magazine, and this website features gear reviews, audio tutorials, loops and samples.

The Open Music Resource Library (OMRL) is to be an online resource for musicians to be able to find and publish loops, softsynth and plugin patches, samples, and sample sets, all under a Creative Commons license. There isn't much here yet, so please check back every once in a while.

RSS and Atom Newsreaders

RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation stands for one of the following standards:

Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9, 1.0 and 1.1)
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

The RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.

RSS aggregators, also known as newsreaders, feed readers, feed aggregators, and news aggregators, are dedicated programs, webpages or online services that collect syndicated content from disparate sources and provide a consolidated view.

One of the most popular online aggregators is Bloglines.

Aggregator programs that run on your computer may be standalone software or applications that integrate into a program that you already use, such as Microsoft Outlook and the Mozilla browser.

There are many RSS aggregators programs, and three comprehensive lists of them can be found at Abbe Normal’s Weblog/Wiki, News Aggregators Directory, and Lockergnome’s RSS Resources.

The one that I have started using is Newzie. Newzie is much more than an RSS and Atom feed news aggregater, it transfers content from OPML, downloads podcasts, browses the web, searches the web using all search engines from one box, and manages your bookmarks.

It has a very nice interface allowing it to run a News Bar at the top of your screen, and a Popup Notifier from the system tray.

Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the internet,receiving around 60 million hits per day.

Freeware World

After discovering the link to the "lost" freeware app Pandamoney in the last post, I found the main link to the website that hosts it.

It's known as Freeware World and currently states that there are 24323 freeware programs for the Windows OS listed on their website. I don't know if they screen for adware or spyware in their freeware listings (like I do) so be careful!

I like the fact that they host lost freeware. This is a great resource, and the only one I've seen of it's kind on the net. I'm sure that future postings here will link to Freeware World because of this!

PandaMoney 3.0 Finance Manager

PandaMoney is a user-friendly Windows application for managing everyday finances. Balance your checkbook with ease using the program's automatic features and drop-down menus. PandaMoney supports up to five user accounts, so each family member or employee can track deposits and withdrawals. All access to individual user accounts is completely password protected.

This is a "lost" freeware application that I have just rediscovered at "The Lost Freeware World". Cool!!!

EasyCleaner

Wanna stop your computer from getting clogged up? EasyCleaner is a small program which searches Windows' registry for entries that are pointing nowhere. EasyCleaner also lets you delete all kinds of unnecessary files like temps, backups etc. You can search for duplicate files and you can view some intresting info about your disk space usage! You are also able to manage startup programs, invalid shortcuts and add/remove software list.

Essential PIM

EssentialPIM Free is the award-winning, absolutely free personal information manager. Supported by a large community of users, EPIM has been widely acknowledged as the best personal information management system on any desktop or USB flash. It is not bloatware and has no spyware or adware.

Get information whenever you need it. Print whatever you want and only what you want! Save your data to HTML, RTF, CSV or TXT.

Also available in a portable version, EssentialPIM Portable Free works straight from your removable media, whether it's a USB flash drive, compact flash card, or even a good old floppy.

This free PIM is absolutely brilliant! If you need a great freeware PIM with an Outlook look and feel to it then I highly recommend it!

Heartlight Art

Heartlight - scriptural art, ecards, powerpoint backgrounds and templates, web animations and wallpaper.

Quicktime MOV to MPG video conversion

I love movies and I especially love downloading movie trailers off the internet. I prefer to download in quicktime (MOV) movie format because of the higher quality. Once I have them then I can convert them to MPG format, burn them onto a CD and watch them on a DVD player! This is a great way to make a compilation video CD for the kids!

If you don't have a registered copy of quicktime that allows you to save quicktime MOV files to your hard drive, look at the movie review websites I listed earlier as they often have direct links to MOV files.

I will also list some links to MOV or MPG movie trailers as well.

To convert from MOV to MPG format use TMPGenc with the TMPGenc MOV Plugin.

UKTV Wallpapers!!

Here's some great British TV Wallpapers I found from the UKTV Australia and New Zealand websites. Brilliant!!!

Microsoft Office Viewers and Converters

With the help of these converters and viewers from the Office Download Center, you can share your Microsoft Office files with people who have versions of Office programs different from your own, or even with people who don't have Office at all.

Converters enable you to open files created by people using different versions of your Office programs. Find the appropriate converter for the version of the Office program on your computer.

Viewers enable people who don't have Office programs to see your work. Simply provide them with the appropriate viewer along with your files.

Here are two links on the Microsoft website:

Usenet Newsreaders

What can I say about usenet? Except that its been around on the internet much longer than the world wide web!

Long before the fancy browsers appeared to make the internet user friendly to everyone, university geeks were emailing, FTPing, IRCing and Usenetting well before the corporates recognised the power of the internet and started writing tcp/ip applications for all sorts of weird and wacky things!!!

Usenet was the way to form online communities long before chat rooms and instant messaging. It's full of thousands of online communities about practically every single subject known to man! - and you know what??? It's still out there! But be warned though, this is the "black market" of the net. This is where illegal software and VERY dodgy stuff goes on.

But in amongst all of the rubbish are great newsgroups for talking to like minded citizens and sharing lots of creative ideas! Once you've got involved in a few "hearty" discussions about politics and religion, found the name of that old Jackie Chan film you were looking for and grabbed Christmas clip art until it's coming out of your ears, there's always a place in your heart for Usenet!

To access usenet or nntp servers you'll need an nntp news reader (not to be confused with RSS news readers - but more on those later on). Here are a couple of good freeware newsreaders to use and some links to discover open nntp servers (servers that don't charge access). Your local ISP provider should have a local nntp server for you to access as well - check out your ISP's homepage.

Microplanet Gravity News Reader is a full featured Windows Usenet online/offline news client with an extensive feature list. Gravity has been a popular news reader since 1996. Numerous features were added over the years. Gravity originally started as shareware, and later as freeware. It is now open source under the BSD license.

Xnews is a general-purpose reader. Although it handles binaries quite nicely, it's not a binary grabber or picture viewer. Also, Xnews is an on-line reader. It has pseudo offline features such as header storage, but if you need true off-line capabilities, use Gravity, or something else.


A handy little app to use with Xnews is Funduc's Decode Shell Extension. If you find that you have missing binaries within your Xnews download folder, then browse to the applicable folder via Windows Explorer, right-click on the Xnews folder file and select Decode from the menu. Decode Shell Extension supports multiple attachments, multi-part files (already concatenated), Base64(MIME), yEnc, BinHex (Mac format), quoted-printable, plain text, XXENCODED, and User (table) encoded files.

To find open nntp servers check out:

DISENTER

FREE USENET NEWS SERVERS

Also take a look at Google Groups to "Create, search, and browse newsgroups" if you want to use your browser instead of a news reader.