Filed under: Photo, Adobe, Commercial, Freeware, Open Source

I understand that Photoshop is a great program. I'm willing to concede that there's really no comparable software for the professionaluser. What I just don't get is why the average user thinks 1) they need Photoshop and 2) they need to pirate it.

A few years ago, no one came in and asked me "Can you put Photoshop on my computer?" Most users hadn't even heard of the program. Now the perception from the public seems to be that if you want to edit photos at all, you've got to have Photoshop to do it - and that you might as well just steal it.

But why? Most users don't need even half of the functionality in Photoshop, and there are plenty of great editors that are easy to use, less hard on computer resources, and completely free.

Clear your conscience and try one of these alternatives!

Continue reading Theft is Bad Karma: Stop Pirating Photoshop!

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Filed under: Audio, Windows Mobile, Commercial, Mobile Minute

MeTeoR is a multi-track digital audio workstation (DAW) designed for Windows Mobile. It has all the basic features you'd expect from a full-fledged desktop DAW like Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, or Reaper. But it runs on Windows Mobile.

That means it's not going to be quite as fast or efficient at applying effects or mixing down large projects as the big guys. But here's a little secret. While most people use their cellphones and PDAs to do things like make phone calls and track appointments, many modern phones have more processing power than a computer from 10 years ago. And there's been decent digital audio editing software for PCs for much longer than 10 years. Now when somebody shows me a good digital video editing package for Windows Mobile I'll be surprised.

MeTeoR has a multi-track recorder plus windows for editing wave forms, mixing audio levels and pan settings, and importing audio. You can also add several effects including reverb and EQ effects. The full program costs $29.95, but there's a free trial available.

The program works with Windows Mobile 2003 and newer devices. A 400MHz or faster processor is recommended.

[via Create Digital Music]

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Filed under: Features, Windows, Commercial, Freeware, Analysis

If you frequent our site (and you do, because you're cool), you've probably read this article about the 5 most annoying apps on your PC. Well, it's time for another installment - this time with alternatives that offer the functionality you want without the annoying, fetid bloat that you don't. Note: before the gripes start, to compare apples to apples I'm only offering apps that need to be installed - no portable apps, no web apps.

Ahead Nero
There was a time when Nero wasn't an overblown pig of a recording application, but over the years it's been "improved" to the glorious state of excess you see it in today. What sucks about Nero today? Well, let's see. First, it tries to install the Ask toolbar during setup. Then there's the hundreds of megs of DVD templates it piles on (none of them particularly attractive). Last but not least, there's Nero Scout. Has anyone ever found this useful? I don't know about you, but click and drag or browsing for files has always worked just fine for me.

The Alternative: CD Burner XP
I want burning software to burn discs, not transcode video, play media, serve it over my home lan, print labels, and scour my drives constantly for files I may want to burn. Not only is CD Burner XP free, it's also miniscule when compared to Nero, installs in seconds, not minutes, and doesn't bring any excess crap along with it. Launch it, and you're given clear choices: data, music, iso, copy, erase. The dual pane view makes creating compilations drag-and-drop easy, as does the totally slick dropbox.

Continue reading 5 Apps You Run That Suck, and 5 Replacements That Don't

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Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Commercial

I've seen my share of bad web products. Some are bad because they are poorly implemented, others are bad because they are ill-conceived. The new Private Label Custom Domains product from FeedBlitz definitely falls into the latter category.

To be honest, I'm not even sure where to start here. From what I can gather, FeedBlitz wants me to pay them for the privilege of syndicating my content onto their domain. They're basically trying to sell subdomains on the feedblitz.com site at prices that are higher ($9.99 per year) than what you can pay to register your own real domain.

This is clearly a product without a market; I mean, who is this mythical customer that is out there wishing they could syndicate the content from their already-existing site onto a subdomain that they pay for at some other site? Nobody, that's who.

And I think FeedBlitz knows this. Follow me through the break for a few more thoughts on this.

Continue reading Private Label Custom Domains - seriously, what the hell?

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Security, Commercial, Open Source

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really hurt our beloved open source projects?

Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including the open source community since pirated software theoretically takes "customers" away from open source projects. For example, a college student may never end up downloading Open Office since he copied Microsoft Office from a friend, but that's not to say it hurts the money-makers like Microsoft at all. A little bit of piracy helps to establish big company's products as "the standard", hurting open source projects even more and making it harder for them to get their foot into a user's door.

Now we'd like to pose a question: Like the college student used in the example above, does pirating software generally prevent you from trying Open Source software or would you have put the cash down anyway even if you couldn't get it for free?

View Poll

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Filed under: Audio, Commercial, Freeware, Mobile Minute

It's 2am and you really, really, really need to get in touch with your significant other to let them know how sorry you are about the thing you said earlier that night. But you're a bit tipsy, and they're probably asleep and you don't want to wake them up. So what do you do? Make a call that goes directly to voicemail of course. Because nothing says "I'm sorry babe," like a rambling voicemail message. And that's where slydial can help.

Slydial lets you make a call to any landline or cellphone number in the US and go straight to voicemail. Just call 267-slydial (that's a Pennsylvania area code, in case anyone was wondering), and while listening to the somewhat amusing, somewhat offensive introduction, just enter the number of the person you want to call. Slydial will play a rather obnoxious ad and then connect you to the voicemail. The person you're calling will then get a missed call and/or voicemail message, but their phone will never ring. It's sort of like sending a text message. But with voice. And without the SMS fees.

If you want to avoid the obnoxious advertisement part of the equation, you can also register for an account and pay $.15 per call or $4.95 a month for unlimited calls. You know, in case you like to leave a *lot* of voicemails, but can't stand actually speaking with people in real-time.

[via Webware]

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Filed under: Video, Windows, Commercial, Freeware, Mobile Minute

Want to watch your DVD collection on your iPod, iPhone, PSP, Smartphone, PDA, or Zune? DVD Catalyst is a simple Windows application that can rip a 2 hour movie from your DVD and apply video compression so that the file fits on your portable device's storage card and still looks halfway decent on your mobile screen.

DVD Catalyst offers one-click DVD ripping and encoding. Just launch the program, select your portable device, slide a DVD into your disc drive, and click the little green button. The program will choose the best resolution, bit rate, and other settings for you.

Up until recently, only a commercial version of DVD Catalyst was available. But now there's a free version with a limited feature set. If you want advanced features like the ability to set 2-pass conversions, split videos into multiple parts, or adjust the volume and framerates, you might want to shell out $15 to $20 for a full version. But if you're looking for a quick and easy way to cram a few dozen DVD movies on your iPod, DVD Catalyst Free might be all you need.

[via Palm InfoCenter]

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Filed under: Audio, Macintosh, Productivity, Commercial

If you ever tried your hand at transcribing audio to text you're probably familiar with rewinding and playing back passages over and over again. What if you could slow down that audio file without altering the pitch to make it easier for you? Well if you're a Mac users, you're in luck as JS8 Media has developed a handy utility able to alter the speed of audio files without effecting it's pitch.

AudioLobe 3 is a light weight application that you can use to speed up or slow down your audio files. All that you need to change the speed of the audio is to move a slider back and forth. No programing or entering percentages. Just drag a slider from left (slower) to right (faster).

If you're working on a difficult passage you can set AudioLobe to loop that region and it will continue to play it back till you're done. This feature comes in very handy since it loops the section for playback so you won't need to press the rewind button over and over again allow you to concentrate on what is being said.

In our testing we found the audio quality very acceptable as the altered file still had a natural sound to it. We also appreciated the included Bass and Treble controls as that helped us focus on the speaking voice by dialing in the correct amount of low and high frequencies.

You can download a demo version of AudioLobe directly from JS8 Media. A full version is available for $20 and supports the saving of the altered file so that you play it back later without having to adjust the speed again.

So if you've been looking for a way to slow down voice dictations so that you can transcribe easier AudioLobe might be the software for you.

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Filed under: Audio, Macintosh, Commercial

The built in speakers that come with Apple's notebooks are fine for most basic audio tasks. And if you want better sound you could hook up a set of external speakers. But external speakers aren't always an option and that shouldn't mean that you have to give up on better sound. With Hear, you can add some slick audio processing to make your notebook speakers sound bigger than what they really are.

Hear uses digital signal processing (DSP) to shape the audio coming from your applications (iTunes or DVD player) giving them a much needed boost in equalization and reverb allowing your music or movie to sound its best with the notebook speakers.

To make things easy, Hear has packaged a variety of presents to get you going. If you're the tweaking type, you can adjust the knobs and faders till you get the sound you're after.

In our testing we found the processing fine for most audio content and really enjoyed the phantom center channel option giving a weighted anchor to all the movies we watched.

Hear isn't only for your built in speakers, it also works great with headphones or external speakers. But if all you have is the notebook built in speakers, Hear will definitely make them sound better.

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Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Commercial, Beta

If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using TuneUp, which we took a look at a couple of months ago, is probably as painless as it's going to get. The application is available to the public starting today. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a great UI. There were a few kinks here and there the first time we used it. It crashed every time we tried to save the track information for a few songs, although strangely enough, it always happened with tracks we wouldn't admit to owning.

Drag up to 50 or 60 songs from your iTunes library into TuneUp and it automatically starts looking up the track information using Gracenote. You can either save the information for each song individually, or save them all in one go. TuneUp is extremely accurate, but we would definitely advise you to scan through the results as some of the more obscure singers aren't in Gracenote's database. The drawback we highlighted last time hasn't been solved. Even if two tracks appear on the same album, but also on other albums, TuneUp won't necessarily group them together. On the other hand, we were impressed with its ability to differentiate between studio and live tracks.

TuneUp will also dig up the missing cover artwork for your collection in minutes, provide links to videos on YouTube and album recommendations from Amazon depending on what you're listening to, and concert notifications from StubHub depending on what's in your library. TuneUp, despite being in its early beta stages, is already so good, it's worth the hassle of having to use a bloated program like iTunes. The free version of TuneUp limits you to fixing 500 tracks and finding 50 album covers, and an unlimited version of the program is available for an $11.95 annual subscription or a one-time payment of $19.95.

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