Programs

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Programs that I have used/are using.

Note that many of these are free for personal use only. Business/professional/commercial use requires you to purchase a license. Many of these freeware programs solicit donations. I've donated to a few of those that are so good, I can't imagine not having them, like Irfanview.

I intend to update this as necessary, but it's low priority and I'm lazy.

CoolEdit
   Audio editing program from Syntrillum, no longer available. Shareware. You can use it free but you have to choose two out of many tools on startup. It was well worth registering. Only does wav files. I find it fast and very capable. It’s denoising algorithm is superb as long as you can give it a sample of the noise. Version I’m using dates back to W95. I believe Adobe bought rights to it and there is a current version available. Update: it works just fine in Windows 10!

Audacity
   Freeware audio editing program. Functionally very similar to CoolEdit. I haven’t used it a lot since it duplicates functions CoolEdit has, but it will read and save mp3. Note that it does not directly edit in mp3, but decompresses it, so repeated edits will cause compression errors to collect.

Dart Pro
   Fairly high end audio editor. You can download a demo of this commercial program. Very capable, but I have found it a lot harder to use than Audacity and CoolEdit. Has a pop and click filter for vinyl that is immensely adjustable and is alleged to be one of the best. So far, I haven’t seen results to justify this claim, but I haven’t played with it enough to really say. One note: my antivirus (McAfee) program detects a virus in this. I know it’s a false positive, but it does require me to disable the heuristic virus scanning to use the program. Neither program’s customer service was any help on this.

Rip Vinyl
   Inexpensive recorder shareware. Pretty much all it does is record from your sound card, but it can be set to detect silence and generate a new file. It will also reject tracks that are too short. Parameters are settable. I found that it isn’t all that useful for vinyl since if I set the detect time and level controls such that it doesn’t cut beginnings or ends, it doesn’t detect the space between tracks either. I use it for live recording. Since it breaks up a session, even if the computer fails, you only lose the recording to the file that is being done when the failures occurs. CoolEdit and Audacity also record, but they will do it as one big file. If things screw up, you lose it all. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be Windows 10 compatible.

MP3 splitter/joiner
   Shareware program that does a superb job splitting and joining MP3 files. I have found it useful to break up recordings of my show into managable chunks, since I record now on an MP3 flash recorder, and the whole 4.5 hours is one file, very hard to search. The player makes a barely audible gap between tracks so playback is just fine.

Microsoft Expression Web 4
This has become my first choice in HTML editors. Of particular use is its ability to do layers (much like Photoshop), which allows making much more complex pages. Takes a bit to learn but well worth it. It was available for free, but I don't know it that is still true. Search for it. Works in Windows 10!

NVu
   WYSIWYG freeware HTML editor. Under evaluation to fill in the things that Pagebreeze does not seem to do. Haven't used Pagebreeze or NVu for a long time.

CutePDF
   Neat little freeware utility. When you load it, it shows up as a printer and in any program that you can print from, printing to this generates a PDF file that can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat reader. I don’t need to create PDFs much and I can’t justify buying Acrobat. It may have limitations, but I haven’t found any yet.

Paint Shop Pro
   I have version 3, which was shareware at the time. It came on 4 floppies and had both 16 and 32 bit versions. It works very well, even under Windows XP, but it is showing it’s age. I can’t use the film scanner with it, but I still use it. It’s compact and fast. I’m currently evaluating the version 11 demo as a replacement for Photoshop. It’s looking good, so far. Bought Version 11. Can't do everything Photoshop can do, but costs 1/5 as much and has a few really cool tools. Actually bought it for my wife, but it's different enough from Photoshop LE that she refused to learn it. Ultimately, she wanted Photoshop and that's what I got her. You've got to be really serious to pay that much. Considering how old this program is, I am totally amazed it works perfectly in Windows 10.

Gimp
   This open source image editor seems to be a good functional replacement for Photoshop, but the interface is so different that I’m far from adept at using it. Despite the fact that it is free and PSP10 is around $80, I may still opt for PSP. Try it. If you like it, I’m sure it’s a great choice. Opted for PSP 11.

Video ReDo
    Another shareware gem, it isn’t a video manipulation program, just a basic editor, but I have found it to do that better than any other program I’ve tried. The tools for moving through an MPG file work so well that I can edit breaks out of a 2 hour recording in under 10 minutes and do it seamlessly. It also does not encode any more than it has to, so much of saving your work is just file to file copy. It should also eliminate the losses that would come from encoding the whole video again. It has proven itself capable of doing some minor mpg file fixing. I had one that was damaged and took a long time to read in and wouldn't play all the way through. I pulled it in, cut from the last part that played OK to the end and saved it. Result is fine.

They now have a high-definition compatible version. I find it a little slow and jerky. That may be my hardware, so I'd suggest trying the demo.

Irfanview
   This has got to be the premier freeware viewer. It seems to handle almost any still or video format and it does it well. You can quickly step through a folder of images in full screen mode using either the keyboard or the mouse. A nice feature is that you can delete files you’re viewing with it. It has some editing and enhancement tools, but I haven’t used them much. What I have used has worked perfectly. If this guy ever wants to make this shareware, send him a check. It’s worth it.

Flashpeak SlimBrowser
   An Internet Explorer based browser, it is so compact that until the last few updates, it would fit on a single floppy. It loads fast and isn’t too resource hungry and it has really convenient tabbed browsing. Don't use this much anymore, but it's still the fastest load. I'm using Firefox now.

SequoiaView
   A great little freeware utility that scans your hard drive(s) and displays usage graphically. Just move the cursor over one of the tile-like display areas and it displays the file name. It groups files in their folders and groups sub folders in higher folders. Very easy to see where your hard drive space is being used. I’ve used it to identify a couple of real space hogs that I didn’t need anymore. Good for a cleanup before defragging.

Volumouse
   A compact utility that allows you to use your mouse wheel to control volume. It can be set to control any of your computer’s volume settings. I have mine set up to do the master, the wave and the line controls. You can set it up to do more. Sure, it only saves a few steps, but if you adjust the volume as much as I do, that adds up to a lot of steps. I've had it stop working randomly a number of times. Always comes back on reboot and doesn't seem to cause any problems when it stops working. Keep the original Windows volume control accessible for when this happens. I find it so handy that this is a minor annoyance.

FileSplitter
     Not something I have a lot of use for anymore since I started using CDs, DVDs and flash drives, but I found a great use for it. I had a badly corrupted MPG file. It not only wouldn’t play, but it crashed video editing programs I tried to load it into. I used this program to split it into 10 equal pieces. The last 4 play just fine, salvaging 40% of the original video, and another 4 won’t load, but don’t crash either, so I have some hope that I will find software that will fix them. The first 2 segments are probably hopeless. You have to split the original file and rename the results so they are recognized as mpg files.

Adobe Premier Elements
    Fairly high end video authoring program. Lots of transitions, but I found a few issues. It has a problem with MPG files I've created with my ADS box. Flawless making videos from stills and seems to have no problems with original digital video that another user gets. Downloaded M4P video from internet and it has no problem making regular DVDs from this.

Pinnacle Studio, Version 11
    Comes with a few less transitions than Adobe Premier, but has no compatability problems with the video my ADS box makes. I use this exclusively now and I moved Adobe Premier onto my wife's computer to do those jobs that it does better than Pinnacle. Damn few. I don't think Pinnacle can read the M4P files without adding a codec, which did not come with the programs and is probably a paid extra. Note that this program IS NOT compatible with Window 7 and later.

Open Office
    This has undergone a lot of work since I first evaluated it. It can default to making .doc or .rtf files and seems nearly 100% compatible with Microsoft Office. I no longer use it, having replaced it with WPS Office, which is smaller and easier to use. Have since dropped WPS Office in favor of Libre Office. Big advantage there is that there is also a Linux version, which I'm using on a few old computers.

WPS Office
    Free replacement for Microsoft Office. Doesn't do quite as much but there's nothing it can't do that I need. There's a paid version that probably has more features.

Ots Turntables Free
    Little brother to Ots Studio and Ots AV, this player has the best dynamics processor I've seen in software. It compares well to the station's Optimod, which was state of the art back when we bought it. Free version sticks in an announcement every 1 to 5 tracks. About $30 for the basic version allows you to shut that off and just play music. Producing the show with this and am very happy with it. Kick-ass compression, but not for the show as it would require recoding the whole show and I don't want to do that.
    I've upgraded to the Silver version, which has a few more features than the Bedroom version. Mostly, it supports a cue function using the headphone jack. This computer is the first that I'v had that can support that. Don't use it much, but when I do need it, there's no other way to do it. These all seem to be compatible with Windows 10.

Stereo Tool compression.
    Taking a liking to this one. It's a command line utility that does really good analog compression with wav source and destination files and it's reasonably fast. So far, I haven't been able to run it in a batch file, but I see no reason that shouldn't work. One limitation, it crashes if the file names are not DOS compatible (8.3 format, no spaces, etc.). It also can't work without a setup file and it doesn't seem to be able to create them. Windows version is a Winamp plug in that allows you to listen to the result and save as a setting file.

MP3DirectCut 2.08
    This little gem can edit MP3 files without recoding them. I found the program to be less than intuitive, but it does do the job and it is fast. The advantage this has is all the other editors I've seen convert the MP3 to WAV, you edit it, then convert it back to MP3. This conversion is lossy and avoiding it is desirable. By the way, it's free.

Fences
    Cool desktop organizer program that is free for personal use. Allows you to organize icons on your desktop into scrollable groups. Find it very handy. There's a paid version for professional use. I have not taken updates of this program for some time and I don't know what it would do if loaded in newer than Windows XP. I'd suggest imaging your boot drive before trying it in newer versions of Windows.