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I played around with Media Monkey today during some work downtime and I like it a lot, when I got a new laptop a couple years ago my music collection was really sloppy and this has really helped me put it back together, especially because I'm really obsessive about making sure everything has the correct album, artist, and art. A couple questions: -When you save a cover art to a song, is that somehow associated with the actual audio file itself? Like, if I take that file and move it to another device that cover art will be retained? -Is there any way to set certain songs to only play when you select them (AKA excluding them from Shuffle)? I'm thinking of how songs in iTunes have checkboxes that will determine whether or not a song gets synced/comes up on shuffle. -Once I've made a nice organized list of songs in Media Monkey, is there a way to have it make a folder with copies of all those files, arranged as nicely as they are?
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 04:10 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 19:51 |
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Magical Jellybean Keyfinder Extracts various product keys for (primarily Microsoft) products from your machine, which is handy if you're an rear end in a top hat like me who forgets which license key they used on which machine when it comes to reinstall time, or completely loses their physical key paperwork, or doesn't bother sticking the COA label on their case, or threw away the case with the COA label several builds ago. Installer has an optional bullshit toolbar (what doesn't though these days) but other than that its unobtrusive and does exactly what it says it's going to do. Grab Meatcastle fucked around with this message at Jan 31, 2013 around 12:21 |
| # ? Jan 31, 2013 12:18 |
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rebelEpik posted:No mention of foobar in the music section? To expand on this a bit, foobar2000 is another highly customizable music player. Modifying the layout is extremely easy, and there are a ton of plugins you can find. A list of some plugins can be found here. If you need help with something, you can always ask in the foobar2000 thread. One thing I like is that you can set global hotkeys, so you don't need the window in focus to use them. That combined with AutoHotKey lets me effectively emulate media keys, despite not having any on my keyboard. Utilities AutoHotKey AutoHotKey is a program that lets you bind commands to a key or series of keys. Commands can be a combination of key presses, or macros. I haven't done much with it myself, but I use it to effectively turn infrequently used keys, like scroll lock, to media keys. Any of the commands are written in a script file, so it may have a bit of a learning curve if you are unfamiliar with programming. To get you started, the site itself has a tutorial here.
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| # ? Feb 5, 2013 21:53 |
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Clover is a nice little Explorer replacement with tabs! Integrates nicely into Windows. Yes, it is Chinese, and no, I haven't found anything bad in it. And it is Freeware. Samizdata fucked around with this message at Feb 14, 2013 around 22:20 |
| # ? Feb 6, 2013 05:51 |
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If we're going to include tools like Magic Jellybean, there are some related suites of smaller tools that should be mentioned. Mark Russinovich is a man who's forgotten more about the Windows NT kernal than you'll ever know. He's also written several stupid-useful tools, and publishes them for free. He's so good at what he does, Microsoft hired him to continue being generally awesome. Highlights are Process Explorer (Task Manager on steroids) and AutoRuns (msconfig on bathsalts). Want to see what an app writes to the registry? Want to watch your network traffic in real time? Want to review the ADSs on your files? There are applications for all those things. His blog is also awesome about going really in-depth on solving problems. http://www.sysinternals.com/ Nirsoft produces utilities that reveal all sorts of hidden data. Recover passwords from every major mail client, every major browser, every major IM client, Windows Wifi, and probably a hundred other things I'm forgetting about. Standout tools for IT pros: NK2Edit (which can extract and edit Outlook NK2 files) and ProduKey, which can extract Windows & Office license keys. http://nirsoft.net Now, there are over two hundred different utilities between these two sites. Some of them are very specific in their usefulness. Many moons ago, I was linked to the Windows System Control Center. All it does is provide a centralized way to automatically download, update, and provide sorting for these two suites. It's designed so that you can dump the executable on a USB key, and run/update everything from there. There are shortcuts to basic Windows admin/system tasks. There are descriptions and categories and searching to make finding things easier. It's stupid-slick. I've used all these tools for years, and for what it's worth, I'd trust them completely. Most AV programs will tag a couple of the Nirsoft utilities, because, duh, they can be used for nefarious purposes. The whole package fits in about 55 megabytes, so you don't have an excuse not to throw it on a USB key.
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| # ? Feb 7, 2013 05:35 |
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Wizard of the Deep posted:If we're going to include tools like Magic Jellybean, there are some related suites of smaller tools that should be mentioned.
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| # ? Feb 7, 2013 06:43 |
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Things that I have to have on a new system: Notepad++ This is my Notepad replacement of choice. If you are editing text and you don't already have a favorite editor I'd recommend this one. Nifty things that it does:
What it doesn't do:
Agent Ransack This is my go-to search program. It's a multi-threaded search that will search for file names as well as searching inside files. With each match it'll display the lines in the file that it found. It's quite a bit faster than Windows searching, more thorough, and it does regex searching. I use this constantly to find things that Windows search refuses to find. What it does:
What it doesn't do (in the free version):
In addition to those to I use the Sysinternals tools constantly. Process Monitor is invaluable for figuring out which registry keys and files a program is trying to access when it won't tell you. I'd highlight a few of them but they're all amazing.
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| # ? Feb 7, 2013 08:41 |
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Alternatively for the people who really like the Sysinternals stuff there is also System Explorer, http://systemexplorer.net/ It's an all in one kind of thing apposed to having a bunch of little programs with Sysinternals, it's a much more detailed Tasks Manager, allows for easy Autorun / Services configuration, and a bunch of other useful stuff like seeing what files are open and whats using your connection. Another great thing I like about it is if you see some service or .dll running and you don't know what the hell it is, a simple right click of it will search Google or can check it with VirusTotal very quickly to tell you more about it.
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| # ? Feb 7, 2013 16:32 |
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Utilities
Also seconding the Sysinternals suite of applications, especially Process Explorer and Process Monitor.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 03:44 |
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ThatSlacker posted:Things that I have to have on a new system: cheese-cube posted:Also seconding the Sysinternals suite of applications, especially Process Explorer and Process Monitor.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 05:04 |
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unpronounceable posted:Process Explorer is the best way I've found to figure out which drat program is the one preventing me from deleting a file/folder. Then there's Process Monitor that will tell you why you're getting the "file in use" or "access denied" error that has absolutely no file name or path information whatsoever. Or what registry key it's trying to find that got deleted/renamed/never created. Or what packet it's trying to send to what machine. If you've got a file that your program is reading incorrect settings from and you just can't figure out where it is this is your program. I can't count how many times it's saved me hours of troubleshooting.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 06:19 |
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cheese-cube posted:Also seconding the Sysinternals suite of applications, especially Process Explorer and Process Monitor. http://live.sysinternals.com is where it's at.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 06:59 |
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Image/Photo Editing Hornil StylePix - A great little editor that picks up where Paint.NET falls short (ie. editable text, better brushes, layer blending options, etc). Don't know if GIMP still does that weird multi window thing, but this is a viable alternative, though possibly slightly more limited in scope. Has a portable version! Will not bother you with greyed out options or even mention the fact that there's a pro version, in case that bothers you. Folder Sync/Backup Tools MS Synctoy - Syncs folders with other folders. That's it. Works well, but don't expect fancy things like exclusion of files or subfolders. For some reason I don't like the interface; something with whitespace. But if it does what you need it to, this is the way to go. File/Disk Management Tools den4b Renamer - Rule based file renaming. Better interface than Bulk Rename Utility, in my opinon, though equally as powerful. Freely choose the order in which actions take place. Has a portable version and good documentation! Duplicate Cleaner - Some years ago, this was the only free duplicate file remover that I could coax into preserving files in one folder over identical files in another location. I don't know if that's still the case, but it works decently enough. Some options are a bit confusing though; you need to keep your attention at what you're doing. (I'll gladly take a look at alternatives, if there are suggestions) SpaceSniffer - Yet another visual representation of file/folder sizes. It misses a tree view, I guess, but it's less of an eyesore than some comparable programs. And adding in another vote for a mention of the Nirsoft Utilities.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 14:49 |
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ThatSlacker posted:Then there's Process Monitor that will tell you why you're getting the "file in use" or "access denied" error that has absolutely no file name or path information whatsoever. Or what registry key it's trying to find that got deleted/renamed/never created. Or what packet it's trying to send to what machine. If you've got a file that your program is reading incorrect settings from and you just can't figure out where it is this is your program. I can't count how many times it's saved me hours of troubleshooting. Honestly Procmon is an amazing application. I once had an issue where Adobe Reader was crashing on launch for no discernible reason. Using Procmon I was able to trace the issue down to a single 1x1px PNG image which was tiled in the background of the EULA which pops up when you run Adobe Reader for the first time. Deleted the PNG file, problem solved. I've got plenty of other stories where Procmon has solved ultra-obscure app crashes but I won't derail this thread. Bottom line: Procmon is essential when troubleshooting issues on Windows.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 15:07 |
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How about a utility included with Windows? Robocopy: Another utility that Microsoft forgot to tell people about, it's similar to Rsync. This utility will copy folders only, and provides the much needed option to mirror folders. I use it quite a bit to make sure folders have the same files in them. This is included with Windows Vista and up.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 15:57 |
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Are there any good log viewing apps out there for Windows that can retrieve a log from a location by SSH and display it? I am working on servers more and more and while I can always use the shell to view logs, sometimes I want to view multiple logs from the same server. They are always in the same locations so it would be cool to have a thing where I tell it some server info and a log location and it brings it up.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2013 20:49 |
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Oh, man, thought this thread had died, only just popped back up in my bookmarks. Will update the list with recent suggestions tonight.
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| # ? Feb 13, 2013 12:58 |
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First off, I'm really glad this thread exists. Thanks for putting it together Leovinus. Also, what do you think about adding cost information to the suggestion format? Just a quick "Commercial Software" or "Shareware" or "Freeware" at the end of a description. Prices change, so I don't think that would be necessary to add.unpronounceable posted:Launchy Also one of my favorites. Extremely fast, customizable and skinnable. I tried quite a few launchers when I switched from Mac to PC and Launchy had by far the best UI and feature set. 3RVX - A highly customizable volume control app. Supports skins and user-definable hotkeys. It can however randomly stop working. This can usually be fixed by opening the Settings pane and hitting "save". Freeware. Citrus Alarm Clock - Supports playing MP3 files or playlists on wakeup, user definable volume fade-in times and can set system volume and wake your PC to make sure the alarm goes off correctly. Only downside is that it's not free. Shareware. inSSIDer - A Wi-Fi network scanner that helps you choose a better channel for your network to improve its performance. Freeware. PWGen - Simple, feature-packed and customizable password/passphrase generator with a super clean UI. Freeware. Rightload - Upload files directly from the Windows Explorer's contextual menu to imgur and other image hosts as well as FTP/HTTP servers. Freeware.
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| # ? Feb 14, 2013 03:33 |
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I've just copied and pasted the descriptions directly from the websites, so there is a little marketing enthusiasm in some of them. Greenshot - Greenshot allows quick creation of screenshots, easy annotation, highlighting and obfuscating using the built-in image editor and sending the screenshot to a file, the clipboard, a printer or as e-mail attachment. BullZip PDF Printer - The Bullzip PDF Printer works as a Microsoft Windows printer and allows you to write PDF documents from virtually any Microsoft Windows application. Virtual CloneDrive - Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Image files can be mounted onto a virtual drive from your hard-disk or from a network drive and used in the same manner as inserting them into a normal CD/DVD drive. ImgBurn - ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Filezilla - FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. KuroKisei fucked around with this message at Feb 15, 2013 around 17:05 |
| # ? Feb 15, 2013 17:03 |
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KuroKisei posted:BullZip PDF Printer - The Bullzip PDF Printer works as a Microsoft Windows printer and allows you to write PDF documents from virtually any Microsoft Windows application. Somewhat related: I'm going paperless! - so I'm after something that'll take several generic scanned image files and bundle them together into a single PDF. Anyone have any recommendations?
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| # ? Feb 16, 2013 18:32 |
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spincube posted:Somewhat related: I'm going paperless! - so I'm after something that'll take several generic scanned image files and bundle them together into a single PDF. Anyone have any recommendations? PDF Split and Merge; also Briss for cropping PDFs.
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| # ? Feb 16, 2013 20:00 |
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f.lux Changes the colour temperature of the computer based on the time of day. Some people finds that this reduces eye strain and helps sleep.
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| # ? Feb 17, 2013 04:24 |
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Any recommendations for a realtime bandwidth graph program? I used to pay for DUMeter until they started doing fairly regular "major" updates that required you to purchase a new key every time.
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| # ? Feb 17, 2013 12:18 |
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Guerrand posted:PDF Split and Merge; also Briss for cropping PDFs. Thanks for the suggestion, but I think all this program can do is mash together individual PDFs into a single, larger PDF. Maybe I should clarify - here's what I'm doing at the moment:  (I should really re-scan that third page.) I'd like to create a PDF of these three images, so I'm not creating a folder for each letter received and naming the pages 01.jpg, 02.jg etc.
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| # ? Feb 17, 2013 12:32 |
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headlight posted:Any recommendations for a realtime bandwidth graph program? I used to pay for DUMeter until they started doing fairly regular "major" updates that required you to purchase a new key every time. I like this gadget It's pretty clean and has only a couple basic options, but it gets the job done free. I know it works on Windows 7, don't know about other versions. That same website has a ton of other similar gadgets for things like GPU temp, RAM usage, CPU load, etc, all of which I never knew about until now. EDIT: *comedy option* (?) after searching google for how to put bandwidth in the taskbar, someone said "Samurize can do that easily!" I only did a little browsing of the samurize website to see that it looks like a build your own interface solution (ie, instructions like "how to place a button here") to do a lot of neat stuff. Haveing not used samurize, I'm going to assume this is ridiculously complicated and probably a bit beyond the scope of just a bandwidth meter, especially considering there are easier options. But samurize looks like an option that can get the bandwidth in the task bar (unlike the gadget I use) and maybe you actually want all of the other features samurize has, I know I am thinking about playing with it a little when I have some free time. Colonel Sanders fucked around with this message at Feb 17, 2013 around 16:32 |
| # ? Feb 17, 2013 16:00 |
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headlight posted:Any recommendations for a realtime bandwidth graph program? I used to pay for DUMeter until they started doing fairly regular "major" updates that required you to purchase a new key every time.
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| # ? Feb 17, 2013 16:14 |
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spincube posted:Thanks for the suggestion, but I think all this program can do is mash together individual PDFs into a single, larger PDF. This post says Irfanview can do it in batch mode. You'll need to install Irfanview and the Irfanview plug-ins. This is from 2007 so they may let you do images straight to PDF instead of going to multi-page tif first. http://quartzsitegen.blogspot.com/2...ments-with.html And here's a link for you, http://www.irfanview.com/ . Edit: Reading a bit more you apparently can't create multi-page PDFs in Irfanview, but you can make single page PDFs and then use PDF Split and Merge to merge them together. Yaos fucked around with this message at Feb 17, 2013 around 17:13 |
| # ? Feb 17, 2013 17:05 |
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spincube posted:I'd like to create a PDF of these three images, so I'm not creating a folder for each letter received and naming the pages 01.jpg, 02.jg etc.
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| # ? Feb 17, 2013 18:02 |
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I'm looking for recommendations on a free, easy to use Backup program that my mostly computer illiterate father can use on his office PCs. He has an external hard drive to backup everything to. I'd like to set it up to backup certain folders when he plugs it in. TIA
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| # ? Feb 18, 2013 18:05 |
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John Lightning posted:I'm looking for recommendations on a free, easy to use Backup program that my mostly computer illiterate father can use on his office PCs. He has an external hard drive to backup everything to. I'd like to set it up to backup certain folders when he plugs it in. TIA The Crashplan client can back up PC's to an external drive, and if he would like set him up with an online backup plan. I would recommend the online backup since it is automated and if he is like any of my family members he won't remember to do it often enough, if at all. I know you said free but ask him if he could be OK with losing his data if his computer and external drive melted in a fire. If this is not feasible Synctoy would work I guess.
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| # ? Feb 18, 2013 20:34 |
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spincube posted:Thanks for the suggestion, but I think all this program can do is mash together individual PDFs into a single, larger PDF. Any reason you aren't just using Adobe Acrobat Pro...?
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| # ? Feb 18, 2013 21:17 |
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Flipperwaldt posted:How about JPEGtoPDF? That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, thanks. mcsuede posted:Any reason you aren't just using Adobe Acrobat Pro...? It's probably irrational, but I'd rather avoid Adobe software - especially considering that there's any number of amateur applications out there that'll do the same job without the bloat, security risks etc. [e] Especially considering you apparently need to create an 'Adobe ID' just to download Acrobat. spincube fucked around with this message at Feb 18, 2013 around 21:33 |
| # ? Feb 18, 2013 21:27 |
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John Lightning posted:I'm looking for recommendations on a free, easy to use Backup program that my mostly computer illiterate father can use on his office PCs. He has an external hard drive to backup everything to. I'd like to set it up to backup certain folders when he plugs it in. TIA Cobian does not offer any online backup service, depending on the amount of data you could backup data to a free service like Dropbox, Ubuntu One, or Google Drive. I do recommend using an online service, since his drive is going to die but he won't know it, or it will die right when he needs it. mcsuede posted:Any reason you aren't just using Adobe Acrobat Pro...? Yaos fucked around with this message at Feb 19, 2013 around 00:22 |
| # ? Feb 19, 2013 00:12 |
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spincube posted:That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, thanks. Sorry if I'm missing something, but can't you just install something like CutePDF, select all the images you want (making sure they're named in such a way that they'll appear in the sequential order you want) and then just Print to PDF?
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| # ? Feb 22, 2013 03:38 |
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:Sorry if I'm missing something, but can't you just install something like CutePDF, select all the images you want (making sure they're named in such a way that they'll appear in the sequential order you want) and then just Print to PDF? Theoretically you could argue that it adds another layer of complexity to the pdf; the program you print from will add its own page layout settings, like default margins and stuff. Depending on the program, it can be a pain in the rear end to adjust those to zero every time. In any case, you'll have to click a lot through a bunch of dialogs (for every page!) to get what you want. That may or may not be a problem, depending on how often you have to do this. If it's only once, jpegtopdf could be considered superior because it doesn't need to be installed. If it's very often jpegtopdf might be superior because it works from the commandline and thus can be scripted. But you're not missing something, it can be done through most pdf printers. EDIT vvvvv Right in one. I didn't want to mention it, because last time I tried to install it, it came with some poo poo I didn't want or something. Don't remember exactly, but I remember that I switched to Bullzip at the time, which was a bit leaner. Again, at the time. I don't print to pdfs often. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at Feb 23, 2013 around 00:57 |
| # ? Feb 22, 2013 13:17 |
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Flipperwaldt posted:If that has an option to append the previous pdf to the next one, yes. Otherwise you end up with a pdf file per picture, which is what he was trying to avoid. This option is not always obvious. I know of one pdf printer where the only way to discover the feature is to keep the file name the same, after which you will get a popup asking whether you want to overwrite or append. That'd be PrimoPDF. We've got it installed on all the lab computers at my university. Useful thing, once you learn about that feature.
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| # ? Feb 22, 2013 18:28 |
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Can anyone recommend me a program which can edit MP3 ID3 tags in bulk? The ability to strip ID3v1 tags and embedded cover art is a must.
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| # ? Feb 25, 2013 14:21 |
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cheese-cube posted:Can anyone recommend me a program which can edit MP3 ID3 tags in bulk? The ability to strip ID3v1 tags and embedded cover art is a must.
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| # ? Feb 25, 2013 14:58 |
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Flipperwaldt posted:You can do this with MP3Tag (removing v1 tags is a setting under options), but MediaMonkey would be a good choice as well. Awesome thanks Flipperwaldt. Mp3tag looks like it will do the trick, giving it a go now.
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| # ? Feb 25, 2013 15:11 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 19:51 |
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Foobar can also do that.
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| # ? Feb 25, 2013 16:11 |
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