The internet allows for a huge increase in connection and community as well as media - more specifically, music. With such a demand, a wave of new file sharing was born that is now called called BitTorrent. This allows users to share files easily by storing separate files, not on one person’s computer, but multiple computers with certain pieces of files on them to allow downloading from multiple locations and thus speeding up downloading. (More information on BitTorrent here.)
Unfortunately today, BitTorrent has become the mainstream way for sharing copyrighted content. There are a few sites though (like LegalTorrents), that do offer torrents that are free and legal.
As a kid I spent hours recording tunes from the radio. I would even call to request songs and I hated DJ’s that chatted into the songs, making them worthless. My collection of music cassettes grew steadily. Growing up I started buying CD’s until I had internet access. From there on my need for hard drive space grew massively. Those were the days.
Today, it doesn’t take a lot of time and effort to obtain legal MP3’s, but it does take some good tools. Here are three different programs to record streaming audio (i.e. from online radio).
Screamer Radio is currently my weapon of choice when hunting for new music. It’s simple, CPU-light and unconditionally free. It can handle just about any streaming format, your machine will hardly feel it’s running, and you can minimize it in the system tray.
Whenever I tune into something exciting, I hit the REC button and the output mp3 file is automatically encoded with the artist and song data. Using this information, I can track down the song or album and add it to my shopping list.
I am a total Skype fanatic, to the point where I use it for 95% of my phone calls and virtually all of my Instant Messaging chats. But when you download Skype for the first time, you are given a basic shell of a program and then you have to make the effort to personalise your Skype and add the programs which will be useful to you.
So today, let’s take a look at my Skype and two of the features I have found useful.
Open source software is a wonderful thing as it breeds invention and creativity. There’s a no more better example than Audacity.
For those of you who have never heard of Audacity, it is a free open source program which enables you to record audio files and then edit them, convert them into various file formats (such as MP3 and WAV) and generally allows you to have your own little audio recording studio on your PC.
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