Best free software - Freeware reviews

Amarok – powerful music player

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:28:53 +0000

Amarok is not just a music player! You can use it to manage and organize the collections of large amounts of music, to burn it to discs, or to edit tags. An important advantage of Amarok is user-friendly graphical interface and high quality of audio playback. This program uses two most popular media frameworks – GStreamer and Xine, so that it can provide support for almost all audio file formats you can imagine. Like most competitive players Amarok allows you to play Internet radio - including automatic download of album covers and text of the songs as well as information about the artist. All pieces of information are displayed in translucent OSD. Also Amarok has an additional interesting feature: it automatically generates playlists with specified music type or according to user criteria. Moreover, it supports most portable media players. Functionality can be extended by a huge amount of scripts available on the internet. The latest version has improved user interface, dynamic playlists generation, and the new options of choosing tracks. Also, there new functionalities as: new example playlists, a Quiz-play option that will pick a song that starts with the same character the last one ended with. And the last thing: this program supports ‘drag and drop’ method which expands its possibilities.

digiKam – advanced digital photo management application

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:27:41 +0000

digiKam is an open source program for management, organization, viewing and simple edition of digital photos. The application supports most of cameras available on the market. It allows to catalog photographs copied from the device into albums and sub-albums. digiKam gives the possibility to comment and sort photos as well as whole albums. “Drag and Drop” method supports cooperation with other applications in the system. digiKam gives you the ability to manage metadata (EXIF, IPTC, XMP, Makernote and geolocation using GPS), supports database and archiving (eg recording on a CD / DVD) also creating HTML album. It has basic photo edition options such as Red-eye correction and basic image properties configuration (brightness, contrast, color balance, etc.), simple special effects (sharpen, blur, noise removal), add text and borders, and also functions of rotation and re-sizing photos. digiKam can also create slideshows, MPEG, export data to your iPod, Flickr and Picasaweb. It has a search of duplicated images and ability to convert the RAW data. This program contains calendar creation wizard, print wizard, and it can create slideshows. digiKam Image Editor supports all camera RAW file formats, 16 bits color depth, Exif/Makernote/IPTC/GPS/XMP metadata, Color management, tagging/rating/comments pictures, etc. A stand-alone image editor version named ShowFoto is also available. It runs without digiKam images database support, but provides all Image Editor functions.

TrueCrypt – Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:14:55 +0000

Clever program to encrypt data on disks such as USB flash drive or hard drive. It uses following very strong encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. There is also a nice option to create a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mapping it as a real disk. Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent. The latest version supports hardware-accelerated encryption but of course only when processor has such possibility. System encryption provides the highest level of security and privacy because all files including all temporary files that Windows and some applications created on the system partition (usually without your knowledge or consent), hibernation files, swap files, etc., are always permanently encrypted (even if power supply is suddenly interrupted). An interesting new feature is also Volumes Favorite Organizer that allows you to manage encrypted partitions and containers from one place and also to configure their advanced options. TrueCrypt 7.0 supports the creation of encrypted partitions on the disk sector size of 4096, 2048, and 1024 bytes (both Windows and Linux). Previously on these kinds of disks you was able only to create a file containers. Moreover, you can interrupt the process of encryption or decryption anytime, leave the partition/drive partially unencrypted, restart or shut down the computer, and then resume the process, which will continue from the point it was stopped.