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.

I am currently working on two machines, one running Windows XP and the other Vista. I want to share documents between these machines, and I also want any changes I make on either one of the machines, to instantly appear on the other. I have chosen to use my Windows XP machine as my main computer because I like the way it is set up. My XP machine has my entire document collection organised neatly. What I want to do is get to these documents from my Vista machine without manually needing to copy them across or constantly mapping network drives. I want to be able to access my documents by opening “My Documents” on my XP machine, and “Documents” on my Vista machine, with both of these folders pointing to the same location.

This article will show you how to synchronise your “My Documents” folder from your Windows XP computer to your “Documents” folder in Windows Vista. Synchronising your “My Documents” is particularly useful if you have a desktop and a laptop. You can take your documents from your desktop with you on the road with your laptop. This is also suitable if you have multiple computers in your home and would like the documents to be the same on all machines, so you are not fighting with your family over which computer you need to use as all the computers will have your documents.

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Media Portal has been around for a few years now, put together by a group of passionate volunteers. Media Portal is an open-source(free) home theatre software solution, allowing you to play music, movies and pictures all from its tidy and easy to navigate interface.

The team has come a long way since the early days of coding this program. There are now many more features, support for many more TV tuner cards, as well as being much more stable. In my case, the Media Portal software allowed me to do more with my TV tuner card than the manufacturer supplied drivers and software.

Media Portal is similar to Windows Media Center (WMC), but the coders are striving to make it better and more desirable than WMC. Media Portal has much more to offer than WMC, as it can be customised to suite your needs, allowing you to change the entire appearance to suit your lifestyle. You can also install plug-ins giving you any number of extra features not already part of the Media Portal package itself such as weather reports and stock information. Did I mention, it is free.

A few of the features Media Portal offers are:

• Fully skinable interface so you can change the appearance.
• Watch TV, Movies, Pictures
• Listen to CD’s, MP3’s and many other types of audio.
• With a TV tuner card in your computer, you can watch TV with time-shifting(pause live TV) and schedule recording of TV shows. You can even watch shows while another is recording in the background
• Load TV guides
• Play games
• Search the web
• Install plug-ins to do all sorts of fun stuff
• etc

Inspect My Gadget highly recommends that you get yourself a copy of Media Portal and give it a try. If you connect your television and stereo to your PC, you will be able to take full advantage of this fine piece of software. 

Media Portal is updated frequently and is available from team-mediaportal.com.

I run multiple computers in my home and I also have one in the office. I often get frustrated that I don’t have the same favourites with me everywhere I go so I have come up with this method to synchronise my machines so that I have the same favourites with me, wherever I am and whichever machine I am on.

I have recently upgraded to Vista, so now I want to receive the same favorites on my Vista machine as I did on my XP machines. The majority of this document is the same as my article “How-to: Synchronise your IE favorites between two windows XP computers” with a change at the end for Vista. If you have already completed the mentioned article, you should be able to complete this How-to in around 2 minutes. It is much easier to make this work within Vista than it was with XP. Skip down to recipient PC.

In this article I will use offline files to ensure that the favourites are the same on both machines. This method is not simple but it is the best solution I have found. This method does require a minor registry hack and also removes network security from your favourites (not that security is all that important for favourites).

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I run multiple computers in my home and I also have one in the office. I often get frustrated that I don’t have the same favourites with me everywhere I go so I have come up with this method to synchronise my machines so that I have the same favourites with me, wherever I am and whichever machine I am on.

In this article I will use offline files to ensure that the favourites are the same on both machines. This method is not simple but it is the best solution I have found. This method does require minor registry hack and also removes network security from your favourites (not that security is all that important for favourites).

Read the rest of this entry »