Description: Xrecode is a free audio file conversion program that supports a wide range of formats. It can also perform CUE splitting of audio files as well as an experimental feature that detects automatically silences to split a large audio file. Xrecode is optimized for converting multiple files in parallel in systems with muli-core CPUs.

I’ve reviewed a number of audio conversion programs here, but was sufficiently impressed with Xrecode to want to write about this little gem as well. What I like about this program is the simplicity of the interface coupled with some serious power it packs the hood (as well as the CUE splitting, which I occasionally sought out). I am also intrigued by the audio file splitting based on the automatic detection of gaps/silences in a big file. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user interface: employs a simple drag and drop interface for files or entire folders. You can keep adding files/folders by dragging while pressing CTRL. Settings and other dialogs are very nicely couched into the interface such that they are only seen if and when they are needed.
• Supported filetypes: can convert to/from any of the following formats; MP3, WMA, OGG, APE, FLAC, WavPack, AAC, and WAVE.
• CUE Splitting: simply drag the CUE file into the interface and watch Xrecode do its magic.
• Split by silence: this experimental feature allows you to set (a) the volume threshold, as well as (b) the length of the gap in seconds that the program will look for to pinpoint gaps between songs. This means that getting an accurate split will likely require some experimentation on you part, and whether or not all songs will be split off accurately is a big question mark.
• Testing “split by silence”: in my experience this feature did not work at all for Jazz (splitting a John Coltrane album into a few dozen songs instead of 6), but did fairly well with a Tori Amos album, albeit chopping one of the tracks in two a few seconds into the song (the rest of the tracks, however, seemed to be split correctly). All in all I would recommend trying this option out but, if it doesn’t work, I do not recommend spending too much time with it and instead to save your time and energy and do the splitting manually (with a program like Audacity or MP3 Directcut).
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Description: CRP (Control Running Programs) is a small free program that runs in the background and performs two functions: it re-launches a program automatically once it detects that it is no longer running, and it limits the instances that a program can be running simultaneously according to a user defined number of instances (including preventing a program from running at all).

Have you ever, say, somehow shut down your instant messaging client without really meaning to only to become aware of this hours later when friends or colleagues call or email you to ask why you’re offline? Or say you have a notes managing app that you like to be always running but shuts down when you only mean to minimize it.

Another, different kind of example is a program that when you try to access it using a launcher or shortcut when in fact it is already running, will mistakenly create another instance of that program running in memory when what you had intended was to simply maximize it or bring it into focus.

CRP program brings together two extremely useful functions that help you manage your system in the above mentioned scenarios. Please note, however that CRP does not automatically limit the instances of running programs on your machine across the board; rather, all operations will apply to programs of your choosing that you have to tell CRP to monitor. Here are more notes on this one:

• What it does: (a) it re-launches programs that you specify whenever it finds that they have been closed or have shut down, and (b) limits the running instances of programs that you specify to a user-specified number.
• How it works: CRP consists of two lists, one for “Instance Controlling” and another for “Instance Launching”. Once you add the appropriate programs to either list you can activate each one of these lists separately (i.e. you can have both lists activated or one list activated and not the other). The program will then run in the background and monitor for the system for instances of the programs on your list.
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Description: Desksave is a free, lightweight program that saves the icon layout on the desktop according to the current screen resolution and can restore it at a later point if needed, either manually or automatically. It features a number of interesting options, including portability, shell integration into the right-click context menu, and the option to run from the command line.

This is the third program of its kind that I am featuring on Freewaregenius (I’d previously reviewed DIManagerX and Shock Desktop). My experience with these kinds of programs is that they are strangely unreliable, especially in relation to whether ’Auto Arrange’ and/or ’Align to Grid’ are enabled. Each of the programs above offers its own set of features and advantages, but Desksave brings a number of things to the table that has made it my desktop-icon-saving program of choice; (these are the first four points outlined below):

• It’s reliable: i.e. it works, whether ’Auto Arrange’ or ’Align to Grid’ are turned on or off, it does what it purports to do (and does not force you to re-check Align to Grid if it was checked to begin with. Note that for this as well as other similar program it might be necessary to perform the icon restoration multiple times in order to get everything back exactly the way it was, depending on how mixed up your icons become.
• Can live in the context menu: this program can be accessed from the system tray or (optionally) in the context menu. I never thought that context menu access would be desirable for a program like this, but in practical terms I’ve found this to be extremely useful (I would even say this is my favorite feature). There is something intuitively appealing about right-clicking to restore the icon layout when you need to.
• It’s lightweight: a mere 78,5 K for DeskSave.exe, and 79.5K for the shell extension.
• Portable: this is a no install program. Adding (or removing) Desksave to the context menu can be done within the program dialog.
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Description: 360 Desktop is a free innovative virtual desktop application that creates a "panoramic workspace" extending across multiple screens. It behaves as a scrollable desktop where you could travel from one side and into the other. It also introduces the ability to embed widgets on the new desktop that clip content off the web such as RSS feeds and videos.

Imagine a desktop environment that is spread across multiple screens consisting of a single, panoramic wallpaper image, and where you can scroll smoothly across the new desktop and place both icons and applications anywhere you like.

360 Desktop tries to deliver exactly this with some success. It provides a never-ending desktop that scrolls smoothly and creates the feeling of an expansive workspace with a lot of space for your windows, apps, and icons. However, the pre-release beta tested here still has some major kinks that need to be ironed out, high on the list of which is it’s support for embedded internet widgets that still feels rudimentary and left me wishing that I could simply switch it off. Here are more notes on this program:

• Performance: is surprisingly robust. Scrolling is mostly smooth and the navigation works very well.
• Icons: can be placed anywhere on the new desktop, however if you prefer you have the option of disabling panning for icons such that they remain in place even as the desktop scrolls. You cannot enable icon "align to grid", which I personally always like to have. You can, however, use icon-location saving programs and these seem to work fine for icons that are visible on the screen only.
• App and folder windows: most application and folder windows can be placed anywhere on the new desktop. Clicking on the taskbar button for an application has the (rather pleasing) effect of automatically scrolling the panoramic desktop and whisking you over to wherever the application is. Some apps, however (such as floating desktop widget programs) will simply move with the desktop as you scroll through.
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Description: Pictomio is a free image viewer which features a slick, modern interface and 3D accelerated browsing of image libraries. It brings together a host of functions for working with images such automatic grouping of images, tagging, image rating, EXIF and metadata editing, as well as image rotation and zooming. Pictomio can also view and manage video and media files and requires a fairly powerful graphics card to run.

In software as in anything, we ideally want to balance both form and function. And although Pictomio scores high marks on both, there exists a good number of more powerful and feature-rich freeware image viewers out there that nonetheless will not hold a candle to this one in terms of sheer coolness and the richness of the user experience. It does come at a cost (will require a powerful graphics card, and is somewhat higher on resource consumption than the average viewer) but if your machine has the resources you will probably love this. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user interface: simply looks good and is definitely the program’s strong suite. Navigation is intuitive and everything is accessible through a combination of tabs (on top, on the side of the screen, etc) and right-click context menus.
• Image browsing: offers thumbnail browsing, film-strip browsing, single image browsing and the iTunes-style carousel browsing, which is somewhat cool but not exactly mind-blowing (and which is presumably why the 3D acceleration is needed). Allows you to sort and/or filter images based on different criteria (see “organization” below).
• Organization: if you are looking for a tool that can best organize a complicated image library this one is on steroids. Pictomio scans a user selected folder initially and immediately sets to work indexing your library and organizing it across different categories and elements. For example, it allows you to classify images into user-defined categories, rate them, flag them as favorites, tag them using multiple arbitrary tags, create albums, browse by medium or by “color mark”, browse by EXIF data, and maintain a shortlist (a basket, if you will) of images to work with. It even keeps a history of performed search queries. You can filter what you are looking at by everything (e.g. date criteria, landscape or portrait, etc.)
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Description: gAttach is a free program that integrates Gmail into your system as your default email service, to be used by default instead of a local client when you send email or attach files from the desktop, the browser, or any local applications. (Note: you can also use Yahoomail as your default email service using sister application yAttach).

If judging only by my friends and the people I know, the number of people using web mail services such as Gmail or Yahoomail as their primary email accounts seems to be growing exponentially. And although there are many advantages to using web services, there is one pervasive drawback: web mail services are in general divorced from your desktop, which means that many email-integration functions that are built into your operating system or other local apps will automatically attempt to use a local client to send email, images, or other files (typically Outlook Express or Outlook) rather that Gmail.

With gAttach you now can use Gmail in lieu of a local client. Here are some examples of things you can do that previously would have automatically opened a local email client (but which gAttach will re-route to Gmail):

• Send “mailto” email from the browser: most sites feature “mailto” links to send email that typically open the default email client and pre-populate the email and subject (see image to the right). gAttach will ensure that these open Gmail rather than a local client such as Outlook Express.
• Send files by email using the send to menu: right click on any file, go to the send to menu, and click on “Mail Recipient” (see first screenshot above). You will be asked whether or not you want to resize the picture, and after that instead of opening a default local email client gAttach will open the Gmail login page, where it will create a new draft email with the file uploaded as an attachment.
• Email any file from within Windows explorer: using the “email file” link that exists in Windows Explorer (on the left explorer pane under “File and Folder Tasks”). Behaves in the very same way as emailing using the send to menu.
• Send links from the browser: see image to the right (from Internet Explorer). You can now send this Freewaregenius URL to your friends and be sure that IE will use Gmail rather than a local email client.
• Other programs: gAttach will work globally from any local application that you can send email from. You can send attachments directly from applications like Picasa, Windows Photo Gallery, Microsoft Office applications, Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.

Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: when you attempt to send an email or file, gAttach will open a Gmail login window. Once you enter your account info you will arrive at a new draft message with any relevant files uploaded as attachements.
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Description: DeskOnTop is a free program that resides in the system tray and provides access to your desktop files and folders by popping up a mini-representation of the desktop in the system tray. Alternately, it can also provide a start menu style list of all your desktop items.

The idea behind DeskOnTop is so simple and obvious it makes me wonder why I haven’t seen more implementations of it: access a miniaturized recreation of the desktop from the system tray. This is the sort of original program that I love to write about on Freewaregenius.

The most obvious use for this program is a when you are working with a number of open windows and would prefer not to minimize them in order to access something on the desktop. Instead, you can left click the DeskOnTop icon in the tray and get a hovering representation of the desktop where you can access all of the desktop contents, and where mousing over the icons displays tooltips that reveal the filenames (see screenshot above). Here are more notes on this program

• Two display modes: you can either opt for a floating, miniaturized pop-up representation of the desktop (left click) or a cascading, start-menu style list of icons (right click).
• Displays the desktop icons even if they are hidden on your actual desktop: just think about this for a second. You can disable your desktop icons in order to instantly get a clean and visually pleasing work environment with no icons cluttering your space. Meanwhile, DeskOnTop can provide access to everything that’s there from the system tray.
• Customizable: the "small" desktop can use your default explorer wallpaper, or can be pointed to a directory of images to use instead. The transparency of the mock desktop, size of the icons, font size and background color in the tooltips as well as the color and thickness of display frames can all be tweaked.
• Memory consumption: approx 8 megs in memory. Not a lightweight program but quite reasonable, in my opinion.
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Description: Evri is a web service that indexes parts of the internet, reads and linguistically “understands” it and discovers connections between entities based on the activity of texts and articles. It then allows you to browse information within the dynamically built (and constantly changing) structure of interconnected entities that it finds.

Not freeware, but a free web service that helps users browse some of the most popular subjects on the net (popular people, popular places, and popular things) and discover connections between them. Evri is a bit of a combination between a recommendation engine of related links and a sort of dynamic, self-creating Wikipedia.

While Evri might look like a news and/or media portal with some nice, flash based links, this startup is based on a robust technology that should raise some eyebrows. Evri is in fact powered by a search technology that scours parts the net (focusing mainly on news, politics, and general media related web pages) and actually understands references within the text to people, places, and things. So, for example, when indexing a news article that talks about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigning together in Unity, NH, it will “understand” that Barack and Hillary are people and that Unity is a place (and it will do so on its own, without any human intervention). If it sees a lot of texts connecting Obama, Clinton, and Unity on the web, it will be able to gauge the “strength” of these connections, as it were.

What this enables Evri to do is construct a web of links and interrelations that mirrors the flurry of activity (expressed in texts, articles, etc.) that takes place on the internet. It is designed to reveal interconnectedness of the web as expressed linguistically in what is being said/discussed rather than in terms of linked hyperlinks (as, for example, Google does).

What it means to you now: the Evri beta has been launched (at this point you will have to sign up for an invite). Here are some of the things you can do on it right now:
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Description: The KM Player is a free media player that supports a comprehensive range of media format, including broad DVD support using all internal filters and codecs. It is extremely feature-rich, offering a range of features such as applying filters during playback (sharpening, denoise, color effects, etc), excellent subtitles support, playing (and capturing) streaming media over the internet, playing incomplete files, bookmarking parts of videos, and others.

The KMPlayer (not to be confused with simply “KMPlayer”, which is another product) is the kind of free software that is so good it makes you wonder how anyone can still manage to charge money for a program in the same category. The reason I give it such a high endorsement is that software manages to juggle four things at once, each of which is remarkable in its own right:

1. Supports a very wide range of formats: (including obscure ones).It includes all essential decoders internally (including RealMedia, Flash video, and Quicktime) that are not registered to the system, but also interacts with system filters through a “fully controlled environment”. This means that The KM Player will (a) eliminate any possible errors due to codec conflict, (b) none of its internal filters will be running in the background at all times, taking up resources, and (c) If you have a media file that you cannot get to work this program will most certainly play it.
2. Has a very light footprint: takes up only 16 megs in memory and a (negligible) 50 megs on your hard drive.
3. Delivers an unusually rich selection of features: from those features that make you think “finally someone thought to include this” to “I can’t believe they thought of this”.
4. Delivers a simple and straightforward interface: despite all the supported features, everything is context-menu based, and the program can be used in a simple way without overwhelming the user with the diversity of options. On-screen tooltips are displayed on hovering over an element that tell you what it is.

This does not mean that this program is perfect but, in my view, is very close to it. There are a number of drawbacks which I will get into in my “wish list” section below. For now here is an overview of some of the features on offer:

• Formats supported: a listing would take a lot of space and would be superfluous. Suffice it to say: every conceivable video format (including DVD), audio format, playlist format, image format, and even disk image formats.
• Image processing: allows you to apply a wide range of effects to your video as it is being played, including color controls, (e.g. greyscale, auto-level control), sharpening, blurring, denoise, resize, flip/rotation, etc. Resize, flip, etc. Variable playback speed also supported.
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Description: Click&Clean is a free tool that works alongside CCleaner to provide 1-click hard drive and browser cleanup from within Internet Explorer, Firefox, or the desktop Quick Launch bar. It can perform an instant, complete uninterrupted cleanup with CCleaner without exiting the browser or dealing with prompts and dilags.

If you use CCleaner to clean your hard drive (temp files, internet activity, cookies, history, etc.) you already know that it is an indispensable and excellent program. What Click&Clean does is simply provide a 1-click complete cleanup using CCleaner from within Internet Explorer, Firefox, or the desktop Quick Launch without having to interact with any of CCleaner’s prompts or dialogs. Moreover, if Click&Clean is used from within a browser, the cleaning operation will be performed without the need to shut down the browser first. Here are more notes on this program:

• Adding browser buttons: in IE right click on the IE toolbar then ’customize command bar’ then ’add or remove commands’. Select the blue ’Cleaner’ icon and add it to the IE toolbar. For Firefox, right click the toolbar and select ’customize’, then drag the blue Cleaner icon to the Firefox toolbar. A desktop “quick launch” icon is added by default upon installation.
• How it works: clicking on the Cleaner button in a browser or otherwise launching it from the Quick Launch bar will start the process. In Firefox, Click&Clean seems to also kick-start Firefox’s “clear private data” option (seems to be a workaround designed around CCleaner’s inability to clean the Firefox environment without shutting it down first). To configure Firefox properly, go to Tools > Options > Privacy, clear a check mark beside “Ask me before clearing private data” (see this page for more info).
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