My Favorite Freeware!

Over the next few weeks I will show you some of my favorite freeware. As you may know i like to pay nothing for my software. Often I am surprised with the amount and quality of Freeware out there.

My first set of freeware are audio related programs.

1) Audacity. Many people have heard of and been using audacity for a long time. It is worth a mention because of its flexibility and ease of use.

Audacity is basically a audio recording program but it does much more. You can use its effects to do some great tricks to your recording or audio that you have.

Audacity is great if you are a pod caster or are in to movie making. It can export to both Wav and MP3 which is a very handy trick. If you are doing the dreaded School Production and need to cut out that extra chorus or unwanted verse Audacity is great. Just zoom in to where you want to cut and simply highlight and delete.



2) Kristal: Kristal is not so well known but is a great bit of software. It is a step up from Audacity. It is more of a Music creator than a recorder. For you Mac people is similar to Garage Band but no where as good.

Basically you are able to record multiple stands of audio. You could have a drum strand, guitar strand, vocal... You can copy and paste parts or repeat bits as you need. It also have an Equalizer and effects so you can do all sorts of things to each strand (audio) this allowing you to balance everything so it will sound just as you want.

I have posted on this program so if you want to see an example look here

Ideas for using this software are:

-Making audio books with sound effects and more.

-pod casting

-movie making. If you know movie maker it only allows you one line of audio. This is a pain when it comes to adding vocal if you already have background music. Using Kristal you can mix the vocal and music plus more together before importing it into movie maker.

One con to Kristal is that it does not export to MP3. So I use either Audacity or mp3-2-wav converter which is also freeware.

Here is a screen shot.




Audio Recorder for Free : If you don't want to do anything but record a simple bit of audio then this is the freeware for you. If you have tried using Windows Sound recorder and find it only records 60 seconds of audio then use this. It has unlimited recording time. It will also record in either Wav, Mp3 or WMA.