There are many good reasons to have a list of what movies you own. It can make it easier to choose a film to watch, give you film information and it provides a record of what you had in case they get stolen. I have wanted to catalog my movies for a long time in case they got stolen but did not get around to it as all DVD cataloging software I could find, was shareware and costed money. Besides, I thought I had a good idea of what I had.

Last year my fears came true, I had my entire collection of 400 DVD’s taken from my house. I was lucky as later in the evening, some were found in pawn shops and on the people who carried out the crime, the rest could not be tracked down.

Insurance covered a certain amount of the DVD’s which had vanished, in the form of a voucher. I created a list of the DVD’s from the pawn slips and included the ones I received that night from the cops. Then I headed to the shop to replenish my collection. I thought I would have a good chance of buying the same DVD’s that had been stolen. I ended up not really having a clue, and instead I ended up purchasing a whole heap of DVD’s that were different to what I previously owned, and then ended up missing badly. If only I had a comprehensive list of DVD’s before the series of unfortunate events happened.

This article will show you the Ant Movie Catalog. There are two parts to the software. One part is the editor, which does not look all that great, but it does work. Secondly is the Ant Movie Viewer, which you can see a screenshot of in the picture above. It looks nice and does what I want. Best of all, it is the only free DVD catalog software that I have found which is worth using.

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The open-source community has done it again with another spectacular piece of software. Audacity is an audio editing/recording software package for your computer which can be as simple or complex as you would like.

At one stage of my life, I was right into using fancy audio software, using Cakewalk, Vegas and Pro Tools to record bands in my loft. I would then use Sound Forge to edit the individual tracks, spending hours on each song to get it right for a release. All of these pieces of software are good, but they are not cheap, costing much more than they really should.

Times have changed, and now all I want is a program that is easy to use and that works well. Audacity is the program for me, as not only will it do everything I want from an audio editor, it is free.

It can as easy to use as loading it up and pressing the record button to record either sounds you hear on your computer, or audio from an external source. It is an ideal application for converting your vinyl to a digital format. Windows sound recorder looks pathetic next to Audacity.

Audacity can also be used for more advanced tasks such as multi-track recording, allowing you to record multiple tracks at once. There are a huge range of special effects you can add to your tracks which are all easy to use and understand. It even shows wave forms as they are created in real time. 

Over the coming days, I will be using Audacity in many of the How-To articles as it is the best tool to use for what we are trying to achieve.

The program itself is very small and runs very fast. Available from SourceForge.

For a long time, Adobe Acrobat Writer was the only way to make PDF files. This was expensive and only worth buying if you wanted to make bulk PDF documents. It is important to use PDF files where possible, because somewhere down the line, they became a standard and they give your documents that professional touch. The documents are also compressed making emailing of them a little quicker.

PDF Creator is another SourceForge project which allows you to make PDF files for free. This has also been around for a number of years now but is not all that well known.

Once you install it, to make a PDF file from any number of document creation programs, such as Microsofts Office Suite, select “Print” from the “File Menu” and select the PDF printer. This will spit you out a nice compatible PDF file, or a number of other tasks such as sending it to someone via email. 

There are many options allowing you to make the document look just as you would like it. This is an essential piece of software that every Windows Machine should not be without.

Download it from SourceForge.

Remember the games and applications we used to use constantly? Many of these have been abandoned by their manufacturer and released to the public domain free of charge. This is because they are no longer making the company any money and the company no longer wants to support the product. The result is that some of these games and applications can be freely distributed.

Because of this, the term “Abandonware” started. There are a whole heap of games that were made before 2000 that can now be downloaded and played for free.

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It is always nice to sit back to listen to an album of your favourite band, with a bit of moving visual stimulation added to set the mood. The visualisations that come with Windows Media Player which have not been updated in years, just don’t cut it. There has been one visualisation program which has stood out over the years.

Introducing R4 from Rabidhamster. The effects and colours of R4 are stunning and there are enough transition effects to always use this program as you will always see new combinations, to keep it interesting. The music detection is really solid, you can notice how R4 responds to a drum beats. It is highly configurable and works really well over multiple monitors as you can see from the screenshots. The package runs really smoothly and you don’t need a really fancy video card.

R4 was originally released as a Winamp plug-in, with the addition of a stand alone program to work with other media players. With other players becoming more and more popular over Winamp, this allows it to remain relevant as it will detect sound and music from any media player we have on our computer. There is a minor scroller on visualisations saying that this version is not for commercial use. It is subtle. The good thing about this scroller is that it shows R4 was designed for commercial endeavours such as night clubs.

I installed this in Vista and a few things worked differently to how they did in XP. I was able to run programs over the top of R4 and always have the Start Bar visible. It was working very much as a screen background apart from hidden desktop icons. R4 would be a reasonable Dreamscene replacement if you are not an Ultimate user.

Available for free from rabidhamster.org.