As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The fact that you can apply changes you’ve made to one photograph to hundreds of other images in one click is another major boon, and is ideal if you want to turn a batch of images into black and white, or apply an auto-colour correction to an entire album of photos, for instance.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Basic 3.50.54 in Softonic

Design and create professional CD/DVD and Jewel Case Labels with this award winning software. CD Box Labeler Pro's easy-to-use interface let you create labels in minutes. Don't spend hours on making labels, CD Box Labeler is created to make things easier for you, but still powerful to make professional CD & DVD labels.

Features:

• Font preview
• Image preview
• CDDB Support
• Multiple image support
• Rotate, flip, mirror images
• Filters & effects on images
• Support for shaded colors
• Rich text (multiple font, sizes, styles colors etc.)
• Read contents of the CD
• Ability to print on commercial made labels
• Ability to print on plain paper

Download CD Box Labeler Pro 1.9.9 H in Softonic

Audials One is designed as downloader and converter for music that, via it's subscription fee, allows you to download and copy music without fear of infringing copyright laws

The program tries to help you discover the kind of music you will like Simply select the music genre that you're into and click on "Start". The music is all copyright free because it has been recorded from over 15,000 internet radio stations that the program is affiliated to. If you don't find the kind of music you're looking for among the 100,000 artists listed in the MusicFinder database of regularly-played music, you can use the Audials One Internet meta-search engine to locate and download the MP3s you want. Whatsmore, the program comes bundled with a limited audio, video & DRM converter plus a simple CD & DVD burner to burn your favourite tracks. The converter is especially useful for recording music onto mobile devices with around 30 different formats supported. The aim to is to allow you to play your music, audio books and videos on mobile phones, MP3 players, MP4 players, PDAs, PSPs, auto radios and Apple iPods. In addition, there's direct access to podcasts from the community of listeners plus ID3 tagging options to organise your library.

This is a solid music program for those that want to download and share music legally although inevitably, the full subscription fee may put some people off.

Download Audials One Music Video Loader & Converter 2.1.35709 in Softonic

WinFF is the Windows version of one of the most popular video converters on Linux. It enables you to covert video files into several different video formats including Xvid and WMV.

WinFF has a basic GUI with a multitude of options and functionalities that will help you select the videos you need, previsualize them and define the format of the conversion. In addition, there are other specialised options such as the ability to change the ratio of the conversion, the resolution or the quality of the audio track.

Although WinFF is a fairly stable converter, it does struggle with long names especially those with unusual characters. To avoid problem, I advise you simply all of the names of the files that you want to convert. Otherwise, you might find that the program simply rejects the files for no apparent reason.

This is a convenient and quick file converter that still needs a few bugs ironing out before it would be my number one choice.

Download WinFF 0.42 in Softonic

One of the most frustrating things about video playback is when you don't have the right codecs installed.

SMPlayer attempts to do away with this problem completely by attempting to play videos regardless of the codecs they need. It does this by using the MPlayer engine which the developers claim can play almost all video formats. In reality, this is not always the case. What you may find is that if you're trying to play a WMV file protected by DRM for example, you will see snippets of the film but not the whole thing. However, the player has many other great features that make it an interesting proposition. One of the most useful is the way it remembers most of the settings of files that you play a bit like a DVD Player. If you turn off a film because you're a bit tired, when you open it later, it will start from exactly the same point where you left it with all the original settings including subtitles and audio. One other area where the player excels is in subtitling. SMPlayer allows you to choose subtitles in a variety of formats allowing you to choose the font, size, and even colors.

There are many other great aspects to SMPlayer - audio track switching, mouse scrolling and multiple speed playback - that on top of it's codec free playback, make it an excellent choice.

Download SMPlayer 0.6.1 in Softonic

Copying or cloning CDs has become increasingly difficult with copyright encryption getting more and more sophisticated.

However, there are always a few programs out there that seem able to crack just about anything and CloneCD is certainly one of them. CloneCD gives you the option to clone as much or as little as you want from not only CDs but DVDs as well. Why the developers chose to keep the name CloneCD is a mystery because this program is more than capable of both.

The utility can compress extensive footage at high speed due to what the developers call "advanced transcoding technology" and it allows you to select both the audio and language you'd like to use from DVDs. The program works very well with ISOs and UDFs and is particularly useful to "unblocking"copyrighted disks - i.e. those CDs or DVDs which are copyrighted and won't play in your CD player. However, it should be noted that copyright laws vary from country to country and that you should not be using this program to break copyright laws or decode commercial disks - it's entirely for your own use.

For unblocking or copying locked or heavily encrypted DVDs or CDs, CloneCD is an incredibly powerful application.

Download CloneCD 5.3.13 in Softonic

You probably have lots of different videos and films on your computer you would like to play on your home DVD player. Unfortunately, many DVD players can only read the standard DVD format and it's therefore a waste of resources to burn DVDs with avi, mpeg or wmv files.

DVD Flick comes in handy because it converts PC video files to a proper DVD format, readable by all standard devices. The final file size is much bigger than the original, for example: a 600mb requires a whole DVD. The conversion process is also very slow, but you can leave the program working while you use other applications, as you can select the priority your system gives to the conversion software. The final result will be an audio_ts and a video_ts folder, which is the standard for all DVDs and you can also chose to create an iso file which can be burned again at a later date. It would have been good to have the possibility to add subtitles but unfortunately this feature is missing.

If you are patient enough, DVD Flick is the perfect solution for burning your holiday movie to DVD, meaning that whatever DVD player your friends or family have, they’ll have no escape from your not-quite-Oscar-winning production.

This is a reliable program that does what it's meant to but at the end of the day, DVD Flick is really only going to be useful to people without a multi-format DVD player.

Download DVD Flick 1.2.2.0 in Softonic

As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The Classic version of StudioLine Photo comes with a raft of features that you don't get in Basic. These extra treats include a Timeline view that automatically organizes images by date, a star rating facility, and a neat image archive filter which significantly ramps up your picture hunting speed.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Classic 3.50.10 in Softonic

Ever thought your photos and movies could do with some special effects? Fancy yourself as a Spielberg? What about all those holiday snaps, surely you could make them more interesting. Photo editing can seem a daunting and sometimes futile business. And creating movies is another prospect altogether. However, MAGIX appear to be offering a program to take the fear out of editing that offers quick and easy results with spectacular effects. In a few clicks you can create effects that you will have seen on many television programmes.

To get started just install the software onto your PC and try out some of the presaved features. There is a large viewing area on the left of the screen and to the right are your folders and files. First of all you need to make sure you have chosen widescreen or normal video though; otherwise all your time and work will be wasted. You can upload music into your presentation, cue intro and outro themes, add cinema curtains opening and closing, then play with the myriad effects available. These include fade ins and outs, pixellation, zooming, tracking in from left or right, tracking out, the whole screen folding up, swirls... too many to mention to be honest.

Once you've mastered all this you can go to the next level of editing which involves animating your photographs, giving your grandparents hilarious moustaches, if they don't have them already, or putting glasses on your dog. You can also add speech bubbles or pixellate faces, as if they were on a news report. Once your happy burn your presentation, slideshow or home movie onto a CD or DVD, or show your slideshows as videos in Flash format or even in high resolution HD. Even better, you can share them with your friends using an online MAGIX album. MAGIX is a substantial and, most importantly, accessible editing package.

Download MAGIX - Photos on CD & DVD 2007 (UK) in Softonic

There can't be many people on this planet who have never watched a video or listened to a song on a computer. Chances are you've used one of the popular media players such as iTunes, Winamp or Windows Media Player, but have you ever stopped to think there might be some more interesting ways to play back movies or audio? If you're yearning for something a little bit different then you might find that XULPlayer fits the bill.

The application can play a wide range of different formats, whether it's audio, video, or even images. It's a little different to the rest of the bog-standard players out there and boasts a number of very interesting features. Besides all the normal playback functions, it includes several simple editing tools for changing the appearance, colour and rotating the image.

Another great concept incorporated into XULPlayer is the ability to have dual-video, allowing you to play two audio files or DVDs simultaneously and cross-fade them. It's a pretty slick interface and many of the useful features such as the subtitle options and video screenshotting are available with a single click of an icon. The app has a few little bugs that need ironing out but I'm sure in the upcoming updates these will be addressed.

Even now, XULPlayer provides a refreshingly unique alternative to those popular media players that have become household names.

Download XULPlayer 0.2.1.1 in Softonic

Photodex’s ProShow Gold is already considered a reference point in photo slideshow creation and it’s easy to see why. This high–spec application offers a range of editing tools and a number of output formats that will suit beginners and advanced users. Let’s look at the most significant features of Photodex ProShow Gold.

You’ll quickly realize the potential of the program after browsing through its features. The new timeline view makes it easy to pick and drag the photos you want. ProShow Gold has all the editing tools you need like red eye remover or drop shadow and you can set an unlimited amount of layers to your slides. With around 200 transitions available, it's easy to give your slideshow an original feel. Adding a track or recording your voice over is also a cinch and Photodex now includes a wave form view to properly edit audio elements.

Advanced users will appreciate the motion effects, which let you configure your transitions with pinpoint precision. Your panning, zoom and rotation settings can easily be copied and transposed to other slides and the speed of each effect can be set individually.

The beauty of ProShow Gold is the number of output formats you can choose from to share your slide show with others. You can create your own animated screensaver to enjoy your photos on your PC. If you want to create copies of your slideshow you can burn it to DVD, video CD or autorun CD-ROM. If you feel like sharing your slideshow over the internet you can email it to a friend or share it with other ProShow Gold users on Photodex’s website. Another one of Photodex’s very own output options is to create a streaming web show. Not to worry here, you do not need to have any knowledge about web editing. ProShow Gold takes care of converting your slide to the proprietary Photodex presenter stream.

ProShow Gold obviously packs a large amount of features and tools and you could easily feel overwhelmed by them, but thankfully the quick tutorial at the start does well to explain how you can best make use of the program according to your needs.

Despite a lengthy installation process, Photodex’s ProShow Gold is certainly the reference point in photo slideshow creation. Professional photographers and wedding planners as well as home users will enjoy the amount of editing tools and output possibilities the program has to offer.

Download Photodex ProShow Gold 3.0.1992 in Softonic

There are various flight sims out there but there are few that are totally free. FlightGear bucks this trend to offer a user-friendly but realistic introduction to the skies, all built on open-source programming. Just because it’s free though, don’t think that FlightGear can’t compete with the big boys such as Microsoft Flight Simulator X – it’s as good, if not better in many ways.

Firstly, it’s not isolated to Windows – in true open source spirit FlightGear also works on several Linux/UNIX platforms and Macs. Like most flight-sims however, the installation and startup takes a good 5-10 minutes to install the various backdrops and 3D graphics. Once started, you’re presented with around 20 planes to select ranging from Messerschmitts to Cessnas. Next up, you’re asked to select an initial selection of around 30 locations around the world. You can download a whole lot more – enough to fill 3 DVDs, apparently – from the developer website.

FlightGear can be controlled in two ways - through the command line and through a graphical wizard called ‘fgrun’. Both do exactly the same thing but we recommend the wizard for ease of use. Once you’re done with this, you hit the runway and off you go! There are no missions to complete or battles to win – it’s simply a case of take-off, landing and enjoying the scenery.

The 3D graphics are surprisingly detailed and for those with programming know-how, the fact that it’s open-source means that the sky is literally the limit in terms of what you can create and do with FlightGear. Fancy flying a rocket from Washington to London or putting an ejector seat in a 747? Just make them yourself!

The major drawback of this flight-sim however is that it is very heavy on resources. Users of older machines may find loading times painful and the graphics sluggish so it’s recommended that you shut down all other applications or expand your RAM before trying FlightGear. What makes FlightGear standout though is the fact that even taking control of the most complicated aircraft is possible due to the excellent tutorials on the developer site which take you step by step through take-off. Whilst most flight simulators are aimed at experienced flyers, FlightGear is designed for those who’ve never sat in a cockpit before but want to learn the essentials. The general interface is also very clean and user friendly – there aren’t too many unnecessary dials to confuse you. The game options are clearly presented at all times as are the customisation options. From here, you can specify everything from the time of day to the type of navigation panel and even the weather.

Another great feature is the ability to team-up with a friend and fly the skies over a network. Many users report that the lag time is incredibly short when playing over a network on FlightGear compared to professional sims such as Flight Simulator X. However, don’t expect to log-on being able to have dogfights and shoot passenger planes out of the sky – there’s no arcade or action mode available as yet although you could always program one yourself.

This is a fantatstic flight sim that will appeal to both novices and experts. Surprisingly high quality plus the fact that it’s totally free, explain why FlightGear is becoming an increasingly popular download.

Download Flightgear 0.9.9 in Softonic

Just three mouse clicks away from recovering all your lost, deleted and (re)formatted photo's or files on any removable media or digital camera connection. RecoverPlus offers media recovery, photo recovery, card recovery and file recovery in an easy interface.

The award-winning program supports all possible picture files and comes with over 40 different file types, data and RAW included. Dedicated to the proprietary RAW Formats of Canon, Nikon, Konica Minolta, Rollei, Kodak, Fuji, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Sigma, Adobe, Foveon etc.

RecoverPlus recovers what others do not

Add more and new file types and improve recovery for the common types with the unique learning engine TransPict Adaptive at no additional costs. For the utmost accurate recovery, even sub-types of the same file type are determined by using Fuzzy Logic. You have a full control over each file type you want to recover with the benefit of increased reliability and recovering speed. Using TransPict Adaptive, you are able to retrieve the pictures other programs fail to recognize.

You get what you see

What you will see in the resizable pre-view pane is the real image. RecoverPlus renders pre-view images from the whole file. The thumbnails in the lower part of the screen are also rendered from the whole image file. What you see is what you get.

Display your recovered photos full screen

Full resizable screen for displaying at the format you want. Full screen display with just one click on the picture. Resizable thumbs. If available, Exif information is shown and the date and time of the files are reset to their original date and time of digitizing.

In a hurry when disaster strikes?

Press the ‘Backup’ button for saving the whole medium to your hard disk. RecoverPlus even recovers from backup files made with other programs. You can deal with it later as if it was the original. Moreover, RecoverPlus caches all scanned files on disk until you save your files or make a new scan. Resume later if you want.

All drive connections supported

The very accurate and fast recovery, enabled by the proprietary Recovery Engine, will surprise you. Scanning, detecting and recovering of files in one go is at least as fast as normal loading of files. Up to 15 MB/sec with a CF card. Supported is any connection with a drive letter, like a disk, reader, camera, card, stick, iPod, Image Tank, CD/DVD, USB, PCMCIA, FireWire, etc. The only limitation in size is the amount of free space on your system disk.

Download RecoverPlus Pro 2.6.2 in Softonic

MAKara CDCatalog is an award winning CD/DVD Catalog software. It stores all file/folder information into it's database. You can split CD/DVD's also local folders into categories, browse them offline, and rename it's display label add description and shelf index.

For index any CD/DVD start program and insert CD/DVD into any CD/DVD drive. MAKara CDCatalog will dedect automatically and catalog it at background; finally pop-up catalog properties to modify caption and add shelf index. So you'll never need to insert that CD again for browsing & searching. You can directly launch any file or explorer from software, if there is no cd/dvd program will warn you to insert correct CD and runs that file.

Download MAKara CDCatalog 1.1.1c in Softonic

GRBackPro is a data backup program for Windows designed to easily solve your backup problems at a low price. You can define multiple backup sessions each having different options. Each session can contains many Jobs. Any Job can backup a whole disk, a single folder or few files. Backup modes are: Full, Incremental and Differential. You can compress your files using the standard zip format and also password protect them.

Fully customizable: include, exclude files, skip directories. An integrated restore facility allows you to quickly maintain two or more PC aligned. An integrated scheduler let you start your backup automatically without your intervention. You can install it as a Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT or Windows Me/98/95 service to have your backups start even if no users are logged in. GRBackPro support network, floppy, Hard drives, DVD-RW, CD-RW and all removable hard drives (NO Tapes). GRBackPro handles a log file where it automatically stores all program activities. GRBackPro is full featured with many professional options. It is an award winning and easy to use backup application.

Download GRBackPro 6.2.0 in Softonic

File Audio Processor is an award winning software, All-In-One multimedia solution, which has a lot of features for audio editing, viewing and management.

In addition to audio processing capabilities, the application also includes video player, picture viewer with editor, file manager and more tools than you can use to perform file and audio management tasks. File Audio Processor has special Batch operation, Rename - Convert - Tag - Copy or Move files to any location in your computer that allows you to fast and easy process multiple files at once.

It can be used as the following tools:

• File Renamer
• Audio Tagger
• File Manager
• CD Audio Grabber
• CD-DVD Writer
• Audio Converter
• Audio Editor
• Visual Audio Editor
• Media Library
• Audio & Video Players
• Audio Recorder
• Playlist Manager
• CDDB Database
• Zip Archiver
• Text To Audio Converter

Download File Audio Processor 4.1.30 in Softonic

Acubix PicoZip is an award winning file compression utility for Microsoft Windows users. Its intuitive user interface is extremely easy to use, while its wide ranging support for most file compression formats and comprehensive feature set makes PicoZip the only archive utility you will ever need. PicoZip is compatible with Zip files created by WinZip, PKZip and others.

Features:

• Simple and intuitive user interface
• Seamless Windows integration
• Fast and easy automated backup
• Integrated archive files explorer
• Powerful batch features to automate repetitive tasks
• Easy favorite archive folders management
• Strong 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption
• Built-in support for CD/DVD burning
• Create self-extracting archives
• Repair ZIP archives
• Split/Merge ZIP archives
• Convert archive formats
• Flexible filtering of files in archives
• Integrated email support
• Virus scanner support
• Quick access tray tool
• Customizable look using toolbar skins
• Recover password from Zip files

Download Acubix PicoZip 3.01 in Softonic

PicoBackup is an easy-to-use award winning backup utility packed with many powerful features to backup all your important data like documents/files, Outlook/Outlook Express emails, Registry settings, Favorites, etc. PicoBackup can be easily extended to support other types of backup by installing plugins.

Various methods of backup like full backup, incremental backup and multi-generation backup are supported, giving you full control on how to backup. Features: Flexible integrated scheduler, CD/DVD burning and spanning, 256-bit AES/Blowfish encryption, backup to remote FTP server, standard ZIP compression, email notification, detailed logging and more. Many different types of media are supported, including flash/thumb drives, Zip/Jazz drive, floppy drive.

PicoBackup comes with a built-in scheduling engine that makes it extremely simple to schedule your backups to run automatically. It also comes with a comprehensive context-sensitive help file. If you have any trouble using any of the features, just pressing F1 will bring up the appropriate help topic.

Download PicoBackup 2.2 in Softonic