So, You Want a Free Media Suite? Well You Can — Kinda.
Roxio and Nero both make media suites available that can manipulate, manage, edit and create a broad array of media. However, those suites can cost. On Amazon.com Nero’s suite is $60 and Roxio $75. Admittedly, once you buy the suite you have everything you need.
Sometimes, a user just doesn’t want to pay for EVERYTHING or – perhaps figures with a little searching and sweat equity he can get something almost as good. Well, the purpose of this article is to save some of the “sweat.”
I have broken down the suites into core functions to be discussed separately.
Music Editor
Each suite has an editor for music or other sound files. The most full featured free sound editor is “Audacity.” Audacity has a full range of features. It can import files, capture sound, edit the sound files, add effects, and export music files. It does not interact with WMA or AAC files because those are proprietary formats kept by Microsoft and Apple.
Audacity a Full Powered Free Sound Editor
You can find Audacity here.
CD Ripping
Everyone who buys a CD wants to make their music portable. To do that you want to find and install Exact Audio Copy. EAC is a audio grabber that is free for personal use. It will grab the audio, use CD databases to get ID3 tagging to automatically rename the MP3, read CD-Text, and normalize the audio. It is a one-stop program for taking your CD collection and making it a MP3 collection.
Exact Audio Copy will Grab all your Audio
You can find EAC here.
Music Manager/Organizer
Once you have all those MP3s on your hard drive, you are going to want an easy way to manage the files. You can use iTunes or Windows Media Player – but why?? They’re both set-up to accommodate the media companies. Let’s find something else. There is a free media manager (with a paid “full” version available) from MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey is by Ventis Media and are out to make a living from their software. Nonetheless the free product is great.
It will file the song files according to the ID tag, can sync with iPods, and, if you don’t want to use EAC, the program can rip the songs from the CD, rename them according to the internet CDDB, and burn the songs back to CD.
MediaMonkey is a well written free sound media manager
You can find MediaMonkey here.
Photoeditor
When it comes to photo editing GIMP is probably the best free image editor available. Download it here.
GIMP - A Powerful Image Editor
What is there to say about an image editor. Well, alot actually, but because I don’t do very much image editing, there is little insight I can give. Simply, I have it installed on my desktop because when I do want to edit images, GIMP has everything I need.
Video Player
Talking about everything you might need, Videolan is probably the most versatile and complete video player available anywhere. I have thrown all sorts of video formats at this application and it has NEVER failed. It is free and can be used with a simple interface or with a skin that will make it more presentable.
Not only can VLC play video on disc or on your hard drive, it can also play streaming video. It is just simply the easiest way to play video files.
Videolan - The Only Player You Will Need.
You can find VLC here.
BTW, there is another free player – the GOM player. Its interface is a little more “slick,” but isn’t quite as good at decoding all file formats in my experience.
DVD Copier
When you want to make a copy of a DVD you want to use DVD2DVD along with DVD43. Just do a Google for those two programs. DVD2DVD will make copies of the DVDs you have – so that the kids don’t scratch the originals beyond any hope of using them. DVD43 allows your computer to read the disc without regard to the schemes used by media companies to thwart your use of the licensed movie.
Video Editor
This is a difficult category. There are plenty of online editors that will allow you to edit video, but generally it is left to low resolution video for uploading to YouTube or some similar site. If you don’t want to be left to Windows Movie maker, try Avidemux or VirtualDub.
Those programs are decent alternatives, but are not full featured. If you really want complete control over DVD authoring and video editing – you are likely left to having to make a purchase. You don’t need a full suite (you have many of the parts for free, so just buy what you need).
Backup . . .
Well, I just couldn’t find a free backup program that will image a hard drive for the purpose of restoring after a failure.
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