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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?"
Try going to www.download.com and searching under programs with freeware licenses.
All the freelance programers have gone to linux. Maybe if more programmers spent time creating things for windows, they might find that they like it better than linux.
I guess most hobbists have moved to GNU/* and *BSD.
When making free-as-in-cost, they may as well be doing free-as-in-freedom. And working with other developers that share code is nice.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
www.nonags.com
A vast majority of the stuff that was once released as freeware is now open source. There are a number of reasons behind this; the ubiquity of the internet and its usefulness in collaboration, the increased availability of high quality development tools and the fact that if you're not making money off some code, you might as well release the source.
With that in mind, Audacity, while being a bit more full featured than a simple sound recorder, will take care of what you need.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I use http://www.versiontracker.com to find all my software... I found these gems all freeware for you. Pocket voice recorder Sound recorder And the total search with "shareware" is Hope this helps
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
http://www.pricelessware.org/
Ever heard of TUCOWS? You can search for software there, and order by license.
AudioGrabber 1.83 is freeware, and is rated 5 stars. I used to use it to rip CDs, but the description claims it can do exactly what you need.
It may be a little bit overkill for recording a radio program (although I've used the software for that before), but why not try the (open source) Audacity?
is that I can d/l a program for *Nix that is free (both beer and speech) and find that the exact same prog is shareware or commerical for Win32. VCDEasy and WinAirSnort come to mind.
It doesn't kill me to pay for software, but I remember the CD's of free games and tools that anyone running DOS could use.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'll never forget the mess AOL's icq client and Kazaa's browser stuff made of my PC. For most utilities, sourceforge tends to have it. Better still, software from sourceforge doesn't install a ton of spyware, hijack your web browser or do any of the crap that freeware/shareware people are forced to do to pay for hosting.
This is one area where open source works. To see the benefit, compare DC++ or eMule with their proprietary equivalents. Better quality because no annoying attempt to install stuff other than what is needed.
Spyware has killed the freeware/shareware world. The degree to which Miranda and eMule are better than their 'free as in beer' equivalents still amazes me.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
http://freshmeat.net/projects/audacity/
Freshmeat.net lists MANY software applications as they are released, and as good search capabilities if you login.
Audacity is one of the best non-complex sound recorders and mixers going, using wxWidgets works and looks right under linux, windows and probably more (you look).
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Years ago my friend who made a freeware called 'GameHack'(sort of, I forgot) was approached by a company for acquiring its source code with good offers. Then the company offers to commercialize his product and pay him royalty after he rejected the first offer. They didn't make the deal in the end.
:)
:)
I think that's how the things go: you make good freeware and someone will support you to commercialize it if you don't do it yourself. We've seen a couple of such cases in OSS community. Developers are simply human who need to feed their kids and pay their mortage.
P.S. Oh btw, the reason my friend declined their offers is that he lost the source code in a harddrive failure and he's too embarrass to admit it.
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
So become part of the growing Linux community, install linux today, because this is where the cool windows programmers have gone!
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Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It just looks that way because of a bad, bad, bad UI.
Record 60 seconds of silence. Now save them as a file, and import it into the current sample. Voila! a 2-minute sample, which you can record over. Repeat as necessary.
GnuWin is a nice burnable collection of free software for Windows.
I personally always include a "GPL" when I search for Windows software; helps filter out the cripppleware.
AnalogX.com has some pretty good software. http://www.analogx.com/contents/download.htm
The folks who wrote DOS and Windows freeware in the 80's and 90's have just gotten tired of it. It was fun, but the community of techie early adopters has been inundated with everybody and his mother-in-law, and it's just not the same anymore. If they're still doing it, they've decided to make a job of it: hence crippleware requiring payment. Some have moved on to Linux and such, but the rest are just middle-aged parents who don't have time or enthusiasm for it anymore.
Meanwhile, the new generation of techie types (who could have been early adopters of PCs, but now it's too late for that) have either gone directly into open-source, or they've grown up in that "mature market" of Windows, where it seems that most of the neat toys and applets they'd want are already bundled with the OS, and the bubbling stewpot of innovation has cooled to a simmer.
Another related factor is that the nature of the computer you take out of the box has changed dramatically over that timeframe. If you bought a computer 25 years ago, it was expected that you would do some programming with it. Turn on that Apple II or C64 or that IBM PC without an OS installed, and you're in a BASIC interpretter. The more recent computer purchaser is never really given that nudge.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
If you're using Windows, you should probably be using all of these programs (if you need them). Most of them are pretty stable and mature.
Audacity - Sound editing (so this post is on-topic!)
Mozilla FireFox - Web browsing.
The Gimp - graphics/photo editing
Sodipodi - Vector graphics (SVG) editing. It's no Illustrator, but the basics are there, and they're pretty nice.
OpenOffice - Not quite ready to replace Word/Excel/PPT, but it's great if you (or your employer/university) haven't already shelled out for Office.
FileZilla - FTP client
Gaim - AOL Instant Messenger client
PuTTY - ssh client
There's a bit more elaboration and links on my blog.
Excellent Freeware Site
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeeware/ (used to be webattack.com)
I used to be addicted to freeware and this was one of my favorite places to get a fix.
All the software is well categorized.
I can often find what I'm looking for here.
http://www.nonags.com is good too.
Tod
ScanRec is one I've found rather useful. It isn't an end-all/be-all recorder, but it does have a rather useful feature. It was created with a VOX control originally to be used for recording ham sessions. So, it would not record constantly, but only when anybody brodcast. It will create a log file detailing what times it did the recordings. Anyway, I've used it for radio/TV stuff in the past, and I've had few problems with it (other than recording in a format that Media Player didn't really like.
I'm so sick of uninformed people bashing Microsoft with inaccurate information!
I mean, really, there are TONS of ways to CORRECTLY bash them! Check your facts!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Maybe MS programmers will start participating with the community and answering questions on the developers newsgroups.
Hold up...did the parent just imply that Linux users were helpful and would answer questions?!?
Hah, it's a joke! I'm kidding!
Sorta!
Probably over half of the programs that I run on my Windows machines are GNU or open source programs (Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GIMP, grep, awk, sed, and even things like Bash). There are very few major GNU/Linux programs that don't run fine under windows these days either because they were written to be portable in the first place or because CYGWIN does a pretty decent job of emulating the unix libraries.
I find Total Recorder very useful too. Just paying $12 for it is easier than trying to find free programs to do the same thing. What's your time worth? I searched for weeks to find something that would record streaming radio broadcasts on Windows (Linux can do this all by itself, with a few command line untilities piped together). Anyway, Total Recorder was the only thing I could find, free or not.
A problem with developing this kind of software is needing proprietary libraries, etc. So virtually all software of this type is non-free. Total Recorder gets around this by recording the output of the sound card. Methinks Java could be used for this and it could be cross-platform, but so far no one's bothered.
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.
www.OnlyTheBestFreeware.com
This is why it is often better to go to a site which serves as a portal to links to your subject of interest, rather than a general search engine.