Month: June 2007

Yes, folks, it’s summer again. Which can only mean one thing: another instalment of the Shrek series is in theatres now! Animated films have come a long way in the last few years and the huge improvements are mainly due to software. In fact, if you’ve ever considered making your own cartoons, there’s never been a better time to start. We’ve collected together the very best animation software for you, so what are you waiting for?

Another regular feature of summer’s arrival is a spike in the number of people joining gyms. A lot of people feel under pressure to get fit at this time of year, but not so many worry about how their computer’s doing. Elena selected some light alternatives to popular, heavy software which should help your PC by taking up less space and consuming fewer system resources.

Tony Blair has just left office after more than 10 years as British Prime Minister. We thought that before he gets his next career underway, he might have some free time on his hands. We reckon that our list of Tony Blair’s timewasters would be enough to keep any former world leader occupied.

Finally, we took a closer look at one of the most popular programs on Softonic. Fruity Loops is a powerful music creation app which is used by amateurs and professionals alike. James found a comprehensive library of sound samples to expand and improve FL Studio even more.

MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV, Ogg….the list of audio formats is endless. Every now and then though, you’ll need to convert your track to another format, just to be able to play it on such or such MP3 player.

The best solution in this case is to install a converter. If this type of application is good you’ll barely lose any sound quality. The difficult thing though is actually finding the converter that you need. We’ve patched up a list of 10 audio converters that Softonic users consider worthy of recognition:

• SoundTaxi – Converts DRM protected sound files to unprotected formats.
• Free MP3 WMA Converter – This application is known to convert extremely quickly.
• Switch – Converts up to 32,000 files without eating up your CPU.
• dBpowerAMP Music Converter – Rips your CDs, normalizes your audio, edits your tags and converts all at once.
• Xilisoft Audio Converter – Converts video formats to audio formats. Handy when you want the soundtrack or dialogues from a movie.
• Power MP3 WMA Converter – Fast converter with low quality loss. We also appreciate that it can rip CDs into any format automatically.
• MP3 WAV WMA Converter – Handy for batch converting audio files.
• Monkey’s Audio – Compresses audio to its very own lossless format.
• MP3 Coder – Convert your audio files to MP3 without any loss of quality or bitrate.
• Easy RM to MP3 Converter – Capture and convert Real Media to MP3.

With the Wimbledon tournament now in full flow, we thought we’d help you emulate your favourite players by highlighting some of the best tennis games around. Although, for me, nothing can ever match quite up to Super Tennis on the SNES, there are plenty of games around that will get you serving and volleying like a champ without having to set foot on a real-life court. Here’s our top five:

Tennis Elbow – Fun, realistic and addictive tennis game

Dream Match Tennis – Play tennis against opponents across the World

Tennis Titans – Play like a pro in this easy-to-learn and fun tennis game

Pong Multiplayer for Firefox – Have a game of tennis retro-style

OnCourt – If you’re serious about your tennis then this database app will help yout record and track all the tennis results and standings

Tagging your MP3s with the right data makes managing your music collection easier in all sorts of ways. It makes your playlists easy to organise and it enables your MP3s to retrieve information more accurately from the internet such as lyrics and album info. However, going through your collection one-by-one, changing the tags is a time consuming a painstaking process.

That’s why I was pleased to discover PicardTagger which does the job for you. It basically automatically tags your MP3s with information about most well known albums. The only things it doesn’t retrieve are the artwork or genre information which is difficult to calculate with some music types anyway.

The process couldn’t be any easier. Once installed, make sure that ‘Audio Fingerprinting’ is selected and you simply drag yourMP3s into the ‘New Files Folder’ of the PicardTagger interface. To organise your collection, simply click on the ‘Cluster’ icon to group all the MP3s together by album. Obviously, the more obscure your collection, the less likely that the tags it assigns are correct but it’s remarkably accurate with mainstream music. I’ve managed to clean up hundreds of tracks which were badly tagged.

The program is written in Python so it’s available on both Windows and Linux – Mac support will be added soon according to the developers.

Many people are scared of spiders but when it comes to the kind sent by search engines, webmasters are generally happy to let them crawl all over their site. Of course, it’s a good thing for your ranking to have these little pieces of code looking at your pages regularly to check for updates. Recently though, site administrators have been getting a little ticked off with Yahoo!’s new spidering tactics. By using a different IP address for each page the search giant checks, many people are now finding their bandwidth being choked.

It looks as if Yahoo! isn’t in a rush to change its new spidering techniques, but thankfully, if you’re being blighted by a plague of spiders there are measures you can take to block them. One measure is to use the following meta tag to talk to the spiders: “” You will need this META tag on every page in your Web site that you don’t want indexed. Obviously if you have a lot of pages on your site this may take a while, so grab yourself a decent HTML editor like Arachnophilia, which allows you to perform a global search and replace and add an HTML header tag to every Web page that you open in the program.

An alternative to this method is to download one of the spider-blocking scripts from TechPatterns to help you cut down on the amount of traffic search engines like Yahoo! are sending to your site.

Acey Deucey is a variation of backgammon with differences in rules, opening position and end play. Absolute Acey Deucey lets you try this variant on a nice playing board right on your Mac desktop. The game stays challenging and entertaining thanks to 5 different skill levels and 3 player personalities to choose from. Absolute Acey Deucey can also give you advice, show stats, tell you how many rolls are left or show an instant replay of your last move.

Looking for some easy entertainment? Then click here and play Bloxorz, but be aware that you may end up spending way too much time with it! This incredibly addicting game will take you through 33 levels with a very simple goal: put the squared block through the hole at the end of each stage.

Using your arrow keys, you’ll have to move the block making it fall on its sides or its ends until you reach the hole. You’ll have to calculate each movement carefully so as not to fall over the edge. Some other obstacles you’ll find are switches to activate bridges, fragile tiles that won’t stand too much pressure and special teleporting switches that will split your block into two pieces. Are you ready to take the challenge?