Category: Free Business Resources

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.   Audacity won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Awards for Best Project for Multimedia. Audacity is licensed under GPLv2 or any later version.

The interface is translated into many languages. You can use Audacity to:,•Record live audio., •Record computer playback on any Windows Vista or later machine., •Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs., •Edit WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP2, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis sound files., •Cut, copy, splice, or mix sounds together. •Change the speed or pitch of a recording.

In addition to recording audio from multiple sources, Audacity can be used for post-processing all types of audio by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out. Audacity has also been used to record and mix entire albums, such as by Tune-Yards. It is also currently used in the UK OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.

Audacity’s features include:

• Recording and playing back sounds
  • Scrubbing (Version 2.1.1 and later)
  • Timer Record enables the user to schedule when a recording begins and ends to make an unattended recording.
  • MIDI playback is available (from version 2.2.0 onwards)
  • Punch and Roll recording – for editing on the fly (from version 2.3.0 onwards)
• Editing
  • via cut, copy, and paste, with unlimited levels of undo
  • Features of modern multitrack audio software including navigation controls, zoom, and single track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (cut, copy, paste)
  • Amplitude envelope editing
  • Precise adjustments to the audio speed (tempo) while maintaining pitch in order to synchronize it with video or run for a predetermined length of time
  • Conversion of cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by splitting the audio source into multiple tracks based on silences in the source material
• Cross-platform operation — Audacity works on Windows, macOS, and other Unix-like systems (including Linux and BSD)
  • Audacity uses the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems.
• A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist, a Lisp dialect.
  • Built-in LADSPA, VST(32-bit), and Nyquist plug-in support.
  • Noise Reduction based on sampling the noise to be minimized.
  • Vocal Reduction and Isolation for the creation of karaoke tracks and isolated vocal tracks.
  • Adjusting audio pitch while maintaining speed and adjusting audio speed while maintaining pitch
  • LADSPA, VST (32-bit) and Audio Unit (macOS) effects now support real-time preview (from version 2.1.0 onwards). Note: Real-time preview does not yet support latency compensation.
  • Saving and loading of user preset for effect settings across sessions (from 2.1.0 onwards).
• Multitrack mixing
• Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 32 bits per sample.
• Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transform algorithm
• Importing and exporting of WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, now integrated as part of Audacity), Ogg Vorbis, and all file formats supported by libsndfile library. Versions 1.3.2 and later supported Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). Version 1.3.6 and later also supported additional formats such as WMA, AAC, AMR, and AC3 via the optional FFmpeg library.
• Detection of dropout errors while recording with an overburdened CPU
• From 2.3.2 onwards, the mod-script-pipe for driving Audacity from Python now comes with Audacity and it can be enabled via preferences.
• A full downloadable manual. (or available online without downloading).
• Four user-selectable themes enable the user to choose their preferred look and feel for the application (version 2.2.0 and later)
  • Four user-selectable colorways for waveform display in audio tracks (version 2.2.1 and later).

Audacity supports the LV2 open standard for plugins and can therefore load software like Calf Studio Gear.

Audacity’s 3.0 update, in March 2021, introduced a new project file format, .aup3, using SQLite database to store everything.

Limitations

Audacity supports only 32-bit or 64-bit VST audio effect plug-ins, depending on which architecture it was built for, but not both at the same time. It is built-in 32-bit for Windows and 64-bit for macOS.

It does not support instrument VST (VSTi) plugins.

Audacity lacks dynamic equalizer controls and real time effects while recording.

Audacity does not natively import or export WMA, AAC, AC3, or most other proprietary or restricted file formats; rather, an optional FFmpeg library is required.

Microsoft’s built-in Windows Defender protects Windows consumers from most malware, spyware, and viruses. There are a few free good virus protection programs available online. The free one I like to use is AVG. AVG AntiVirus FREE is super lightweight software that won’t affect your PC’s performance or speed.

AVG AntiVirus free version of the software is a single anti-malware package that lets you protect an UNLIMITED number of Windows and Mac computers, as well as Android phones/tablets, from one easy-to-use dashboard. It’s also Zen-enabled, which means you can now extend your protection to your entire family and all their devices.

AVG features most of the common functions available in modern antivirus and Internet security programs, including periodic scans, scans of sent and received emails (including adding footers to the emails indicating this), the ability to repair some virus-infected files, and a quarantine area (virus vault) in which infected files are held.

Calibre is a free and open-source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. Calibre converts files to PDF, ePub, and other file types that work well on e-readers. Calibre can be used to create epubs for kindle and so much more. Calibre (stylised calibre) is a cross-platform open-source suite of e-book software.  Calibre is a powerful and easy-to-use e-book manager. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. It’s also completely free and open source and great for both casual users and computer experts.

• Save time on managing your e-book collection
• Use it everywhere and with anything
• Comprehensive e-book viewer
• Download news/magazines from the web
• Share and backup your library easily
• Edit the books in your collection
• Satisfy every e-book need and get support

Calibre supports organizing existing e-books into virtual libraries, displaying, editing, creating and converting e-books, as well as syncing e-books with a variety of e-readers. Editing books is supported for EPUB and AZW3 formats. …

Scribus is a free Open Source application that functions very much like Adobe Indesign. Both are used for Desktop Publishing (page layout design for newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters, books, and pdf). Scribus can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms.

Scribus is a page layout program that can be installed on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.  When saving and editing a file in Indesign, you won’t lose data by the inherent “trimming” function. What this means is that if you resize an image to 1/10th of its size the application gets rid of some data because you’re not using it. This function processed multiple times is what allows some documents (pdfs) to take up less space.

Scribus doesn’t have this function, so your files may be large depending on the image qualities used. The workaround for this is to edit your images in GIMP or Photoshop before using them in Scribus.

Although Scribus and Indesign are similar- Indesign’s file format (.indd) is proprietary and can NOT be read/opened/imported by Scribus. It’s currently unclear if Indesign has taken steps to be able to open Scribus files (.sla)

There are conversion processes that can be found by googling, but you may lose your layer functions and in some cases the whole of the file because it converts ‘every page’ of the file into a separate file*. As of today (10/30/13) Scribus is on version 1.4.3, with 1.5 in beta promising IDML files (the other export option Indesign offers besides pdf).

Inkscape

Create banners for websites and blogs with Inkscape and so much more. Inkscape is a free vector graphics editor similar to  Adobe Illustrator a widely used vector graphics editing program. Inkscape is powerful enough to compete with Adobe Illustrator in terms of the functionality most users expect from a vector graphics program.

The best thing about Inkscape is its ease of use. If you do a lot of work rendering and drawing in vector, this program will save you much time, even if you are new to digital art programs the learning curve with Inkscape is much easier than that of any Adobe Creative Suite program.

The Inkscape window has a large central drawing area, with several toolbars around the edges. Many dialog boxes, such as the one for setting stroke and fill properties, will open along the right edge of the window. The layout is configurable. For example, toolbars can be hidden, and dialog boxes can be dragged out of the main window to become independent windows.

The default file type of Inkscape is a .svg  but, Inkscape can import many file types including:

• .ai
• .pdf
• .dxf
• .png
• .jpg
• .bmp

Inkscape can export several file types including:

• .pdf
• .dxf
• .png
• .jpg
• .bmp

GIMP is a free image retouching and editing tool, very much like Adobe Photoshop. Tools include free‐form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo montages, converting between different image formats
(i.e. from .tiff to .jpg), and more specialized tasks. There are versions for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

It is an extremely capable piece of software with many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, and more.

Gimp is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything to be easily scripted, from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures.

Features And Capabilities
This is only a brief list of Gimp features:

· Full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.

· Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space

· Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing

· Full Alpha channel support

· Layers and channels

· A procedural database for calling internal Gimp functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu

· Advanced scripting capabilities

· Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)

· Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip

· File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others

· Load, display, convert and save to many file formats

· Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent

· Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters

To learn more visit the website …