ShareX is an open source screen capture tool with a very extensive feature list. The program doesn’t just grab individual windows and a full screen, for example. You can also capture rectangles, ellipses, triangles, diamonds, polygons or freehand shapes. There’s support for multi-monitor systems, and even a screen capture tool…
Paint.NET has long been a staple of the free image-editing market. It sits comfortably between the uber-powerful (and complex) Photoshop on the one hand and Windows’ anaemic Photos tool on the other. The program has a beautifully clean and uncluttered interface, using tabs to make it easy to work across…
REAPER is a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). If you’re unfamiliar with the jargon, essentially this means that the program is a high-end and very configurable digital recording studio. You can import any audio or MIDI source, maybe plug in a microphone to record something, then loop, pitch shift, trim,…
Invest in audio hardware, such as mixing desk, and you are immediately limited by what you can afford and have to resign yourself to the fact that in a year or less there will be something far more impressive available for the same price. This is true in many walks…
Image editors are ten-a-penny nowadays, so anything which wants attention from a divided audience needs to offer something quite special. GIMP (or the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is one of the most powerful free image editors available and is frequently described as being a free alternative to the likes of…
VSDC Free Video Editor is a surprisingly powerful, if unconventional video editor. The program comes with a host of transition effects, for instance. You can tweak colours, brightness, contrast, levels and more in a range of ways. And there are options to apply blur or sharpen filters, flip or rotate…
When it comes to ripping DVDs to your hard drive, Handbrake is one of the best known open-source tools there is. One small problem if you’re a Windows user: the GUI was designed for the Mac, and the Windows build sometimes feels like an afterthought, particularly with the slightly cluttered GUI.…
Kdenlive is a powerful open-source non-linear video editor. It was first developed for Linux, but has been ported to OS X and a Windows port is now available. The program uses FFmpeg to import and use almost any audio or video format, with no need to convert or reencode your clips. Drag…
Ocenaudio is an free audio editor. There’s a lot of competition around in this area, but ocenaudio stands out from the crowd immediately. Try opening a file, for example, and you’ll find the program supports a vast number of audio formats (including raw and text-based), video files and URLs. It can…
TagScanner is a versatile tag editor that makes it easy to organise your music collection. The program can automatically tag your audio files by working with file and folder names, or online databases (Freedb, Tractype, Amazon, Discogs). Unusually, it’s also able to work in the other direction, renaming files based…