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Most useful PC applications?

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hateradio said:
That's a program I haven't heard about in years. I used to use it quite a lot, but then I started using WinCDEmu and finally Windows 7 and 8 got native mounting, so that became unnecessary.
Click to expand...

Isn't it just 8 that got iso mounting? And just iso, and not bin/cue or stuff like that?
 
VLC - Media Player, rarely lets me down, works "out of the box"
OBS - Very competent open source streaming app, can also be used for making local video to upload to youtube etc.
dxtory - Great partner to OBS. Ability to stream raw game footage to multiple drives at once and then compile later means you're getting the best quality possible without the performance hit. Helps OBS with full screen games
foobar2000 - Great music player that is extremely customizable
dBpoweramp - Swiss army knife of audio ripping / conversation into a whole plethora of formats
Mumble - open source server chat client
Tixati - torrent client, nice features, and no bs.
Raptr - multi-chat client centered around gaming. think pidgin but also tracks your games and makes a community of it.
Firefox - dun does web
theGIMP - extremely powerful (and free) image editing tool.
NetBeans IDE - free, open source desktop, mobile and web applications development kit, with support for Java, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and more.
Sublime Text 3 - a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. very slick
7-zip - open source file archiver with a high compression ratio. supports most formats.
 
Allway Sync - nice directory synchronization tool. I use this to back up my music collection.
qBitTorrent - my favorite client. better than uTorrent.
HOLMImpulse - for making acoustics measurements for room correction. better than REW for this purpose I think.
REW - Room EQ Wizard. draws nice plots from, e.g., impulse measurements.
drc - Denis Sbragion's free room correction software. beats the pants off Audyssey MultEQ XT-32 in general sound quality (if you know how to use it).
 
OSX:

Firefox
Adium
Tweetbot
Cyberduck
Transmission
VLC
CoRD
Menu Meters
SMART Reporter
Fantastical
gfxCardStatus
The Unarchiver
AppCleaner
Burn
DaisyDisk


Windows:

Firefox
WinRAR
Alcohol 52%/Alcohol 120%/Virtual Clonedrive/MagicISO/MagicDisc/WinCDEmu
uTorrent 2.2.1 (build 25302)
Combined Community Codec Pack (Codecs and Media Player Classic HC)
Microsoft Security Essentials
CDBurnerXP
Winamp
Cyberduck
 
What programs can convert all my music to ID3v2.3? Most of them already are but I have some MP4 and some other ID3 versions. I want all my files to be ID3v2.3. I have Mp3tag but I can't figure it out.
 
Jordoon said:
What programs can convert all my music to ID3v2.3. Most of them already are but I have some MP4 and some other ID3 versions. I want all my files to be ID3v2.3. I have Mp3tag but I can't figure it out.
Click to expand...

To tag all your audio files in Mp3Tag to the ID3 v2.3 format go to Options>Tags>MPEG and under Write check only v2>2.3 and under Remove check whatever tag formats to remove.

Then open up your library in Mp3Tag and select all then Ctrl+S to re-save the tags. If you're doing this because of some device not correctly reading the files it might be worth making a test on a few files first.

Also the mp3tag.de forums are an amazing resource. Type site:mp3tag.de yoursearchhere into Google and you'll find answers to virtually anything you could think of.
 
My options look like this:

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So then I saved all the files (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-S) but I'm still getting different tag versions:

MP4
plzawpE.png
Click to expand...

APEv2
0NTbnek.png
Click to expand...
 
Jordoon said:
My options look like this:

So then I saved all the files (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-S) but I'm still getting different tag versions:
Click to expand...

Ah, just tested this and you're right. Must have remembered the wrong instructions.

The correct method is File>Remove Tag. This will remove only the type of tag format specified in the Options, so be careful to only check the formats you want removed.
 
Coreda said:
Ah, just tested this and you're right. Must have remembered the wrong instructions.

The correct method is File>Remove Tag. This will remove only the type of tag format specified in the Options, so be careful to only check the formats you want removed.
Click to expand...

Awesome it worked. Thanks.
 
WinDirStat: Basically scans your hard drive and shows a nice color info graph of all your files and how much space it takes up. Helps when cleaning up your computer or finding files lost or forgotten.
 
coldfoot said:
VLC can be used to play, encode, stream, and do all sorts of other stuff, MPC-HC does not even compare. Don't see a single objective reason why someone would use MPC-HC over VLC besides personal preference.
Click to expand...
I always have both installed. VLC is getting old though, Potplayer does it better now.

Why use something else than VLC ? You obviously don't know about MadVR : it features the best upscaling algorithm (NNEDI3) for turning your typical 720x576 DVD into something watchable on a modern 1080p display. But quality comes at a price, it will make your CPU fans scream :D
 
I'll list my media tools:
Servers
Universal Media Server - Branch of Playstation Media Server for DLNA renderers. Receives frequent updates (where PMS's updates seemed to have fizzled.) Will transcode/remux on the fly if your DLNA device doesn't support the format you're trying to play.
Air Video Server HD - To stream/on-the-fly-transcode your media to play on an iOS device.
Plex - Runs a website on your machine that you can connect to to watch your media content.

Codecs
CCCP or Shark is fine, but for the main thing they're installing is LAV Filters and DirectVOBSub (for soft subtitle support).
I just use Windows Media Player because I like its GUI a lot. Those tools will get mostly everything up and running. When installing LAV, be sure to go into the LAV Splitter settings and tell it to leave a tray icon when it's open. You can right-click that to quickly change between audio tracks and subs.

Ripping/Conversion/Muxing
MakeMKV - Free while in beta, and has been in beta for years. You'll have to go on the forum and grab a new serial key every 30 days, though. Good for ripping your discs.
Handbrake - Transcode media to bring down their file size change the format of the video/audio streams. Check out the nightly's for QuickSync support.
AVIDemux - Some basic video editing tools. Also can do some transcoding.
MKV Toolnix/MKVMerge - MKV Muxing tool. Good for looking at, adding, or altering streams. No transcoding, so there's no loss of detail if you change anything. Works with most container types if you need to turn things into MKV.
Unfortunately, the only decent MP4/M4V muxer I've found is Subbler for the Mac, which doesn't have a Windows alternative. Most other MP4 muxers struggle with AC3, for example.
MKVExtractGUI2 - Will let you pull specific streams out of MKV. Good for extracting subtitles to work on them.
BDSup2Sub View, convert, resize subtitle files. Has an option to export only the forced subtitles. Be careful that even some English films may have forced subtitles to appear when an alien language is displayed (or something like that).
 
Very nice thread for us who have just build our own computers. Many useful ones. But is there a program which will let me rip my own Blu-ray movies to my computer?
 
coldfoot said:
VLC can be used to play, encode, stream, and do all sorts of other stuff, MPC-HC does not even compare. Don't see a single objective reason why someone would use MPC-HC over VLC besides personal preference.
Click to expand...

It runs 10x better on inferior machines for one.
(For example i used to have a single core Zotac MAG which ran everything in MPC perfectly even 25gb mkv 1080p files , XBMC was near perfect but VLC was just awful on it , like 10 fps bad - and i did play around with the settings - its a good app just power hungry)
Very good DXVA support. Very lightweight.

I dont see why anyone would use VLC over XBMC =P

as for me :

XBMC (+ the streaming addons)
Chrome
Steam(Obviously)
Ccleaner
Geforce Experience (For shadowplay recordings - used to be DxTory as fraps is shit)
 
I tried VLC but I hated that you couldn't pause using space bar, was this ever added?
 
Obvious stuff aside, Symlink Creator is really useful for people that want to create symlinks but don't want to mess with the command line. And EAsus Partition Manager, similar to GParted and its ilk (but which runs on Windows), is really great at doing advanced partition operations that you can't do with a the normal partition manager. And don't forget about WinCDEmu, which is perfect for mounting ISOs. Or Win32 Disk Imager, which is a necessity for reliably burning images to flash sticks (whatever UNetBootin does is broken for a lot of Linux ISOs).

EDIT: also, ShellMenuView, ShellExView, WhatInStartup, FileTypesMan, and OpenWithView are really great for customizing your Windows experience with file extensions, context menus, startup applications, and all that stuff.
 
Really good stuff posted so far. A few I'll add (all for windows):
Mnemosyne: spaced repetition program like Supermemo or Anki. Really clean interface, simple and straightforward. My favorite spaced repetition program of the three I've tried.

Resophnotes: really simple note-taking program. Operates totally in plain text. Some people my find this restrictive, but I like it. Helps me focus on the information I'm putting into it.

Scapple: a really intuitive mind-mapping program. I don't do mind maps much, but this program is so easy to use that I fire it up and map out concepts that are fuzzy in my mind. Really like it.
 
Fool (I dream of Zack Snyder) said:
MPC-BE - A modified version of MPC-HC. I use it with LAV filters and MadVR.
Avast - I trust it to protect me when I watch porn.
Malwarebytes - But then, I can never be too careful.
Chrome - My personal favorite NeoGAF browser.
Notepad++ - Good Notepad alternative.
Steam - Duh.
MSI Afterburner - A useful overclocking tool with on screen stats display and screen recorder. For free.
NVIDIA Inspector - Must have for tweaking NVIDIA driver and stuffs.
GIMP - Free Photoshop.
ImageMagick - I use it because I just don't like how GIMP, Photoshop, Paint.net, etc. has limited options when it comes to scaling images. I also use it to make gif.
7-Zip - At least I don't have to feel guilty for not paying for WinRAR.
XnView - Or just any image viewer that I feel comfortable using.
Foobar2000 & Spotify - Life would be so empty without music.
VirtualDub - Just for basic video editing. Also use it to make gif.
AviSynth - Advance video editing. Also use it to make gif.
MakeMKV - For ripping DVD.
Audacity - Basic sound editing.
MeGUI - Encode AviSynth files to videos.
VidCoder - Re-encode DVD, or videos in general.
MediaInfo - Video, audio, image stats.
Teracopy - Mainly for checksum stuffs, but it's also a nice tool to copy/move files.
CCleaner - Remove unnecessary stuffs.

Not sure if I missed anything but these are how I roll.
Click to expand...

hahaha at the avast/Malwarebytes part, same use here.
 
Let's see:

Necessary:
Chrome/Firefox
LibreOffice
foobar2000
Steam
7z

Free little software:
Free Alarm Clock (Lightweight alarm clock app with easy to use GUI)
MPC-HC + MadVR (best video quality, enables color correction)
VLC + Livestreamer (solves twitch/dailymotion when laggy)
notepad++ (great little windows text editor)
WinDirStat (creates a nice disk usage map)
ProcessExplorer (Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open?)
IrfanView/XNView (fast small image viewers with a lot of plugins)
Tixati (Lightweight standalone torrent client with great auto-bandwidth function)
GLFW (cross-platform openGL utility library - windows+input+sound)
 
A free program I use called WinDirStat has always been helpful to me.

It shows you all of your stuff on your hard drives and which ones take up the most space so you can organize.
 
Blablurn said:
can you make notes and highlight text with sumatra pdf?
Click to expand...

The most glorious things about Sumatra is if you use TeX/LaTeX then you dont have to reopen/close the pdf viewer everytime you recompile. You just hit F5

It also does comic formats(.cbm?) if you are into those
 
I'd rather not open a new thread for this so I'll ask here: Itunes on windows is not letting me manage the apps on my iphone, doesn't seem to accept any authorization. Is there some alternative software for it?
 
Azulsky said:
The most glorious things about Sumatra is if you use TeX/LaTeX then you dont have to reopen/close the pdf viewer everytime you recompile. You just hit F5

It also does comic formats(.cbm?) if you are into those
Click to expand...
Actually, it automatically highlights the areas that have changed, at least in my case.
 
OminoMichelin said:
I'd rather not open a new thread for this so I'll ask here: Itunes on windows is not letting me manage the apps on my iphone, doesn't seem to accept any authorization. Is there some alternative software for it?
Click to expand...

No alternative if you need to manage apps on the phone other than managing it directly from the phone. Try turning rebooting the phone then plug in again.
 
Music: Foobar2000, cubase.
Image editing: Photoshop cs2. I've never felt the need to upgrade.

Dev:
Mingw
Notepad++/sublime text
Putty
VMware
DrMemory (valgrind equivalent for windows, awesome)
 
Maybe it's just in the back of my head, but I can't help but feel that MP3Gain is causing some lossy compression, no matter how slight.
 
Couldn't get qBittorrent to open magnet links straight from Firefox. :(

I might try Tixati - uTorrent is a great program ruined by bloatware/ads.

Also I seemed to always have a problem with VLC in that it would never play FLACs without highly distoring the file. Literally every other media player worked better.

These are some awesome lists though, great considering I just did a clean install.
 
Mr_Appleby said:
Music: Foobar2000, cubase.
Image editing: Photoshop cs2. I've never felt the need to upgrade.
Click to expand...
CS2 is like the slowest version of Photoshop. I remember it would take ages to start. I think they finally fixed that with CS4.

Sub-Zero at a Starbucks said:
Maybe it's just in the back of my head, but I can't help but feel that MP3Gain is causing some lossy compression, no matter how slight.
Click to expand...
I don't use MP3Gain itself, but I do use ReplayGain. Since RG just adds a tag to the file, only certain players can adjust the volume.

MP3Gain can be added directly to the file, but I wouldn't do that.
 
What's that program that populates the files in your HDD in real time as growing squares that represent their sizes visually? Had to be reformat recently. Forgot the name...

It was fucking awesome. You can see everythings size clearly.
Made it easy to uninstall crap you've forgot about too.
 
Ixian said:
You could always grab an older version of uTorrent from a site like Old Version. I still prefer uTorrent and just stick to the earliest version that supports magnet links.
Click to expand...
If I remember correctly, 3.1.3 is the last version without any of the ads. But I think it introduced the app bar, which you can disable in the Advanced preferences window.

Otherwise the last 2.x version is a good alternative because it's what made uTorrent great. A lightweight torrent program.
 
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