Windows: Having the appropriate codecs is essential in order to be able to play any audio or video format. With K-Lite Codec Pack Mega you can rest assured that you have all the codecs you need on your PC, plus a bunch of interesting related tools. The latest update 5.4.4 includes the most recent versions of a handful of codecs, plus other changes and improvements.

Santa’s Run: Being the actual Father Christmas is not a job I would relish, given the amount of work the guy has to put in. However, playing the role of Saint Nick for just a few minutes can be jolly good fun, as Santa’s Run proves. The game charges you with the task of delivering presents to children across the planet. You need to throw the presents into the chimneys or doorways, using your finger to flick them in the air.

Mac: Are you frustrated by the inability to use the webcams in MSN Messenger for Mac? aMSN (now updated to version 0.98 1-1) is an alternative to the classic MSN Messenger with more features - including webcam support (but not audio) - yet a more slimline interface. The aMSN developers have delved into the preferences menu, adding extra little features like event alerts and sounds and conferencing support.

Windows: Do you need to convert any audio or video file? Oxelon Media Converter is the perfect tool for the task. This simple app can convert multiple media files simultaneously, and it works surprisingly fast! Oxelon Media Converter supports dozens of formats and is perfectly embedded with Windows Explorer, which enables you to convert files with one click.

iPhone: Halloween is upon us once again, but if you haven’t got the money or the inclination to go trick or treating this year then check out Spooky Photo Free. This app allows you to make scary scenes out of your photographs. For example, you could put a zombie into a wedding picture, make bats appear in the sky above your house, or add a menacing pumpkin head onto an image of your dog.

Mac: Keychain on Mac does a pretty good job of managing passwords but once you’ve tried 1Password you’ll probably never look back. If you’re tired of making up passwords to access sites or worried that your passwords are not secure enough, it really is invaluable. 1Password creates strong, unique passwords for you, then remembers and restores them all within your web browser.

Windows: The quintessential optimization suite for Windows is back! The all-new TuneUp Utilities 2010 has a new redesigned interface and a bunch of new features and improvements that make it even better: Turbo mode, Live optimization, TuneUp desktop gadget, Optimization report and support for Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

iPhone: Aside from a jellyfish attack or a sudden downpour, another guaranteed thing to a ruin a day at the beach is an attack by the entire Japanese Imperial Navy. Blood Beach puts you in the unenviable position of a soldier who must take down the entire Japanese WWII fleet alone. You’re holed up on a thin stretch of beach in the Solomon Islands and must take down the waves of planes, boats and foot soldiers landing on the beach.

Mac: Renaming huge numbers of files can be a real pain, especially when you only need to make a few minor changes. Renamer (formerly known as Renamer4Mac) makes it easy to rename a huge number of files at once, in several different ways. One possibility is to search and replace certain components or words, much like using a word processor. Alternatively, you can simply insert or copy over a chunk of text to multiple files.

Tom and Elena have already explained how to stream movies from your Mac to a PS3 and an XBox. To complete the series, I’m going to explain how to stream movies from Mac to your Wii. The good news is, it couldn’t be simpler using a nifty little app called Wii Transfer. Wii Transfer not only allows you to stream movies to your Wii, but also photos, music and it even allows you to backup your Wii profiles.

Here is how to in 3 easy steps.

1. Download the Wii internet channel

Fortunately, Nintendo have seen sense and stopped charging $10 for it. The browser is now available for free. Just go to Wii Shopping on the main menu to download it.

2. Convert your videos for streaming

In the main interface, click on the “Movie” tab in the left-hand menu and drag and drop your movie files into it. Wii Transfer will then convert your films into a format the Wii can read so you may have to wait a while for this.

3. Setup sharing

Go back to the “Sharing” tab. You’ll see an IP address like: 10.0.1.197:9000. Enter this into your Wii internet browser. Read the rest of this entry »

Windows 7 is a fast, stable operating system that already includes high quality software by default. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to enjoy the advantages of  third-party apps.

Common tasks such as downloading files, chatting with your friends, creating documents or editing photos require tools that you won’t find built into Windows 7. Also, some of the tools you used before may not be compatible with Microsoft’s new operating system. This is why we’ve put together this list of 20 top free apps that work with Windows 7, with which you’ll be able to take full advantage of your brand new system.

Security comes first. There are many antivirus apps that work with Windows 7, but Microsoft Security Essentials is the one that best integrates with the system. Plus it also protects you from spyware!

Stability is another key issue. While we wait for the new Windows 7 compatible version of TuneUp Utilities, CCleaner can also do a great job cleaning, tweaking and optimizing your system.

Don’t be ashamed: we all have deleted files by mistake at some point in our lives. Fortunately we can count on this great tool called Recuva to get them back - and it works like a breeze on Windows 7 as well.

Need a password manager to deal with all your usernames, passwords, secret numbers and personal codes? Keepass is a great choice, and is also perfectly embedded in Microsoft’s new operating system.

Browsing the Web is the main activity for most computer users. Windows 7 already features the new Internet Explorer 8, but I’m sure most of you will only use it to download Firefox. Another excellent alternative is Opera. Read the rest of this entry »

Windows: Are you worried about spyware and rootkits entering your computer? Ad-Aware Free 8.1 is here to protect your system from unwanted malware. This new version features faster scans, improved detection technology, a community-based defense against the most recent online threats and a new Simple/Advanced interface to suit everyone’s tech skills.

iPhone: Tired of your old music collection? With Spotify (new version 0.3.20) you can have access to thousands of songs, bands and music styles anywhere, anytime. This awesome app streams high quality music to your computer for free, includes bio data about your favorite bands and lets you share playlists online with your friends.

Mac: If you’re looking for a twitter client with a distinctly Mac feel, then look no further than Tweetie (new version 1.2.4). Tweetie features a delicious interface and the overall presentation throughout is first class. All of Tweetie’s main functions can be found in the navigation bar along the left-hand side. This includes the search box, personal mail and a shortcut to your timeline.

iPhone: The default battery indicator on the iPhone looks pretty, but it doesn’t really give you much information other than a general idea of how much juice you have left. About Battery delivers a more powerful and advanced way of monitoring battery life on your iPhone. Rather than just give you an overview of the remaining power, the program breaks it down into calculations of the remaining time you have left for certain tasks.

Windows: There are a few apps to listen to music in streaming, but what if you’d like to buy or download a certain MP3 to your hard drive? With Songr you can search the Web for selected MP3 files and download or buy them from within the program in seconds! Songr uses ten different MP3 search engines and also lets you locate songs by their lyrics.

Mac: With so many mobile devices available nowadays, it’s handy to have some way of syncing your data across them all. doubleTwist is aimed at the media side of this issue, allowing you to synchronize video and music across portable devices, including mobile phones, smartphones, PDAs, PSP, cameras, and MP3 players. It’s ideal for syncing iTunes playlists across your mobile devices as well as many other media-syncing needs.

Spotify continued adding to its service today by allowing users to download tracks directly from Spotify onto their hard drive. Of course, users have been able to purchase MP3 tracks for a few months now but only by right-clicking tracks and being taken to 7digital’s website. Now everything has been streamlined and can be done directly within the Spotify interface. From now on, users will see a “Buy” button (which annoyingly for many paid-up Premium members can’t be removed or deactivated) next to tracks which when clicked, allows you to enter card details.

Note that the new download purchase option will initially be available in the UK and Germany, France, Italy and Spain with Sweden, Norway and Finland following in a few weeks’ time. It’s not clear how much each track costs but Spotify say once purchased, you will be able to download them a further 3-5 times depending on the label. There is no DRM attached to tracks so they can be transferred to any external device and most tracks are in very high quality 256/320kpbs MP3 format. This all gives Spotify a distinct advantage over iTunes downloads which only allow 20 second previews and one download per song.

However, while I can see that this purchase option will appeal to free users of the service so that they can download the odd track they really like, it will surely appeal less to Premium users. Those that are already paying around $10 a month for ad-free listening will probably see no reason why they should stump-up extra cash just for the pleasure of owning tracks. Especially now that they can use Spotify on their iPhone or Android mobile and use the offline listening function to access music when no internet connection is available.

Windows: Are you the kind of person who has a shortcut-ridden Windows desktop? Then you need an app like Stardock Fences. This handy icon organizer creates customizable areas on your desktop to store and categorize folders, files and icons. The program just hit version 1.0, so it’s time for you to try it out!

Mac: CoverFlow is great for browsing and playing back music in iTunes, but CoverSutra might just change your musical habits. First of all, it serves as a player for your iTunes library, with your list appearing in a sleek dark interface and playback buttons present in a floating dark window. Secondly, every time you play a track from a new album, the cover will discreetly appear on your desktop, with its rating.

iPhone: Reckon you’ve got a steady hand? Well you’re about to find out if you install Marine Sharpshooter on your iPhone. This popular game sees you assume the role of a sniper who is part of an elite American military force. Your objective is to abate a global war of terror by going in behind enemy lines and taking down terrorists from a distance.

Earlier this year, I wrote a short explanation of how to use the free DJing application Mixxx. In this post I wrote that you could import iTunes playlists, and commenter Stephane has pointed out Mixxx isn’t compatible with iTunes playlist formats.

Having searched around for programs that convert iTunes playlist files to the more common M3U format, I haven’t found a solution that works. The nearest thing to a solution, assuming you associate Mixxx with your iTunes library, is to open iTunes and the playlist you want, and select all the tracks, then drag them into a newly created playlist in Mixxx. The problem with this is that although you aren’t copying the files, for some reason you will lose the playlist order, and Mixxx will automatically put them in alphabetical order. I can’t get around this!

However, as Mixxx doesn’t automatically play tracks - you have to cue and start each one yourself - it’s not a big disadvantage, but it is annoying that you have to remember the order yourself, or make it up as you go along. I had thought I could drag iTunes playlists into WinAmp, and then export them to Mixxx, but even that doesn’t work.

More annoyingly, Mixxx doesn’t let you drag and reorder playlists - although this is a problem highlighted in their development Wiki, so hopefully it will be addressed soon. Until then, or until iTunes exports more friendly playlist file formats, I’m afraid importing playlists from iTunes will continue to be a pain. For now, you’ll have to make new playlists.

As always, we welcome your comments - maybe you have a solution to this problem?

Do you think the Aviary suite is all about online graphic tools? Well, you’re wrong. This week saw the birth of a new member in the Aviary family: a complete audio editing application called Myna.

Don’t get me wrong here: Myna is nothing like as advanced as Adobe Audition or GarageBand. But for audio editing newbies like me, it’s the perfect tool for some quick audio mixdowns that can add the finishing touch to a video, a photo slideshow or any other personal creation.

Even if you’ve never used an audio editing tool before, you’ll immediately feel at ease when launching Myna. The program’s interface follows the traditional design of audio editors, with a library of pre-made clips at the bottom, and a top working area with a timeline that features ten different tracks. All you have to do is select the appropriate clip and drop it on the timeline.

You can also drag them around for adjusting or trimming, copy and paste them via the context menu, and even record your own sound samples with a microphone. Myna includes not only a wide variety of audio samples you can use for free in your creations, but also a bunch of special effects such as fades, reverb, flanger, pitch and more. After saving you mix – which requires a free user account on the Aviary website -  you can save it right away and also share it online with your friends on several different social networks

Want to learn more about Myna? Check out this video from Alan at Aviary, and see how powerful this awesome tool can be.

iPhone: Skype for iPhone successfully carries the principles of quick and easy communication across from the desktop to the mobile, allowing users to make free or cheap calls anywhere in the World.You can use it to make free calls over Skype only over WiFi, and SkypeOut calls on 3G to cellphones and landlines using Skype. I think it will be a long time before carriers allow Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G, though.

Mac: Many people use Parallels for hosting Windows inside OS X but VirtualBox (now updated to version 3.0.6) is a free open source alternative that does a pretty decent job too. With VirtualBox, you can install any version of Windows (as long as you have the boot disk), Linux, Solaris and just about any other operating system you can think of.

Windows: Tired of your old music collection? With Spotify (new version 0.3.19) you can have access to thousands of songs, bands and music styles anywhere, anytime. This awesome app streams high quality music to your computer for free, includes bio data about your favorite bands and lets you share playlists online with your friends.

Mac: Sharing your music with others is a great way to get into new music and also reveal what awesome/terrible taste you have. Simplify Media (now updated to version 2.5) is designed to help you do this with the minimum of fuss over WiFi allowing you to share music via iTunes. In effect, it means that you can enjoy and share songs with your friends wherever they are as long as you’re connected to the web.

Windows: If you’re tired of local TV, try tuning in to some foreign channels instead! With TVU Player 2.4.7.2 you can watch satellite and cable TV over the Internet on your own computer, without any special hardware. Content is very varied - from soap operas to important sport competitions worldwide - and includes channels from many different countries.

iPhone: Convertbot aims to make the process of working with different scales of measurement much easier. The app handles all manner of conversions including currency, area, volume, speed, and temperature. There are 21 different categories of units available, and you can select or deselect those that you’d like to appear in the interface using the settings menu.

Spotify is the talk of the town these days, either because some people love it or because some others complain about increasing ads. In any case, Spotify has some handy features you may not know about yet, which let you search for music in a more refined way and therefore find better results. Check this list of Spotify tricks and tips and try them yourself if you like:

1. The soundtrack of your sweet 16
Feeling nostalgic? Find those good old songs that used to play in pubs and clubs when you were just a teenager. It’s as easy as using the ‘year’ tag.

2. They don’t make good rock ‘n roll anymore
I agree. So if you’re sick of reggaeton, pseudo-disco and other musical atrocities, use the ‘genre’ tag to find those classic hits that still give you the goosebumps. There are more than 100 genres to try out!

3. I want to have all the versions of my favorite song
If you want to listen to all the versions they’ve made of your favorite song, there’s a Spotify tag for that! Simply type in ‘title:’ followed by the song title and you’re done. Read the rest of this entry »

Spotify, the application that lets you stream almost any music you can think of, free, is obviously a pretty popular application. I don’t like it! It doesn’t have everything I own, so won’t replace my hard drive collection, the advertisements aren’t targeted and are pretty horrible. Worse, no matter how much stuff I listen to the front page always has music I will hate on it. Spotify just doesn’t get me, and doesn’t seem to be trying. Sorry for being rude, but that strikes me as a bit web 1.0.

Here are some alternative ways to get aural satisfaction from the internet:

The daddy of social music sites, and despite being sold to an evil corporation it’s still pretty cool. Last.fm has a large user community, recommendations based on your listening history and concert listings. It records your iTunes activity, and builds a profile of your tastes, and you can listen to Last.fm radio stations based on genre, similar artists or the stations of other users. There’s  less control than Spotify, but you will hear new music you might like.

Similar in some respects to Last.fm, in that you can listen to generated radio stations based on genre. You can also build and save playlists. Deezer’s interface is really intuitive, and not a million miles away from iTunes, so you’ll feel right at home. It even has an equalizer! They have a good sized library, but Spotify seems bigger.

This is very different. The Hype Machine collects music that is being blogged about. You can play all the music in their site, and if you have an account and “love” tracks, you can build a playlist of music and artists you like. It’s fantastic for hearing brand new music, and keeping up with what’s hot! It features Last.fm synchronization too, so you can scrobble all the cool new tracks you’re listening to.

This internet jukebox lets you search and listen to music, using YouTube.com and imeem as its library. With a songza account you can build a playlist, but other than that it’s pretty basic. As it uses YouTube as a source, the library is huge, although the quality varies a lot.

Similar to Last.fm, imeem has lots of social features, like twittering tracks you like, and sharing and creating playlists. Personally I think Last.fm is a nicer site, but it’s probably just a matter of personal taste!

This barely scratches the surface of web based listening. What are you favorites?