Audacity many uses, one program.  Audacity is great software for recording or mixing multiple tracks.  It allows you to edit your tracks and add special effects or lay tracks together.  But that isn’t the best part.  The very nice thing about Audacity is its ability to allow you to record whatever sound is playing through your sound card. 

If you are listening to streaming music: You can record it!

If you are talking on Skype, Teamspeak or Ventrillo: You can record it!

If you just want to have a part of a song or speech: You can record it!

Which may perhaps bring up the legality issues while working with this program, but I trust you.

Once you have recoreded the sound you want or have mixed your tracks, Audacity saves it as an Audacity file.  However, there is a .dll file you can get called LAME.  This allows you to save and export .mp3 files from Audacity, which is an excellent feature.

You may be wondering about the quality of recording streaming music, I find it to be surprisingly good.  I did however have problems the first time recording, my music sounded horrible.  If this happens to you, just update your sound card drivers. 

To record streaming music, you need to open up the preferences (Ctrl+P) and select the device, in your case probably your sound card, through which the music is streaming.  Then back on the main program layout you will see a drop down menu with selections like microphone, stereo mix, cd player, and a few others.  You will want to select ’stereo mix’ for the best quality. 

Overall Audacity is a great program that is very easy to use, so enjoy!

Get Audacity!

It has come to my attention that many people have not heard of the great program Teamspeak.

Teamspeak allows you to talk to your friends over the internet for free. All you need is a microphone and someone who has a Teamspeak server. Both the client and the server are free to download and to use, and are quite simple to use. One nice thing about Teamspeak is when you install it, the speak feature is hands free. All you need to do is talk into your microphone and it will pick it up and send your voice to whomever you are chatting with. However if there is alot of background noise, TS also comes with the capabilities to set a press to talk key so you microphone isn’t constantly transfering static.

With multiple channel capabilities, password protection, and being able to have multiple server admins is another great feature of using Teamspeak.

The above picture is the quick login option on teamspeak. If you don’t want to take the time to save the server or your just visiting a TS server once, then you can quick login.

This screenshot is of what team speak looks like when your logged in. Your user name is displayed under the channel. In my case it is Shade. To change channels you can double click the channel. You also have the option of letting people record your voice or not, and you have the option to put yourself into a mode like a sleep mode. In sleep mode you microphone is muted so you can’t be heard.

I rate Teamspeak as a good program, nay as a great program!
Get Teamspeak

Let me start by apologizing to whomever reads this… I was on vacation for the last week and a half.

Now onto the review!

This week I downloaded and tried out Gaim.

Gaim is relatively what you would expect from a multipurpose instant messaging program. It is much like Trillian except it allows you to have more types of screen names linked as can be seen in the included picture. You can link AIM/ICQ, Napster, Gadu-Gadu, and a few others.

So after selecting AIM/ICQ, I quickly filled out the form that it prompts you with the first time it starts. From there, everything was pretty easy if you have used programs like it before.

I did like how the buddy list style was large, you can actually see who is online, and they program they are using is next to it. The chat window seems larger than most programs, and the features are similar.

One feature that I noticed was called Buddy Pounce. Buddy Pounce is basically Aol’s version of the little window popping up in the corner of your screen when a buddy signs on/off or goes away. With Gaim you not only get that feature, you can customize it to just sign on or off, or to see when the buddy starts typing. You will never be fooled by them saying, BRB and then just talking to other people.

In conclusion, Gaim is nothing new, just adds more programs to the list that you can link. It is all up to personal preference to what program you use. Personally I am sticking with Trillian because I really don’t need anything besides AIM and MSN linking, and I like to be able to save all the conversations instantly, that way I can look up something if needed.

Gaim gets a ‘Good’ in my book but its not great.

I really don’t care. What are rules if they are not meant to be broken?

Yes I know that I just started this site and yes I know it is about programs but, don’t get mad, I feel that you would be missing something if you did not experience these few websites that I will be giving you.

Del.icio.us

You have probably seen a link to this site somewhere on my page or on other peoples pages if you read other blogs. Maybe you haven’t clicked it or maybe you have. Maybe you just weren’t interested in reading and trying to figure out how delicious works. Delicious is like the next best thing sinced sliced bread.

You know how when you format your computer with DBAN and everything is gone, including all those sites you added to your favorites but never checked out? Fear no more! Delicious is an online favorite saver. All you have to do is create an account and then go to town. Just log in and add the site to your favorites list and then you can access it anywhere, anytime. Or if your at home, you can put buttons on your links bar to save you some time with delicious bookmarking.

You can keep your favorites private or let them be seen by the public. It is a great way to share sites and find other sites that you would be interested in.

Flickr

This is a truly amazing site. Many people are getting onboard this massive project to share and store photos online. You can get a free account or you can pay for more bandwidth. Yes thats right, bandwidth. Flickr doesn’t charge you for photo views or anything of the sort. It just limits you amount of uploading by how much bandwidth you use to upload the photos.

Flickr lets you: put photos in certain sets, edit photos, add tags to your photos for easier searching, add notes to the photos themselves, share photos with everyone or just specific people, join groups with similar photography interests, or just let your photos jumble together.

Anyway you look at it, Flickr is a great way to store and share photos. Check out some pictures that I took at http://flickr.com/photos/pyrosarco

Radio Blog Club

Radio Blog Club is like having your own personal radio station, except you have to choose all the songs you want to listen to. If you register you can create a playlist to store your favorites, or you can just search for what you want to listen too at the time. Most of the time the site works great, the only problem is that it is totally based off of peoples hosted mp3s. If someone goes over their bandwidth usage for the month then their songs wont play for you.

Other than a few minor problems, there is nothing to hate about Radio Blog Club.

Yes, I know they aren’t really programs in the sense that you can download them and use them, the are great sites that are worth mentioning.

WARNING: The following program, when used as a start up, can and will, delete data unrecoverably. I take no responsibility for what you do with this program.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke, where do I begin?

First let me start by apologizing that there will be no screen shots for this program because none would survive… which is ok, because while DBAN is a Good program, it sure is Ugly.

DBAN is a self-contained, Linux based program, that can be put on a floppy or CD, to be used as a data destroying tool. Basically, DBAN will wipe a hard drive thoroughly.

The creator of DBAN says emergency data destruction, however, DBAN has never seemed very fast to me. Every time I run it I just type ‘autonuke’ and let the program run its course. It has taken about 3 hours to clean my 80gb hard drive. However there are other options besides ‘autonuke’ which you can have DBAN run, I have never thoroughly explored them.

I stumbled across DBAN maybe two years ago when looking for something to clean my hard drive better than just a format. It seemed to me that every time I formatted my computer and reinstalled the operating system, I would get the same errors with the same programs when reinstalled. I thought that this could be stored registry data that just gets compressed and not fully deleted when you format a drive. So I put a query in Google Groups and got DBAN back as an answer. Thanks whoever. I used it to wipe a computer, reinstalled, and never go the errors again.

I never looked back.

DBAN does clean a hard drive to basically nothing. In my experience, if was running Windows 98 SE I had to format and create a partition after running DBAN, then install. If I was going to put Windows XP on the drive, I just ran DBAN and dropped the XP disk in.

Basically, DBAN is a data destroying machine that is Ugly but Good. Use it, love it, become one with it.

I apologize, after looking at the website that goes along with DBAN, there is one screen shot which can be found here: http://dban.sourceforge.net/screenshot.png.

Get DBAN here: http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Winamp, you may have heard of this program mentioned somewhere, but you’ve always stuck with iTunes or some other bulky media player. Well not today!

Winamp is a small, free, or if you choose, affordable media player that comes with, not only all the standard features you would expect from a media player but more. For instance, can you watch web TV in iTunes? I think not! Winamp allows you access to hundreds of different shows through Shoutcast TV. It also lets you listen to different radio shows that happen to be streaming. You can search for songs, music videos, and play games.

Winamp is also great because of the customizablilty. You don’t need to be computer savvy to change the color scheme on the Winamp player, but for those who are more savvy, you can download whole different skins for Winamp.

Winamp also allows you to get plugins. Plugins are different pieces of software created by a person or several people, that allow Winamp to do different things. My personal favorite plugin is PaceMaker. PaceMaker for Winamp allows you to control the tempo, pitch and speed of a song.

It’s customizability, cost (nothing unless you want pro), and non-bulkyness, makes Winamp one of the best, if not the best media player out there.

This picture shows how one can shrink Winamp down so that they only have to see the basic controls and song name.

This picture shows Winamp expanded open with the playlist and media library showing.

While I, as a person, am not new to blogging, this is the first time that I have used a site where everything has been done for me. It feels strange, I have always built my websites a designed them the way I wanted. My current project besides this site is solomon - welcome the revolution.

I am trying wordpress for several reasons:

The first, is to see if I will get more traffic. I have problems getting traffic to my other site since it isn’t part of a community.

The second is so that I have a focus. The focus of this site is about computer programs, primarily Windows base programs. There are many people, like myself, who delight in finding a good program, using it, and sharing it with others. My goal is to do this, so if you’re one of those people stick around or suggest programs for me to feature.

With that in mind, the first program I will give to you is Trillian.

Now, one can get this program through download.com, by searching for Trillian, which is how I got it, or one can go to http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/ which is the maker of Trillian.

Trillian that compiled several of the instant messaging programs of today, including AIM, MSN Messenger, and ICQ, along with another that eludes me at the moment.

Trillian has several great features besides the linking of screen names. The first being its smart underlining during messages. Certain words get underlined in green, these words you can hover your mouse over to see the WikiPedia article for. This really helps if you are trying to impress someone and you can pull up quick facts about the topic you are talking about.

Another nice feature about Trillian, or maybe not so nice depending how you use it, is the feature to save all conversations had automatically. This way you can pull up a conversation you have from a week ago and say, “Aha! I told you so!”

With Trillian you can also do things like set all your messengers away at once, bring them back at once, or go invisible.

I also have pictures of Trillian with the contacts list closed, to protect my privacy, and the account manager open with name crossed out in red, also to protect my privacy.

Trillian is a Good program, I would reccomend it to anyone who juggles different instant messenging names.