Here we go again! If you know of a good and free program that you think others would be interested in, please be so kind as to let us know. I'll get the ball rolling and will try my best to keep the list updated as you guys add more names and links. If you could type a short description as well, it would be most appreciated.
The list will be divided into sections, so as to make browsing easy and efficient. Of course, it's gonna be a WIP for a while, so please pay no mind to the clutter. ;]
Multi-purpose tools
- MediaCoder easily replaces Ogg/LameDropXPd or Monkey. A universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices.
Audio
Ripping:
- Exact Audio Copy is a simple, yet effective CD ripper. Will rip to wav or any common format, given that you set it up and download the encoders. A truly simple and effective way of 'backuping' your music.
- CDex not only rips CDs but also supports a great number of encoders, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and APE.
Playing:
- foobar2000 is a great audio player for Windows. Can be used as is, but this little baby is fully customizable. If one so wishes, it can be turned into a real work of art. Many plugins are available: to see album covers, to download and see lyrics, album info, artist info, song info, etc. It isn't, however, all that easy to modify. It does require some patience if you know nothing of coding, but it's worth it if you have the time and desire to learn.
- Winamp offers all that you need and has a ton of available skins you can apply in a few clicks.
Editing:
- Audacity is a powerful and easy tool for editing and recording audio. Personally, I mainly use it for sampling sounds or adding/removing audio effects such as fading, but it's capable of doing much more.
- Medieval CUE Splitter is a freeware tool that split a single big audio track, mostly an album or a compilation, into the relative individual audio tracks, using informations contained in the associated "CUE" file.
Encoding/Decoding:
- Monkey's Audio (for ape files).
- OggDropXPd (for ogg files).
- LameDropXPd (for mp3 files.
Tagging:
- Mp3tag is an editor for metadata of common audio formats (eg. ID3, Vorbis Comments, APE, MP4, TAK Loseless). It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more. The program supports online freedb database lookups for selected files, allowing you to automatically gather proper tag information for select files or CDs.
- Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track/file oriented like the ClassicTagger was. Picard is written in Python, which is a cross-platform language, and makes use of cross-platform libraries - this allows the same code to run both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Check the link for an illustrated how-to.
Video
Ripping:
- DVD Decrypter will rip DVDs right to your HDD in a matter of minutes.
- DVDFab HD Decrypter is a simple version of DVDFab Platinum. It copies entire DVD movie to hard disk, and removes all the protections (CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and Sony ARccOS) while copying. It also comes with full HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support (Removes AACS).
Playing:
- VLC media player will play nearly all video files.
- Media Player Classic offers a good deal of interesting features. Looks simple enough, but it's quite capable.
- Winamp not only plays audio files, but video ones as well. Check it out.
- SMPlayer. No need to download extra codecs for this one. It will play ALL videos. An interesting feature would be that it remembers your settings file by file. If you quit a movie in a hurry, when you next play it, you'll start where you left off. Available for both Windows and Linux.
Editing:
- Movie Maker 2.1.
- VirtualDub.
- VirtualDubMod.
- AutoGK is a compression tool that's basically automated, requiring almost no input from the user. Perfect for you if fiddling around with options over options isn't your thing. Here's a quick guide.
Editing/Demuxing/Muxing:
- MKVToolnix (For mkv files).
- OGMCleaver (For ogm and mkv).
- YAMB (For mp4 files).
- TMPGenc (For mpg files).
- Nandub (For avi, mpg, and ogm).
- AVI-Mux GUI (For avi)
Subtitle editing:
- SubTitle Workshop.
- SubTitle Edit.
- SubMagic. Has an annoying bug where with subtitles that are 3 lines long, it deletes the last line; still useful though.
Codecs
- Real Alternative, which comes with Media Player Classic, allows you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer.
- CCCP was created to replace the filter packs provided by several anime fansub groups into a single reliable pack capable of decoding practically any group's files - without breaking compatibility for other formats. (Supported and unsupported formats.)
- GSpot is an identifier. Run it, put the format you wanna play in, and it will tell you whether or not you have the right codec installed.
ISO
- ImgBurn will burn almost anything you throw at it.
- ISOBuster is only for ripping. One of the best and simplest to use.
- CDCheck is a utility for the prevention, detection and recovery of damaged files on CD-ROMs with an emphasis on error detection. Supports DVDs as well.
- CDMage "Image Handling Tool" scans ISOs for corruption. Can import and extract files from the ISOs, as well.
Rom File Manager/Auditing/Renaming
- RomCenter is designed to help you maintain and organize your emulators roms collection for various gaming systems including computers, consoles, arcade, calculators and handheld. You can add additional systems through external datafiles available on a lot of sites.
- NSRT, the most advanced SNES ROM tool to date, provides the ability to check, alter, retrieve info from, verify, fix, and organize SNES ROMs.
Virtual drive
- Daemon Tools is one of the most used and well-known virtual drive creators. To know which version is best for you, which depends on what you're trying to emulate, visit our Everything Emulation forums.
- Alcohol 52% can also rip, but not burn ISOs.
Graphic design
- GIMP's a good image editing software, especially since it's free.
- Blender, an open source 3D content creation suite, is available for all major operating systems.
- Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.
- Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows.
File sharing
Clients:
-Bittorrent
- Azureus.
- BitComet.
- Burst!
- µTorrent is lightweight and updated rather frequently. Unlike other BT clients, this one is low on resource usage.
-Direct connect:
- DC++ will let you connect to millions of other users and allow you to chat while you download and share files.
-FTP:
- SmartFTP allows you to upload and download from FTP servers. It's one of the most commonly used clients.
- Core FTP.
- Filezilla supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS).
Computer protection and maintenance
AV:
- AVG.
- Antivir. Perfect if your system is old or you don't like losing a lot of resources to protection.
- Avast. Offers active protection for just about everything, all of which can be manually turned off if you don't need them.
Anti-spyware/adware:
- AVG also offers an anti-spyware app.
- Spybot is a well-known, highly effective program that I recommend you run on a weekly basis. Simple of use, it will detect and offer fixes for nearly 100,000 malwares. Give it a try and see how much gunk's slugging down your computer.
- Ad-Aware does just about the same as Spybot. Where one doesn't find anything, the other just might. Great duo.
- SpyWare Blaster blocks the installation of a good number of unwanted software as well as tracking cookies and spyware in general.
IP blocker:
Firewall:
- Sygate Personal Firewall 5.6 remains one of the best out there.
Cleanup utilities/Diagnostic tools:
- ATF Cleaner. Simple interface, extremely fast, no install.
- HiJackThis will scan your computer and list all running processes, browser objects, etc. and offer you to eliminate any of them. Of course, you shouldn't be using this tool if you're unaware of what you're doing, but it's really of a great help when your computer's experiencing slow downs or when your internet isn't what it used to be for seemingly no reason at all.
- CCleaner can be used to remove cookies, temp files, etc.
- EasyCleaner does the same as CCleaner, basically. Has a simple interface that covers just about everything you can think of: registry entries, temp files, etc. It will also allow you to view how your HDD is being used, which is a great way of putting order in your mess, if only by letting you know what's taking up all that space. A lot of other functionalities are included.
- Everest Free Edition is a system information, system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for home PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST technology. It offers the world's most accurate system information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information.
- PC Wizard. Info is within link.
Firefox extension:
- Adblock Plus will block popups, ads, or even images and active objects. If you can't stand a certain GIF or huge image, a mere right-click will take care of it. It's excellent.
- DownThemAll! is a download manager that works wonders and only requires an extra click when downloading. Supported by most uploading services that allow for download accelerators.
- Tweak Network Settings will speed up Firefox. It's easy to turn on and off, in case something goes wrong with a given site.
- URL link is a small Firefox and Thunderbird extension that allows you to select a non-URL in a mail/news message or web-page, and open it in a browser window.
- IE Tab lets you visit sites that require you to use Internet Explorer.
Download manager:
- NetAnts. Banner ad supported, which can be removed with SpyBot.
Miscellaneous
- QuickSFV. For verifying your SFV files.
- Screamer Radio has a minimal interface that allows you to listen to internet radio. Don't like ads? Don't like pop? Prefer a particular genre? Then this is for you. Select one of the presets or browse for a channel yourself and then open it up with this little app. Supports Shoutcast MP3 streaming, WMA streaming, etc. You can also record what you're listening to. Nice feature, IMO.
- CDisplay loads JPEG, PNG and static GIF images which are automatically ordered and presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time. Will also read directly from RAR, zip, ACE, and tar files without having to decompress them.
- IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Also offers some editing capabilities.
- Foxit Reader is a PDF document viewer and printer.
- Open Office is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office, and the vendor-neutral OpenDocument standard from OASIS.
- JWPce is a Japanese word processor that features an online Japanese dictionary, various Kanji lookup systems, etc.
- yTimerlets you run up to 40 countdown timers, with an audio alert and a popup window when the countdown reaches zero. You can also choose to run a program or open a URL in your default browser when the timer goes off. Lots of other freebies on this site.
- TimeLeft is a versatile desktop utility, which may be used as a countdown clock, reminder, clock, alarm clock, tray clock, stopwatch, timer, sticker, auction watch and time synchronization utility. A powerful customizable reminder, which can show a message, play music (any formats including mp3) or open a link, document, execute an application, turn off your monitor or shutdown your PC.
- ListMaker 3.3 is the easiest way to catalog, search and print lists of all of your files. Now free, registration key: 1426917.
- Explorestart 1.00 is a very small, simple and reliable utility that simply restarts Explorer and Internet Explorer. To be used when things are sluggish or when a file refuses to be deleted.
- Unlocker will let you delete any file that refuses to be trashed by conventional means.
- URL Snooper can mainly be used to fish out streaming info when you want to listen or record internet radio or even a video stream, but that the links are hidden behind activex and java scripts.
- Minimize to Tray Minimize To Tray lets you minimize running applications to the system tray, which helps to increase free space in the taskbar.
- GammaSutra allows you to quickly change the gamma on your screen in two easy, different ways.
- NetMeter is a small network bandwidth monitoring program with numerous parameters for customization.
- Amok Playlist Copy.Provide a playlist to APC and it will copy the files in the playlist to a directory of your choice.
- Kill Winamp does not, as the name might suggest, kill Winamp. It either closes Winamp or stops the current song playing or it can shut your computer down (it will power off, if supported by hardware) after a certain number of minutes or songs played. It does not require Winamp in order to turn off the computer.