Multimedia Applications
Multimedia applications allow you to manage or play your vast libraries of multimedia. Whether you have a large music collection or video collection, you'll need something to manage it or play it. Some great multimedia applications can be found below for your enjoyment.
One of the best music manager/cataloger/player I've ever found. I've tried iTunes in the past and while it's great for very small collection, it can quickly become quite a memory hog and will bog down your system to the point that it's unusable. Songbird is another alternative that so far has not lived up to its hype to be used as an everyday music manager/cataloger/player and therefore is not included here. It's also quite memory intensive. MediaMonkey on the other hand has none of those issues. It requires very little resources to manage even the largest libraries. The look can be completely configured via skins and panels within the program can be moved around to suit your needs.
There are too many features to mention, but some of the cool ones are looking up albums automatically on Amazon and downloading missing information, including covers. Other includes the ability install extensions to display album art in a different way or to display lyrics timed to the music for example. MediaMonkey, in my opinion, is just easy and intuitive to use. The standard free edition lacks some feature of the Gold, paid for edition, but surprisingly it has worked very well for me even with my very large collection. The one feature I thought I could not live without, file folder monitoring, has been a non-issue as it's quite trivial to get MediaMonkey to re-scan the folders where you store your music. Try it and love it today!
Are you tired of the constant bloating of Windows Media Player with every release? Well, you may be happy to hear about the open source project called Media Player Classic. The aim is to make a general purpose media player that has the look and feel of the old Windows Media Player, before it became bloated. Thus Media Player Classic was born. It supports an astounding variety of video and audio formats right out of the box and can play almost all media files without issue. I have Media Player Classic and VLC installed on my system, but prefer to use Media Player Classic whenever possible.
VLC Media Player is an open source general purpose media player. It supports a variety of video (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, DVD, VCD, streaming video, etc.) and audio formats (MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, etc.). Chances are, if VLC Media Player can't play it, neither can anything else. If you need a general purpose media player and can't stand the constant bloating of Windows Media Player, give VLC Media Player a try.
PortableApps.com has packaged VLC Media Player into a portable app so you can run everything from one folder. A portable app runs everything from 1 folder, making it easy to take with you on a USB drive or to test drive a new piece of software. Uninstalling is just a matter of deleting the entire application folder, leaving nothing behind.
Audacity is a free, open source, easy to use audio editor and recorder. You can use it to record live audio or edit Ogg, MP3, and WAV files. Cut, copy, splice and mix sounds together. Change volume, speed, pitch, fade in and out, and add effects easily. Use Audacity to clean up audio from old recordings by removing static, hiss, hum, or other constant background noises. You can even use VST plugins if you wish. Audacity is quite powerful for a free program.
PortableApps.com has packaged Audacity into a portable app so you can run everything from one folder. A portable app runs everything from 1 folder, making it easy to take with you on a USB drive or to test drive a new piece of software. Uninstalling is just a matter of deleting the entire application folder, leaving nothing behind.