Should getting burners get you burnt? Nope! The truth is, you don’t need to burn a hole in your pocket to get a nice burner that can help you create data, audio and even DVD disks and help you burn them into any type of media you want. FinalBurner is a freeware that helps you achieve this with ease.

FinalBurner is a freeware alternative to expensive CD and DVD burners. It enables you to create data, audio, DVD disks and burn them onto any type of media, such as CD R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD DL. You can also create an ISO image of a disk. It combines all the elements of a professional CD recorder, delivered with a convenient user interface that pleases the eye. It is designed without any extraneous features. It restricts the complex process of CD recording to a few mouse clicks, which is ideal for typical users.

With FinalBurner you can produce high quality output easily without any deep knowledge of CD recording technologies. You just select a few main settings and start burning. FinalBurner’s artificial intelligence will find the perfect recording balance.

Start burning without getting burnt, go and check it out! Click HERE for more info and free download!

Pandora is an internet radio station site, but with a twist! It knows what you might like, before you’ve even heard it! You simply type in the name of a song or artist, and it generates a playlist of similiar sounding songs and artists! It bases its findings on musical similiarity, not popularity, only the music counts!

It’s part of the ‘Music Genome Project’ an attempt to group thousands of songs by musical similarity. Everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. You can even give a “Thumbs Up”, which makes that song and songs that sound like that song play more often or “Thumbs Down” bans that song from that station, and makes songs that sound like that song play less often.

It’s a great way to discover new music based on what you already know you like. I like how they even provide links to more info on each band or artist, so if you find something you like you can easily learn more info!

Start listening right now by going here!

The thing with dictionaries is that it’s not enough to have them you must know how to use them. But the truth is this; there are so many dictionaries that are well stocked with words and their meanings but not easy to use. If you’ve had this problem with dictionaries, you might consider using TheSage.

The Sage’s English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a complete dictionary and a multifaceted thesaurus of the English language. The fact that it runs locally without an Internet connection makes it a must-have.

In case you are still wondering, “How does TheSage differ from any other traditional dictionary?” You might want to check the following features it possesses:

• A Comprehensive Dictionary with over 145,000 references with multiple detailed definitions (over 200,000)
• Tabbed interface, which allows multiple definitions and searches to be readily available
• A Complete Thesaurus with nearly 1,200,000 relationships between definitions (synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, holonyms…)
• A large collection of “Example Sentences” that already includes approximately 35,000 examples of usage
• Quick cross-referencing
• Standard and advanced wildcard search functionality
• Anagram search- only valid English words are returned
• History and session record keeping
• Options that allow customization of the appearance of TheSage

And so much more!

What really makes this particular one, my dictionary of choice is the fact that it can look up words directly from almost any program (IE, Word, Firefox, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc ) and is 100% portable [you can run it, fully functional, from portable devices such as a USB]

Want to check it out?

Click here for more info and download

[Silly Me! I forgot to mention, it’s totally FREE!]

If you are a video enthusiast and you have been searching for a shareware that is fun and easy to use, you may want to check this out.

Departing from the storyboard concept that most video editors use to a more familiar method of select, cut/copy, and paste editing, Video Edit Magic Express makes video editing as simple as possible for the average user. With Video Edit Magic Express, you can easily decorate your videos by dragging and dropping effects, adding background scores and changing the volume of individual tracks for audio mixing. The built-in capture tool enables you to quickly capture video from a camcorder, capture-card, or USB video camera and move it to your hard disk. You can also add captured footage directly to the timeline for further editing. You can combine video, audio and image files on the same timeline for editing operations, making it simple to compose your video masterpiece.

The fact that you don’t need to be a professional to use this software should make it a darling among all video enthusiasts. With little or no experience in video editing you can quickly learn the basics and start making your own video productions. A wizard based help quickly takes you through all necessary steps from importing to editing.

Believe me, this software delivers what it promises, so you might want to try it out. And if you are not satisfied with it; No problem, you don’t have to buy it until you have checked out the trial download which lasts for as long as 30 days, so what’s to lose. Check out the free trial download.

One thing is worthy of note though, you need nothing less than 256 MB RAM and 100MB of hard disk space to be able to download his software and use it effectively. It works on all Windows OS.

Learn More about Video Edit Magic Express.

This software has apparently been in use in computer music for over fifteen years, and used by performers, composers, artists, teachers, and students all over the world. As they put it on the web site “Max/MSP is the way to make your computer do things that reflect your individual ideas and dreams”, which is a bit grandiose for my taste.

More simply put, Max/MSP is a “graphical programming environment”, which means you can develop your own music generation and treatment software using a visual representation of the tools, connecting them together with patch cords on screen to make them talk to each other. This is really cool by the way! Not to mention very powerful.

The basic environment includes all the basic MIDI, control, user interface, and timing tools. That is the Max part of the suite. On top of Max you can build hundreds of other objects, including the two powerful collections of objects you can buy with Max, first of which is MSP, a collection of audio objects that facilitate everything from interactive filter design to direct to hard disk recording. The other set of objects is Jitter, a set of objects optimized for manipulating video and 3D graphics.

Yes it’s very geeky and techie, BUT it is VERY powerful. Computer driven music doesn’t get more leading edge than this.

Click here to join the magic.

Flash has long established itself as the standard for animation on the Internet. Its everywhere you look, banners, games, flash movies, even entire sites! So, there’s two ways you can go about making flash stuff, one is with the official Flash program from Macromedia, and the other is with programs such as this! The second option is usually a lot easier than learning Flash.

This program is great for making some pretty impressive stuff that would take hours to make in Macromedia Flash, you can make some very decent stuff with this thing. When you first use it, it walks you through a tutorial which makes you feel comfortable pretty quick. It has a simple to use interface and for the more experienced users it has a pretty good advanced mode too. They have a lite version of this program too, called ‘Flashy effects’, that mostly focuses on just text effects and banners. You can check them out by going here.

In design stock photography is something you usually pay through the nose for. A good source of free stock photography is a boon for designers, graphic artists and web creators alike. Which is why it’s so very nice to see so many good quality free stock photo resources on the web.

My favourite of all time has to be Stock Exchange, the first and best. The quality of the photos is great and you can contribute too. It’s like Flickr but with higher resolution to the graphics you create using these resources can be printable in magazines.

There are other resources too, all you have to do is search for “free stock photo -royalty”. The last bit is to stop searching for “royalty free” which is not free but something you pay for.

See Stock Exchange, but also these fine resources:

http://www.creatingonline.com/stock_photos/
http://www.free-stockphotos.com/

At the end of last week my Skype-client have told me that there’s a new BETA version (for Windows users) available… I was too busy that time to download and look at it but now time have come! So, what’s inside Skype 3.0 (Beta version)? First of all there are lots on new and very interesting functions (like skypecasts (which were available in the 2.6 Beta already), public chats etc.).

So, lets start with those skypecasts:

In Skype 3.0, you can browse the current Skypecasts straight in Skype on the Live tab. When you decide to join or host one, the Skypecast itself will run within a separate tab where you have all the host or participant controls to ask for mike, see who’s the host and do all those other things you need to do in a Skypecast. So there won’t be no more of those clunky pop-up browser windows. To join Skypecast just click the link and talk (or just listen to the conversation). Every Skypecast have all ‘statistic’ you need to know (subject, who’s hosting it, number of participants right now). One more thing about the host: one who organized the whole talk have more rights and can vary a few things, for ex. They can cut somebody short so you won’t be able to talk, just listening to the conversation. Also he can set a chat time (how long the conversation will take place). There’s a 5 hours limit (maximum). For that time chat will be available even if there’s no one is talking. After that chat will be deleted (only if there’s no one inside, if there’s at least one person it still will ‘live’). (more…)

If you want to change the way you play games and pull some really cool pranks on your friends, MorphVOX may come in handy. MorphVOX Junior is free voice changer software that will modify your voice to match your personality. You can sound like a man, woman, or little folk. Built-in voices and sound effects make this voice changer so convenient to use.

It is optimized for online games, but is also great for prank calling friends via instant messaging and VoIP. And it’s just about voices; it can send out car screeches and drum rolls with a push of a key, mouse or joystick button.

MorphVOX is a voice changing application for adding fun to online communication. If as a regular gamer, you have spent many hours grooming your online character to look a certain way, you now have the opportunity to change your voice to match. 

Get a whole new chatting experience, IM voice chatters, change your voice to disguise your age, gender or identity. The cool thing about it is you can change your voice with the available themed voices or create your own. Additional voice changing packs, sound effects, and skins can be easily added. 

MorphVOX is available in two versions, MorphVOX JUNIOR [free] and the Full featured MORPHVOX which you must pay for. 

MORE INFO AND FREE DOWNLOAD!

Are you tired of looking at some of your old pictures over and over again? Do you wish you could enhance the images, do something about the background, make it more romantic or whatever? That means you are ready to give your old pictures a new look? Then you’ve got to check this out!

Light Artist is a program that allows you to add realistic lighting effects to your photos. With it you can easily make your ordinary and undistinguished photos sunnier, romantic or even gloomy if you want. You can modify the light color, add multiple light sources, change the surface qualities of the image and add various ambient illumination effects.

Using one of the image channels as the texture channel you can add 3D relief to your images.

Though it is not a freeware, you can try out the evaluation version first to see if it will do what you have in mind. It doesn’t matter whether you are a pro or a greenhorn in image enhancements, it’s really easy to use.

Give it a try! For more info and download, CLICK HERE!