…and One!

The college basketball season has begun in earnest, and you can watch a half-dozen or more games every night – more on the weekends. One of the things any savvy fan likes to hear is when his team makes a shot and the announcer says “and ONE!” because this means that not only was the basket made, but there was a foul and the team will get a chance for a bonus point. With the advent of the three point shot several years ago, it is now possible for a single player to score four points on one possession.

Let me introduce you to some great free software you should know about if you do anything more sophisticated online other than just surf the web (maybe looking up the College Basketball Power Rankings?). And in the spirit of the season, I’ll offer you a three point shot – and One!

We’ll start with what my friend and colleague John Lester calls “The Holy Trinity”. These are the three must have tools you should get if you work with documents and scripts, videos, or audio – whether you are building a website, an online game, or otherwise creating something digital. By the way, you should definitely check out John’s blog “Be Cunning and Full of Tricks” for tutorials and musings on virtual reality, online learning, community development and many other topics

One of the best things about all of these tools is that they are absolutely free to download and use. That, and the fact that they just work really well! You might consider each of these tools a form of disruptive innovation in the most classical sense, as they each offer a tool that has essential features that most people need and use, without the “feature bloat” and attendant cost of other well-known software tools.

Audacity is a high-quality, easy to use sound recorder and editor. With Audacity, you can record your own audio files, record things you are hearing through your computer, convert tapes or records (remember records?) into digital sound files, edit a wide variety of types of audio files, and import, export, cut, copy, dub, splice, loop and transform sounds on your computer. It’s like having your own sound studio at your fingertips. In fact, many professional musicians use audacity in their work. This is “live software”, the developers continue to improve it. The most recent version (Audacity 2.0) has a noise removal feature, so if you are making a recording and there is some background sound bleed-in, you can slice it out to get a better finished product.

For the video crafters, the program to get is the VLC multi-media player from videolan.org. The program runs on all of the major platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Android, Linux, Ubuntu, etc.) and plays most types of multimedia files, including MP3s, DIVX, FLV – well it might be easier to list what it doesn’t play, although I’m not sure there are many candidates for that category. VLC can be your go-to player for DVDs, Audio CDs, and other media as well. With VLC, you can also import media in one file format and export it in another when your needs require a specific format. It’s also easy to use, so if you have had bad experiences with other media player software in the past, you really owe it to yourself to check this out.

Rounding out the Trinity is Notepad ++ (Notepad plus plus) which you can download here. N++ is a source code editor and advanced text editor (think replacement for the more traditional and widely known Notepad that probably came on your computer) that packs a lot of power without taking up much space or using many resources – they brag about reducing carbon emissions! It is available with translations into over 70 languages. N++ has been in continuous development for over 10 years and keeps getting better. Programmers love its source code editing features, including syntax highlighting, brace and indent highlighting, macro recording and other tools that work with over 50 programming and markup languages. Anyone who uses a text editor or notemaking tool will like the drag and drop feature, the ability to do split screen editing, find and replace, bookmarking and shortcut keys. I’ve only just discovered this great little tool but I doubt that I will ever use Notepad or Wordpad again!

So there is the Holy Trinity, Audacity, VLC, and Notepad++. All powerful, easy to learn and use, and free! I promised you an “and One” bonus, though, so here is your extra shot. Even on Amazon.com, you are likely to pay well into three figures for the world’s best known photo enhancement and manipulation software tool, Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is used extensively by photographers, videographers, artists, designers and hobbyists. But, like the other categories we have been discussing, there is a free alternative that offers a majority of the same features, and for free! The GNU Image Manipulation Program – affectionately known as GIMP, has an enormous user base (great when you need some advice), an online magazine – which should soon be published monthly, and loads of features that are most frequently used by owners of PS, including various painting tools (Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, etc.), gradient editors, blending tools, selection tools, editable layers, image transformation, full alpha-channel support, and tons more. GIMP sports a customizable interface, great documentation and tutorials, and that big user base we mentioned before. GIMP handles files in most all of the formats you would ever need, including bmp, gif, jpg, tiff, tga, and png. It runs on all of the major platforms. GIMP is a great bonus for this three point play!

And did we mention all these great programs are free? What are you waiting for?