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…
Resizing images for any purpose can be a chore. If you are putting together a web site and need to ensure that all of your images have the same dimensions, it can take time to load each picture into an image editor and apply the relevant settings. Some image editors…
OpenShot Video Editor is an open-source editor with many powerful features. The program’s use of FFmpeg means it’s able to properly handle many different video, audio and image formats. There’s drag and drop support for importing clips, resizing and repositioning them on the program’s multi-track timeline. Right-clicking a selected clip gives…
One of the great benefits of working with digital music files is that metadata makes it possible to perform advanced searches, as well as benefiting from high quality audio. But being able to do this is dependent on having the correct information attached to files so that it can be…