K-Lite Mega Codec Pack is a collection of audio and video codecs, necessary to play (decode) and encode different audio and video formats. It is being updated frequently and it includes the means to play almost any audio and video format I have encountered.
The pack includes Media Player Classic and several tools for diagnostics and video usage. It can also detect problematic codecs and filters already on your system and helps you to remove them. It is very easy to install and I believe would suit anyone’s media playing needs.
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast image viewing and browsing application, supporting most major image file formats as well as excellent RAW support. It has a very nice cropping and resizing interface, including jpeg lossless operations. The full screen view has various options and operations, which show up when you bump the mouse onto an edge of the screen (the different edges give different options).
Here are the feature highlights I like the most:
- Fast and responsive image browsing and viewing.
- Very nice cropping interface, which supports standard cropping formats, 4×6, 8×10, etc…
- JPEG lossless operations including crop – most editors would only do lossy operations, which degrade the quality of the image.
- Support for RAW formats.
- Dual monitor support – if you have two monitors it can show the browser on one and full screen view on the other.
- Support for batch operations to convert, resize, crop, watermark, etc. multiple images at once.
- Contact sheet builder
Overall an extremely useful program with many other features I did not mention.
ColorCop – is a colorpicker with a variety of options. It contains an eyedropper you drag to the section of the screen you need to get the color from and it will sample from that area. You can choose between 1×1, 3×3 and 5×5 average pixel sampling. The color options allow WebSafe, Detect WebSafe, Reverse, Random, Convert to Grayscale.
A very nice feature is that you can use the mouse wheel to magnify while picking. It has multiple output options like HTML hex, Visual C++, RGB float, Delphi hex, etc.
The application can also be minimized to the system tray.
JAlbum is an awesome web album generator, that creates web albums from set of digital pictures. At first when I found out it is written in Java, I was skeptical about the speed it will generate the albums with. I was wrong! It is a very nice application with very reasonable speed. Here are the features I liked the most:
Support for Skins
Skins (a.k.a. themes) define the look and feel of your gallery. Extensive Skin Repository is available with skins from multiple authors. Of course you could make your own, but there are plenty to choose from. Several skins are installed “standard” with the program. There is support for skin-related options in the GUI, depending on the skin. My favorite skin BluPlusPlus has myriad of customization options.
Create Album from Folder Structure
It is very nice that JAlbum creates the album structure, based on the input folder structure. This way as your photos are arranged in folders and subfolders anyway it is very easy to create an album out of them. If you need folder thumbnails in the album, make sure to select a photo for a thumbnail in the JAlbum GUI. Also worth mentioning is that when you update an existing album, you could select to only process the files that are new, which considerably speeds up the generation process.
Familiar Explorer-like Interface
The user interface is arranged as Windows Explorer with a folder tree on the left and thumbnail view on the right side. Supports dragging and dropping files. You can easily organize a large number of images.
Image Manipulation
You can set it to extract metadata from the images (IPTC, EXIF, etc.) like camera, aperture, shutter speed, and others. Image filtes can be applied for watermarking, rotating, adding borders, etc.
The program actually supports any kind of file, not just images, so you can include along with the photos PDFs or Word Documents for example.
Web Publishing
JAlbum can directly upload the generated album to an ftp site or use the integrated web server. When uploading to an ftp site and you are updating your album, you can select “Smart Upload” and JAlbum will check which files are already on the server and will not re-upload them.
Here are several of screenshots.
MP3TAG is an extremely powerful application to edit metadata (ID3 tags, Vorbis comments, etc.) in a variety of audio formats (including mp3, flac, ape, m4a, mp4, m4b, ogg, etc.). It also allows to update tags from filenames and directories, update filenames and directories from tags, updates the whole or parts of the tags.
It also features powerful export with user defined templates, tag import from amazon, freedb, and other online databases. For those interested in other than English languages it supports UTF-8 and Unicode.
Awesome and strongly recommended software for managing the tags of your mp3 collection.
MPEG Audio Collection (a.k.a. MAC) is a powerful companion to MP3TAG. It creates a searchable database from your audio archive, reading file information and metadata (ID3, Vorbis comments, APE, etc.). MAC also supports generating variety of reports, in .txt, .html and .dif formats. Even though it has not been updated since 2003, it is still a worthy utility to have on your computer.
