Mashed Articles

Each issue we’re going to be hunting down the best digital media applications available on the internet so you don’t have to. This could be anything from image manipulation to video editing, from audio compression to media management and everything in between. You name it, we’re likely to cover it. Best of all, everything you’ll find on this page will be freeware. So no nagging popups, no time restrictions and no feature limitations. Just strictly no holds barred functionality! Read on to find out what we’ve been digging during the last month.

Free Opener
There are many free image-editing suites out there. Some of them useful, some of them not so much. But often, those that are useful are just complete bloatware. Free Opener is neither of these. It just contains the most useful functions for basic photo manipulation including resize, rotate, flip, change format, add watermark texts and the ability to sort or rename your images.
Website
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PixBuilder Studio NEW
Professional quality functions in a freeware package? That’s not something you hear everyday. But it is what the developer of this particular package is touting. There’s advanced colour management with the like of brightness/contrast adjustment, colour balance and levels manipulation to backup the boasts. And that’s in addition to the colour curves feature.
Website
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Free image editor with quite the myriad of features

Bad Peggy NEW
JPEGs are often easily corrupted when trasferring them from an old backup or downloading them from the internet. Sometimes there’s data truncation, at other times unusual blemishes appear in random places. All this can be incredibly annoying, sure. But it can be fixed. All you need to do is install this great app and run your dodgy images files through it.
Download from here

Google Music Player
One of the annoying things about Google Music is that you need to keep the tab open whenever you’re rocking out to your favourite tracks. Should you accidentally close the browser you’re suddenly pulled back into the sound of the world around you. Solve this by installing Google Music Player where you can enjoy a separate app that minimises to the system tray and supports your keyboards media keys.
Website
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JPEGmini
The folk behind this little beauty believe they’re on to such a good thing that they’ve lodged a patent request. With JPEGmini it’s possible to significantly reduce the size of your favourite photographs in preparation for uploading them to the website. The big hook here is you’re likely to see no noticeable degradation in quality. Give it a try, the results might surprise you.
Website

Photofly NEW
Gone are the days when creating 3D models of objects required time and money, but mostly a lot of time. With the help of the brainboxes at Autodesk you can use Photofly to convert still images into 3D models. It uses a process called photogrammetry, a method of 3D modelling that stitches together regular 2D images together to create 3D point clouds .
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PanoramaPlus Starter Edition NEW
Everybody likes to create panoramas. They can be so easy to make, but look so good. All you need is a good camera and a simple utility like this that stitches the photo together and you have some really swish-looking images that can be the result of both horizontal and vertical stitching. Oh, did we mentioned it was also free?
Website
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Create some truly wonderful panorama photos with this simple stitching tool from Serif

Free Studio NEW
A real suite of applications this one. By downloading and installing the one executable you pretty much have access to all of DVDVideoSoft’s utilities under the one roof. Massively useful if you’re looking to convert video to, well, pretty much anything. All the major mobile handset manufacturers are covered, not to mention audio CDs and DVDs.
Website
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Free Audio Converter
What happens when you download a piece of music and it’s not in the format you’d hoped for? the easiest solution is to quickly load up Free Audio Converter. With this program you can convert audio between a number of different formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A, OGG with support for MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, iPads and PSPs. It’s also possible to extract audio from video and join audio files.
Website
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ffDiaporama
Love to snap a few photos? Find that you have an overwhelming number of images to keep tabs on? Then you’ll obviously want to add ffDiaporama to your workflow. It’s more than capable of cataloging photographs from removable drives and your local disks simultaneously. Plus images can be arranged in a single, virtual file system doing all the hard work for you in the process.
Website
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All these great tools are part of issue 315 of PC Plus, on the shelves on 11th November 2011. Subscribe today to the paper edition and you can get it up to a week early! Subscribe to PC Plus.

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