The reason they were not initially featured here on MakeUseOf is due to the fact that they don’t offer free products ““ they cost $49 per year, and typically we only review free products. I did test all the products and was very impressed, so I was glad to see this announcement a few days ago:

We’ve listened to your requests for free products and today we are releasing several free applications that will enhance your desktop:

• Free Video Converter – new application for converting and basic editing of home videos, also included in Extensions for Windows as a new update.
• Free Screen Capturer – new application based on our Screen Capture Extension.
• Free Disk Usage Analyzer – new application based on our Disk Analyzer Extension.
• Free Extended Task Manager – new application based on our Extended Task Manager Extension.

Please visit our updated Products page and enjoy!

The Screen Capturer, Disk Usage Analyzer and Extended Task Manager were previously only included amongst the subscription products, so I was surprised to see these released for free ““ especially considering I found them to be my favourite three extensions of the lot!

The Task Manager is great, and provides a significantly enhanced UI over the Windows XP Task manager and even over the improved Windows Vista version.

The New Video Converter tools are also very impressive, in fact it’s one of the best free video media converter tools I’ve found ““ it’s simple, looks great and is very functional. It’s also got a great implementation of the “˜Office Ribbon’, which makes this one of the few applications I’ve seen in the wild to do so.

The Disk Analyzer is also great for working out exactly where all the space on your computer is being taken up. Sometimes it’s a little slow during the analyses, but that’s a minor quibble. For alternative, see our previous article on Visualize your Hard Drive Usage with WinDirStat.

For users tired of Windows simple print-screen button the Screen Capturer is a great little tool with a whole lot of useful features.

If you like any of these tools then we have 10 FREE subscriptions for a year to all of Extensoft products. All you have to do is post a comment below telling us the ONE feature you feel Windows is most missing (Make Use Of employees and anyone connected to Make Use Of employees ineligible).

Enjoy!

By using Flock you get stacks of features built right into the browser while retaining speed, performance and security which could potentially be compromised when installing so many extensions in Firefox. So jump in for my Flock review.

Cross-Platform

Like Firefox, Flock is compatible across all three major platforms, Mac, Windows and Linux, which is great considering the number of students who use other platforms instead of Windows.

Social Networking

I’m going to assume just about every student is on either Facebook, MySpace or both, so the inclusion of them into the browser certainly makes life easier.

As well as these two, there are 20 other supported services which you can see these in the image below:

One glaring omission is Windows Live which has around 300 million users worldwide compared to Gmail’s 20 ““ 30 million. Considering the huge Windows Live update happening right now I would assume the Flock team is working on including all of this new functionality.

Blogging

Plenty of students have blogs and Flock is perhaps the best browser for making blogging easier ““ it includes a decent blogging editor and support for several blogging services such as Blogger, WordPress.com, Blogsome, Xanga and LiveJournal as well as self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Research

Now most students are required to do a fair amount of research and study and Flock is the perfect browser to do this.

Flock has a built in feature called the Web Clipboard which really is Flock’s most understated tool. This clipboard takes the form of a sidebar onto which you can drag just about anything, links, text and images for later.

What’s so great about it is that unlike favourites which require sorting and organizing, using the Clipboard just requires the dumping of a whole stack of information while you research a topic.

There is one additional extension which I would recommend most of all and that is Zotero, the research extension for Firefox. All Firefox extensions usually work fine in Flock so you’ll have no problems there.

Zotero is fantastic for collecting a huge stack of online resources together for more careful reading and analysis later. I barely scrape the surface of its functionality in my own usage, but basically you can save webpages quickly for later (offline if you need it) reading. You can tag keywords, take notes and use various other ways of organization.

Also coming soon is Zotero sync for transferring notes between computers, a great addition to the tool.

Search Easier

Tell me, just how often do you Google something just to go straight to the Wikipedia entry? This extension modifies the Google search page so the most relevant Wikipedia result is shown along with search results.

WorldCat is a web service which can be used to locate books and journals in the nearest library to you. Add it to your browser from here.

Flock also includes instant results searching for many search engines like Yahoo, Google and Technorati. As you type in your search query the results are brought up instantly below the search box. I find it one of Flock’s handiest features.

This is what I use as my student browser, do any of you know of any other great research extensions?

For me personally it’s Songbird. Over the last year I’ve been taking a real interest in watching the progress of the open source media player. I’ll admit I have not been using it as my main music management software recently ever since I bought a Zune, however I’ve still been testing and playing around with it as each new version is released.

Songbird launches today as a non-beta, version 1.0 release following 2 years of development. The significance of this launch should become apparent with time, but I think it’s safe to say this is an important milestone in the development and innovation of desktop media players and hopefully Songbird will gain the same community support Firefox did.

The Vision for Songbird

Rob mentioned the vision for Songbird briefly in his interview with us a few months back; “what happens when a desktop media player is connected to the Web is an unexplored and intriguing opportunity. Songbird re-architects the traditional desktop media player to go there. Songbird is an open, customizable desktop media player that is built to play the Web.”

Given that Songbird is open source, available across all three operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and has been translated into over 60 languages this vision looks more like a reality every day.

However, visions and arguments for openness and ubiquity have rarely made much difference to what users actually use so the real test of Songbird will be what mainstream users think of the software and if they adopt it which only time can tell.

Performance

Performance and stability has been an issue for Songbird throughout much of the development ““ however it’s also to be expected considering it was being released as alpha software. The last few releases however have seen dramatic improvements in both areas ““ so much so that the experience of testing Songbird 1.0 feels almost like a new media player entirely.

Songbird has always been lightweight but for the first time however it actually feels lightweight. If you’ve come from using Media Player or iTunes especially than the experience will be a huge improvement. If you’ve been a longtime Songbird user than you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Customizability and Features

What I love most about Songbird is the ability to only include functionality that you actually need. Software development often follows a cycle in which a new development will quickly gain popularity for being lightweight and innovative. Users like it, but than demand all kinds of new features. This “˜feature creep’ eventually results in a product much like the software it was designed to replace ““ slower, bloated and loaded with features many users don’t need.

This is what I feel is happening to Firefox ““ the point of Firefox was always in creating an open, extendable platform which could be extended by developers, however now Mozilla seems to be also caught up in a features race with Microsoft and Google and what was once Firefox’s greatest strength ““ stability and performance ““ is failing behind. Since Firefox 3 I’ve got sick of the browser’s memory usage, random freezes and frequent freezes.

Songbird will hopefully avoid that and this can be seen by the difference in how features are introduced. The Songbird team develops extensions alongside the main Songbird client and these are what introduces new features to the media player. If you don’t want them you don’t install them ““ simple as that.

Some examples include support for various file types, media players, the popular MashTape extension, LastFm scrobbling and media views are developed by the Songbird team and made available from the addons website.

Incidentally the way the Mashtape extension aggregates data from various different sources really is fantastic, check it out in the screenshot below:

Add-Ons

Since extensions are such a huge part of Songbird you would hope this launch includes a number of addons to choose from.

There are over 70 community provided addons for everything from skins to media views to browser extensions. It’s not a huge number but it’s a significant start to what will hopefully grow into a strong community. Songbird is built upon the Mozilla codebase which it shares with Firefox so for many Firefox developers conversion of extensions should not be too difficult a process and may perhaps encourage them to do so.

To conclude ““ this is a great release and I would very much recommend it to anyone to use as their main media player. To be honest, I can’t think of the last time I reviewed a major product and really felt like the developers had totally nailed everything they needed to.

• Performance: fixed
• Stability: fixed
• features: provided by the community
• minor UI issues: fixed
• web integration: great.

I actually like to provide balanced reviews ““ point out the negatives and compromises however this time I really can’t. That alone is probably the best thing I can say about this product.

Download it now.

To those of you with a feed addiction, it may come as some surprise to learn that RSS adoption is still surprisingly low across web users”“ even those who spend a lot of time on the internet. Most people are unaware of the technology or if they are ““ even less interested. A lot of people simply prefer email subscriptions and depending on the target audience of a blog this can be nearly equal with RSS subscribers. Even here on MakeUseOf, a substantial number of our subscribers are using email for updates.

There are hundreds of interesting ways in which RSS feeds can be put to use. Yahoo Pipes is one great example and this is something I’d like to write about in more detail at a later time. For now however I’d like to introduce you to PostRank.

What is it exactly?

“PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.”

The 5 “˜C’s are used to determine the popularity of any particular post, I’ll leave you to check it out for yourself if you wish to find out more detail, but in essence this criteria includes the following:

• The creation of a blog post responding directly to another blog post. This is the biggest determinate of a post’s popularity.
• Commenting on a blog post ““ the second most important measure of audience engagement and the quality of the article.
• Discussion ““ this involves mentioning a post on other social networking services like Twitter.
• Sharing ““ submitting a site to Digg, or bookmarking it using a service like Del.icio.us
• User activity on the page ““ clicks and page views, not given too much weight in PostRank.

Using this system, blog posts can be run through PostRank to determine just how popular (and therefore how good) the posts are. In the example mentioned above, this is how NewsGator implemented PostRank.  When viewing one of your feeds online, you can choose to change the view to show only the most popular items ““ a useful feature for when in a rush.

Why Would You Want it?

For me the biggest issue I have is finding time to read all the feeds I subscribe to. While personal blogs may only get updated once a day, large multi-author blogs (like one particular blog you may be aware of) are updated much more frequently while other sites focusing on news will be updated constantly 24/7.

With this constant flow of information it’s become increasingly necessary to have the ability to filter out articles which are not of interest to you, and instead simply read the articles which are.

This is where PostRank comes in.

What’s great about this is that no matter what RSS reader you use, be it web based like Google Reader or a desktop application like FeedDemon you can still use PostRank to filter your feeds.

PostRank is both an online RSS reader, service and also an API which developers can choose to include in their applications if they wish. One notable online service which have done is this is Newsgator Online a few months ago.

How Else Can I Use It?

To use PostRank on any feed simply submit it to the PostRank website.  I’ve shown an example in the screenshot below.

If this is a fairly popular feed you’ve submitted then it’ll already be in the system.  If it’s a bit more obscure than you may have to wait a day or so for it to be fully submitted (I’m actually only guessing, I have no real idea how long it takes. Perhaps someone else knows?). In my own experience any feed I wanted to use was already submitted so I’ve had no issues.

After this you can choose what to do with the feed.  You can select from 4 different rankings:

• All Posts
• Good Posts
• Great Posts
• Best Posts

You can also filter the feed by any keywords you want.

After doing this, if you decide you would like to use this feed in your own RSS application then simply click the “˜create new feed’ button. Using this feed you can simply import it into whatever application you already use and replace the feed which may be overwhelming you slightly.

If you decide to create a PostRank account then you can use the site as your web based feed reader.  You can save submitted feeds and change them as you like. If you don’t want to sign up then if you want to make any changes to the feed you’ve created you’ll have to start over again ““ although it’s not really that inconvenient.

Hopefully some of you can find this useful, I know I did.  Has anyone else already been using it in this way?   You may also want to check out Mark’s previous article on using PostRank and AideRSS in Google Reader.

As you may be aware, Windows 7 build 6801 was handed out to 8000 PDC (Professional Developers Conference) attendees.  A few days later I got hold of a copy myself.

I’m going to assume that for you the main issues you have with Vista are the following:

• Performance (both perceived and real)
• User Account Control (UAC)
• Bloat and bundled software

Well I can say that all three have been the main focus for the Windows 7 development team and all have received substantial changes and improvements.

Performance

The big one. With updated drivers, Windows Vista performance is actually equal or better than Windows XP regardless of what you hear.  However Microsoft wanted to do a lot better than that with Windows 7.

I’m finding startup times (from turning the computer on until you get to the login screen) is improved but only by a few seconds over Vista.  From the login screen to a usable desktop however is hugely improved, down from around 30-40 seconds to closer to 10 seconds. Shutdown time is similarly reduced, two thirds faster by my estimates.

RAM usage is down slightly, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate any differences in performance. In general the desktops seems slightly more responsive than Vista, although that could also be from other factors such as Windows gadgets not loading up from the first login.

Battery performance is substantially improved as well, in fact my notebook has gone from squeezing one and half hours from Windows Vista on power saver to nearly 3 hours using Windows 7. That’s a huge improvement and Windows 7 running on power saver is also much faster and more responsive than Windows Vista.

User Account Control

UAC never particularly bothered me much, except for when I was trying to delete things and UAC denied access to me, even if I was the administrator.

In Windows 7 the major changes involve UAC prompts no longer graying out the desktop, no longer appearing for basic system tasks like changing the time and date and generally only popping up during software installations.

It’s a huge improvement and one everyone will be happy with. Also included as you can see in the following screenshot is a slider control for no UAC prompts, or even more for extra security.

Bloat and Bundled Software

You may have heard that Windows 7 is going some of the way towards removing the “˜bloat’ which is present in Windows Vista. Well, in many ways this isn’t true. Windows 7 comes with nearly as much as Windows Vista does, perhaps more considering the number of new features.

I personally don’t have a problem with Microsoft bundled software because I actually use just about all of it, however I can see why some people would have a problem.

What Windows 7 does do is remove some of the duplicate functionality which was present in Vista such as between Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Instead now we just have Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center and you can choose if you want to download Windows Live Photo Gallery or not.

What is interesting is that Windows Explorer is now almost as good an organizer of media as the dedicated programs themselves.  Perhaps this is the way Microsoft is headed? I know they have announced their intention of bringing the concept of an OS back to just the platform between the hardware and the software and this is a way in which Microsoft could achieve this while still retaining many of the same features and functions.

In particular the new displays of music within Windows Explorer is fantastic.  You’ll never have to worry about folder hierarchies again for your music collection.  Using the meta-data, Explorer can display the files as Artist > Album > Song which is great for instant organization.

Anyway I hope this was interesting as a preview of the upcoming release of Windows 7.  You should be able to download a public beta within a few months.   In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments.

To recap, Digsby is a messaging application which lets you talk to people on all of the major instant messaging networks such as MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Gtalk and even Facebook Chat. More than that it also lets you connect up email accounts and social networks accounts including Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It also supports customization, skinning and even synchronizes your account details and Digsby skins between computers.

Steve Shapiro is the project manager for Digsby and he took the time to answer a few questions concerning this project:

Tell us about the ‘Digsby’ logo/mascot…

We wanted something that was a mascot and not just a logo so that it would “be Digsby” – we felt this would be a good way to brand it as a consumer friendly product. Another important aspect of it was that it needed to look good as a 16×16 or 32×32 icon since it is used on the desktop and in the tray.

How many people do you have working on this project? Is this purely a hobby project or do you hope eventually Digsby will provide some kind of revenue stream?

Digsby is developed by a company so we do need to pay the rent and keep the lights on.

What about this project aren’t you currently happy with? Is any part of the application frustrating you feature-wise?

We would love to finish stabilizing the Windows build so we can release for Mac and Linux!  We’ve had tons of requests.

What Instant Messaging application did you use before Digsby?

I used AIM 5.9 + Gtalk.

What is your personal favourite feature?

The email integration.  It’s nice not to have to keep checking my inbox through out the day.  If I get an email that’s important I can open it right from there.   If it’s spam, I can mark it appropriately without ever going to my inbox.

I’m interested to hear your comments on the whole ‘perpetual beta’ a lot of companies have going on these days. Are you working towards an actual version 1.0 release, or is Digsby going to do a Google for the next few years?

It’s a little more complex than that.  There will never really be a 1.0 or a 2.0 but it will also not stay in beta for years.  We adopted a development cycle that is more typical of a website than a software product. A software product typically releases version 1.0 and then there is a massive effort to release 2.0. You need to then convince people to start using 2.0 because it is better while also providing support for 1.0.

With a website, every time you visit the site you see the newest version.  Digsby auto-updates each time you run it so you are always running the latest release. We release new versions almost every week.  Check out http://changelog.digsby.com.  Once it is a bit more stable we will remove the alpha or beta tag that we put at the end of each release but the fast release cycle will remain unchanged so there won’t be a version 1.0 and version 2.0…..just constant builds that keep making Digsby better and better.

Any hints you’d like to share about something big which is yet to come?

Mac + Linux releases!

What do you think of Digsby becoming the ‘Firefox’ of instant-messaging applications?

We have seen that tag line in many reviews and are honored by it.  Firefox is a great browser and being put on the same level makes us smile and encourages us to push even harder to improve Digsby.

Do you have any opinions you would care to share on the latest Windows Live Messenger?

It’s a great IM client in my opinion.

So thanks to Steve.

If you haven’t tried Digsby out yet then I would very much recommend it!

As of the Zune 3.0 update however the Zune has become a fantastic product, enough so that I actually went and bought one myself, a 120 gigabyte Zune I ordered from America and got sent here to Australia. The whole thing has seriously impressed me and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the product for anyone looking to replace their MP3 player.

What I want to talk about in this article however is just the computer software and why, even if you don’t own a Zune, it’s still worth using as a media player for your music.

Before I do however I would suggest that if you are not a US citizen, you download the International Zune Hack for the software. This will allow you to access all the features and sign up for Zune Social using your Live ID.

Interface

The Zune software often flies under the radar compared to rival Apple’s iTunes and it’s a shame because it’s one of Microsoft’s most impressive offerings and stands out from just about every media software I’ve previously used.

It looks great, functions great and performs decently. I would stress however that this software isn’t for meta-data geeks, of anyone who likes to fully customise every aspect of their listening habits and library. However it does provide a great experience as long as you don’t expect it to function in the same way as other media software.

Music Visualisations and “˜Now Playing’

Maybe I speak for myself here, but for years I never saw the point of visualisations. What exactly were they for? If I have my media player up on the screen it’s because I’m browsing my music library, not staring at the pretty shapes and colours while a song plays.

Anyway perhaps with this in mind the Zune 3.0 update provides a great way to show visualisations, down at the bottom of the main screen as you can see from the screenshot. To really appreciate it you’ll have to download and try it for yourself, it looks great trust me.

The ‘Now Playing’ screen is even better, rather than just a larger version of the visualisation seen above there is a full screen display of ever-changing album covers which looks fantastic. In fact when I’m not using the computer for anything else I often just leave it up while my music plays.

It gets even better though.

If you’re connected to an internet connection and you have the ‘Now Playing’ screen up than you’ll get a new kind of display for many popular artists which will look like the following displaying pictures, text and animations related to the band:

MixView

This new feature is designed to help you get involved in the Zune Social, discover new bands and find out more information concerning bands you already know.

Podcasts

Before getting my Zune, podcasts never really interested me, but the Zune software provides an easy way to subscribe so I got into listening to them. In the Marketplace you can find hundreds of podcasts with more being added all the time, although sometimes it can take a long time to get a podcast submitted and accepted.

These are just a few of the features of the Zune software. I would definitely recommend downloading it and giving it a try. There is so much I haven’t mentioned here. Do you use it and if so, what do you like about it?

A lot of high-end software companies provide extremely good value packages for students often involving completely free giveaway editions, stripped-down versions or huge discounts on the off-the-shelf price.

Maybe you hate Microsoft for charging so much for its operating system, but at least it also has plenty of great free software giveaways (such as Windows Live). This year it has released two great deals, one for students only and the other for anyone else interested in getting into software or web development:

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions

The Visual Studio Express editions are feature-limited but not in a way that will affect most beginners just wanting to try out development themselves. The Express editions are available for anyone to download and include four main applications, the two main stand-outs being;

Visual Basic 2008 Express

If you’ve ever wanted to have a go at learning how to develop your own Windows applications then this is the best place to start. 2008 Express includes the capabilities to create applications using the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft provides plenty of free guides, tutorials, samples and extra resources.

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express

Visual Web Developer is for the design and creation of web pages and more. 2008 Express includes a lot more support and tools for using CSS, building JavaScript applications and more complex data-driven web sites.

It’s great for learning for the same reasons described above, you’ll find plenty of tutorials and assistance.

The Express editions also includes Visual C# 2008 and Visual C++ 2008 for more.

DreamSpark

DreamSpark is restricted to students currently attending a university or academic institute which has been accredited and signed up for this program. The number of universities is actually pretty comprehensive and I would guess most universities around the world have actually joined up.

You’ll have to use the student number and password you should have received from your university. Verification is simple and instant before you can download for free any of Microsoft’s software for designers and developers. These aren’t trial or feature limited in anyway and are the exact tools you can buy off the shelf for hundreds of dollars:

Visual Basic 2008 Professional Edition

Provides the features missing from the Express edition. Create software for Windows, the web and devices running Windows Mobile. You can also create applications with then new Office 2007 Ribbon UI or create addins for the Office applications like Word and Outlook.

This file is downloaded as an ISO file which you’ll need to burn to a DVD before installing. Or if you have a mount program to mount ISO files that should be fine as well.

Expression Studio 2

Expression Studio is Microsoft’s set of products designed to compete with Adobe’s developer and designer software such as Dreamweaver and PhotoShop. This installation is 500MB and includes:

I’m still only trying these products out for myself so I can’t really give you a honest opinion at this point. For the price of free though there is little to complain about. Incidentally the Expression 2 applications were all re-written in WPF. An interesting point although I’m not sure what advantage this gives, perhaps someone can help me?

XNA Game Studio 2

The strength of this application is that it enables developers to easily create games for both Windows and Xbox 360 which have support for the Windows Live and Xbox Live respective multiplayer gaming networks. This application is for hobbyists and independent developers, for fun or profit.

The student download also includes a 12 month trial subscription to XNA Creaters Club which would normally be $100 per year. You won’t get access to premium content though. Seriously, what’s with these stingy companies these days?

If you try these tools you’ll discover the software alone isn’t the best part of this, but the community, the extra resources, free assistance and tutorials and sample code and templates which will go a long way to helping people who are teaching themselves.

Since then I’ve been following the development of Songbird with a great deal of interest and was excited when Songbird 0.7 was released a few weeks ago.

This release introduced a great new UI, more features and significant performance improvements, all very welcome additions.

With Songbird on track and cranking up the pace for a version 1 release by December I decided to contact the Songbird team for an interview about their project. Rob Lord is the founder and CEO of Songbird and took the time to answer these questions about Songbird:

Perhaps you’d like to describe the team behind Songbird. I believe a number of you have been involved in previous media projects?

Hi Laurence, thanks for the interview. Yes, our Pioneers of the Inevitable team includes key developers from media players including Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Jukebox.

What do you think about development in other media players? With 4 main choices for consumers (iTunes, WMP, Media Monkey and Winamp) and each with a pretty unique market, things seem to have slowed down in the last couple of years. Apple only releases a new version of iTunes when they have a new product to peddle and Microsoft with their newest OS.

Our perspective is that the traditional desktop media player feature list is complete, thus there has been little innovation in desktop media players for years. However, what happens when a desktop media player is connected to the Web is an unexplored and intriguing opportunity. Songbird re-architects the traditional desktop media player to go there. Songbird is an open, customizable desktop media player that is built to play the Web.

Songbird has an incredible amount of potential. Have you been getting much interest or support from significant online companies such as Amazon? Without an iTunes/iPod lock yet still supporting them I would assume companies would be jumping on an opportunity like Songbird =)

Songbird has attracted a lot of attention from consumer electronics companies, especially handset makers, and media retailers/service providers. We’ll be making announcements as the partnerships are ready to launch.

We hear everyday from device makers that they want to focus on their devices. We hear everyday from digital media retailers, subscription, radio, video, recommendation, locker and other service providers that they want to focus on their services. Yet everybody – users, developers, device makers and service providers – wants those devices and services to work together with software. But only Apple offers a credible integrated service + software + device experience. Songbird is the solution for all those who benefit from open, customizable media player software. Songbird is the open solution for service + software + device integration.

That said, Songbird isn’t yet ready for everyone. If a user needs full feature parity with traditional desktop media players or has never installed a Firefox add-on, Songbird isn’t ready for them yet.

Songbird is based on Mozilla and not Firefox itself as I initially assumed. Can you explain what this means? Do improvements in Firefox, such as FF3 and 3.1 become part of Songbird? Does the Songbird team work with the Firefox team?

Songbird, like Firefox, is built from the Mozilla platform. So, yes, new Firefox features and enhancements are inherited by Songbird. Also our team provides testing, fixes and patches back to Mozilla.

What’s the best song you’ve ever discovered through Songbird?

So much to choose from! A Ratatat remix from the Gorilla vs. Bear music blog comes to mind.

What feature do you miss the most personally when using Songbird? CD ripping and burning?

CD Rip/Burn isn’t an issue for me because I ripped my CD collection years ago. I’m 99% pure digital now. Key for me is support for my iPhone 3G so I can leave my older iPod behind. FYI, CD Rip/Burn is on our roadmap.

What Media Software did you use before Songbird?

Winamp was for many including me the seminal MP3 player. Winamp was first to go big in the 90s with skins, plug-ins, EQ, visualizations, etc. and its community responded with thousands of extensions ““ the kind of vital community we see supporting Firefox today. In the last five years, I found myself recommending iTunes to others for its relative simplicity — and found myself using it for the solid service + software + device integration.

The approach for Songbird is almost a “˜make-your-own’ media player, even more so than Firefox is as a browser. By that I mean the Songbird Media player includes only the most basic functions and almost all new features, device support and codecs are all added via extensions. It’s a great idea as users can avoid having any features they’ll never use (such as iPod support when they don’t have an iPod), however will the most popular extensions eventually become part of Songbird, or are you keeping the system like it is?

You nailed our thinking. Like Firefox, Songbird will offer a baseline of what ever media player user needs and then offer customization via add-ons to your specific media player preferences. We’re experimenting with including highly requested add-ons, such as Last.FM integration, in the first-run bundle.

Does using Songbird make you more attractive to the opposite sex?

Works for me and my lady. Try playing the Groove Salad channel via SHOUTcast for best results. YMMV. ; )

Tell us your five favourite extensions.

Hard to pick as there are over 250 Songbird add-ons currently ““ and they are all specialized features. We’re very grateful to all the individual Songbird add-on developers that have embraced Songbird and the Songbird community.

Rather than pick favorites, here are the add-ons with the widest appeal based on downloads:

Wikipedia – artist biography of the currently playing artist.
Mashtape – a mash-up of Flickr photo, YouTube vdeos, Last.FM bios of the currently playing artist.
MediaFlow – Like iTunes Coverflow, view you music library by flipping through album art.
Last.FM Cover Fetcher – retrieve album art from Last.FM for your music library.
Last.FM Recommendations – artist recommendations from Last.FM based on currently playing artist.

Songbird have also been cool enough to provide us with a Songbird T-shirt to give away! To win this just comment below and tell us the craziest place you’re going to wear it (When you get the shirt we expect a photo proving it – and we’ll publish it! So no bare bottoms please!)

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR : MUO employees are not eligible to enter! This one’s for the readers!

On an unrelated note we’d like to share some tools for the purpose of ripping, converting, downloading and backing up videos.

Since we’re starting from scratch the first thing I suggest you download is a Windows codec pack. Codecs are necessary to play various different ‘digital streams’ (thank you Wikipedia for making me sound smarter) and files. Varun has alsom briefly covered it in his article about Playing Unplayable Videos on your PC.

When you start dealing with video you’ll soon discover there is an awful lot of them. With these packs however you should have no trouble playing any video or audio files you encounter or download:

Free Codec Packs

XP Codec Pack

XP Codec Pack is one of the most completed codec packs which helps you to play all major audio and video formats.

Vista Codec Pack

The installer will automatically remove most other popular codec releases from your computer before installing this concise yet comprehensive package. You won’t need to make any adjustments or tweaks to enjoy your media content immediately. Windows Media Player and Vista’s Media Center will instantly recognize all your files as playable.

Vista Codec Package does not contain a media player software and it will not associate filetypes.

Free DVD Ripping Program

Without a doubt the easiest and best DVD ripping software you’ll find for free is DVD Shrink. It’s been officially abandonware now since 2005 thanks to some copyright infringement accusations and DMCA takedown notices.

Actually that may not be completely true. I think the developers still hang around on the DVD shrink forums, but as far as further development goes they have released nothing more.

It says something for the quality of the original application that two and a half years after the final release it is still one of, if not THE, best DVD rippers.

You can get DVD Shrink from various mirror-sites, here is one link to Softpedia.

DVD Shrink removes copy-protection and regional codes, although on some newer DVDs I have been unable to rip them, perhaps due to new copy protection measures.

DVD is not a DVD re-authoring program, you’ll have to use other software for that. It does however work in conjunction with Nero burning suite if you use that. If you don’t have plans to reburn DVD’s to other DVD’s then I would suggest not splitting the audio and video files. You’ll find the option when you “˜backup’ a disk.

Any Video Converter

Perhaps an explanation isn’t really necessary for Any Video Converter, however I will recommend it.

Any Video Converter takes some of the frustration out of converting media. It’s not infallible but in my experience it’s worked pretty much every time I’ve needed to do something. It also gets a big plus for having an attractive usable interface which is functional and easy to learn.

You can convert video for essentially any popular media player (iPod, PSP, mobile phone) and also for sharing online with services like YouTube. You can see it gets a nice big button in the screenshot below:

uTorrent

uTorrent is now clearly the most popular torrent client. According to TorrentFreak Azurus was the most popular bittorrent software until 2007 when uTorrent took over.

uTorrent got to be the most popular client for being simple, very light on system resources and stable. For most people, me included, this is enough. I can’t think of any feature I require aside from simply downloading the file.

What codecs, converters and rippers do you prefer? These ones or others? Let us know in the comments!