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Freeware for Windows -- Where Did It Go?
Talahamut asks: "The other day, I was planning on recording a radio show by running my stereo's output into my PC. Oooh, that sucks - WinXP's Sound Recorder limits you to 60 sec. recordings. Oh well, I'll just go online and grab a little WAV recorder. 30 minutes later, I'm frustrated because all I find is crippleware (time-limited, of course...) that records every format under the sun from any sound stream imaginable. What happened to the small home-brewed Windows utilities that used to be so easy to find online years ago? All the freeware sites I checked had nothing but commercial crippleware. Is there no place to find simple programs like that anymore?"
I remember there being lots of shareware that relied on your good will to send money to the creators.
:)
Perhaps the attitude of the article author that this was all "freeware" is why it has slowly changed to cripple-ware
I'll put my vote behind audacity also.
I handle the sound for our church, mainly recording sermons and music, and it certainly handles the job. The setup is simple enough to user right out of the *cough* box *cough* or package. Often I by the end of the service I have about 1.5GB of stuff to go through and clean up and put on a CD which audacity handles pretty well also.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I was in a similar situation myself recently. I wanted a program to rip the audio from a stand-up DVD so I could listen to it on the PC without needing to play the DVD.
After a looong search I eventually found one free program that could do the job. Downloaded it, installed it, started ripping. Five minutes later it stopped. Time-limited, you see. But good news! Apparently there was a commercial version which could record for longer than five minutes! So after being tricked like that, obviously I rushed to order the commercial version... NOT.
Obviously that was a dirty bait-and-switch trick but I can think of one legitimate reason why more ethical coders may be moving away from free releases...
A few years ago I wrote a video capture program. It was for my own personal use because I wasn't happy with any of the commercial options available. I decided to release the software for free, and included in the zip file a brief text file explaining how to use it and stating the one very limited, specific job that it was designed to perform.
The software was listed on one download site and the reviewers there ripped it to shreds.
Why?
Because they claimed that a certain feature didn't work.
Never mind the fact that the info file made no mention of that feature. Never mind the fact that the feature was way outside the scope of this particular program. These reviewers wanted a free video capture program with a certain feature, so when a free video capture program came out *without* that feature, they reviewed the program as defective.
Would I release a program for free in future?
Very unlikely.
If someone considers buying a program then they'll probably read the instructions to make sure it can do what they want. If they go ahead and buy it then they'll almost certainly have read the instructions. But if it's free, as with most free stuff online, people have unrealistic expectations and they react nastily when those expectations aren't met.
THe thing about the cost on developing windows is not 100% true. You can download Microsoft's command-line C/C++/C# compilers for free, along with SDK's for developing Internet apps, GUI apps, database apps, and much much more. You have to pay for their IDE, debugger and for a local copy of the manuals, BUT you can do a whole lot for free. Don't forget either that the basic Visual C++/C# package is only $99. There's always GCC/Cygwin. You can install the free MS SDK, and then use any Cygwin development tools you like. Thing is, most windows developers actually LIKE Visual C++. It's really a great environment once you customize it (far less so than you need to customize Emacs).
Download.com and similar sites used to be good sources of freeware, but since they started charging to list your software, the freeware is gone; at best, the authors will want to recoup their listing fee.
The worst part is that they only charge the little guys. My company (big internet company) released a client-side application last year. Download.com approached us and offered to host it for free. They've served a ton of downloads and we've never paid them a cent. They even featured it for a while -- something we neither asked for nor discussed with them.
Yet the little guy that gets ten downloads a week actually has to pay for it...
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
record a blank file, about 2 seconds,
using 'effects' increase the length by 'decreasing speed' as needed to length required for project.
start at beginning of file, and hit 'record' this causes your new sound to mix with the file
using windows sound recorder, it's ability to convert, and the lame codec, I actually have a friend I setup converting his old LAME punk rock from casettes to mp3's using just soundrec.. I actually created blank wav's for him in 180, 240, and 900 second versions, and have used it successfully to record an entire side of a 45 minute casette onto one file, 2800 second blank wav, pared down as needed after the casette was in.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It seems the problem is much older than that. When VB became popular, everyone who could make a dialog box pop up figured he or she could slap together some (usually) crappy piece of semi-functional-ware, charge $29.99 and become rich. It didn't help that shareware had been successful for a lot of products (mostly because the successful products were _good_). Shareware _is_ a great idea, but there is so much stuff out there which is complete crap, and you'll see 10 wastes of disk space for every app that is actually worth the 30 seconds to download.
My frustration is not so much finding free tools but finding _any_ tools that don't suck for small simple needs like the one described. I'll gladly pay a small fee for a small utility that does something really well, but the freeware actually tends to be better than the shareware in so many cases, probably because the creator is motivated to make a useful app rather than just become the next WinZip (which I happily paid for years ago, but now I use WinRAR, also paid for). Big commercial apps have their place, but most of the time, what I'm looking for is a simple tool to fill a simple need, not something that tries to be everything to everyone.
Between sourceforge.net and freshmeat.org and maybe a little learning curve with cygwin, there is plenty of good Windows open source software out there to be had, but it should be a lot better.
Recently I wanted a good font manager for Windows, something that would let me browse through hundreds of fonts and install or uninstall them quickly and easily. I found the same thing... a bunch of crappy shareware (or at best, decent shareware that lacked features I required), so in frustration I started writing my own using old Ziff-Davis free utility source code as a starting point. I haven't gotten far because of work demands, but if I ever get something good, I will release it Open Source.
And please, Windows programmers, if you are going to release freeware, give us the source. Many marginal piece of software could be very valuable if the source were available.
I have nothing against shareware or commercial software, but if you are going to go that route, your app better be worth the download, and from what I've seen, most aren't.
At the end of the day, any good software is hard to find.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
maybe he was using jeeves?
not everyone has discovered google yet...
FWIW, I'm still a Google fan, but am finding that Teoma (which uses the same engine as Jeeves, but I like Teoma's presentation better) is delivering results where Google fails.
Google's great (well as good as Infoseek was in its prime before Disney/ABC/Go bought it and ruined it), but Teoma's methods seem to hold up a bit better and retrn results that are often more useful and relevant than Google's, especially in those cases where Google returns way too much crap. You don't have to switch - use Google for what it's good at, but if you find yourself still looking for the needle after two or three search modifications, then hop over to Teoma and give it a try. I did, at a friend's urging, and have been surprised at how well it works. (I have no connection whatever with Teoma, other than as a user.)
Google is still my home page, but I am now using Teoma two or three times a day, and am actually thinking about switching, which I couldn't have imagined several months ago...
Yahoo is getting better, too, and adding more and more useful services all the time. You've just got to love capitalist competition! Thank you, Adam Smith...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Try writing a multi-threaded app on Windows.
The win32 threading API is very nice. Seriously -- I'm a FreeBSD developer, and there isn't much about Windows which I like, but win32 threads are really well thought out and intuitive.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
It depends on the state law. That's very clearly defined in California, but in other states it's not so clear-cut.
In California, so long as you don't use company time, equipment, or premises to create a work, and that work is not substantially relevant to work you do for the company, they have no claims whatsoever on your work, and that right cannot be waived.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.