Best Free Audio Video and Graphics Programs4.552

BEST FREE AUDIO CONVERTER

Any Audio Converter – The name says everything, it converts audio files, WMV, MP4, WAV, WMA, OGG, AAC, MP3, M4A, MP2, etc. The interesting feature is that it can extract the audio track from video files such as AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, ASF.

Alternatives: - MediaCoder

BEST FREE AUDIO EDITING PROGRAM

Audacity – Open source audio editing and recording program, the best free on you can get. It is very easy to use and works on Mac OSX and Linux too.

Alternatives: - Wavosaur

BEST FREE SCREEN SESSION RECORDING UTILITY

CamStudio – Free screen session recorder, can record audio too, records to avi or swf files.

Alternatives: - Jing

BEST FREE CODEC PACK

Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) – Essential codec pack, no spyware, Media Player Classic included.

Alternatives: K-Lite

BEST FREE CODEC UTILITY

CodecInstaller – Analyzes your video or audio files, tell you which codecs are needed, finds codecs, installs or unistalls codecs from your system.

Alternatives: –

BEST FREE DVD RIPPING PROGRAM

DVD Shrink – This one is a classic, everybody knows it, some people even sell copies of it. A great tool for backing up your video DVDs.

Alternatives: DVD Decrypter

BEST FREE DVD AUTHORING PROGRAM

DVD Styler – Free DVD authoring tool, supports PAL and NTSC. Very easy to use, just drag and drop an mpeg file and make your video DVD. You can also make decent menus with it, even with audio. It also has a Linux version.

Alternatives: DVD Flick

BEST FREE AUDIO CD RIPPING PROGRAM

Exact Audio Copy – Great audio CD ripper, extracts your audio tracks from all kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI drives). Supports many output file formats, including flac through external encoders.

Alternatives: CDex

BEST FREE UNIVERSAL TRANSCODER

Format Factory – Universal transcoder, converts almost any video, audio and graphic file formats. Can also extract DVD Video to avi.

Alternatives: MediaCoder, SUPER

BEST FREE IMAGE EDITING PROGRAM

GIMP – The best freeware alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It’s an open source image editor, very powerful and quite stable.

Alternatives: - Inkscape

BEST FREE VIDEO PLAYER

KMPlayer – The best video player, versatile freeware media player that supports many video file formats and containers. It can also handle various types of subtitle files.

Alternatives: SMPlayer, VLC Media Player, KMPlayer, Zoom Player, GOM Player

BEST FREE IMAGE VIEWER

Picasa 3 – Fast and reliable image viewer, can open various file formats and also has some basic editing capabilities.

Alternatives: IrfanView, XnView, FastStone Image Viewer

BEST FREE VIDEO CONVERTER

MeGUI – Powerful video encoder, supports the best formats and encoders, great tutorials available.

Alternatives: AutoGK, StaxRip, XMedia Recode, HandBrake

BEST FREE AUDIO PLAYER

Songbird - open source music player, highly customizable, featuring last.fm scrobbling and many interesting add-ons.

Alternatives: - Foobar, Quintessential Player (QCD)

BEST FREE SCREEN CAPTURE UTILITY

PicPick - Great freeware all-in-one graphics tool for webmasters, designers, software developers or simple home users. It has a screen capture module, color picker, pixel ruler, image editor.

Alternatives: Screen Hunter Free, Screenshot Captor

BEST FREE VIDEO EDITING PROGRAM

Avidemux – Great open source editing program that supports almost any video file type. It’s also multiplatform, it has Linux, Windows and Mac OS X versions.

Alternatives: - ZS4, Jahshaka

BEST FREE COLOR IDENTIFIER

ColorCop – Helps you identify the colors on your screen and gives you the respective code for each color. Very useful for webmasters and designers. If you are using PicPick you don’t really need ColorCop because PicPick has a bult in color picker.

Alternatives: - Just Color Picker, Pixeur

BEST FREE AUDIO FILES TAG EDITOR

TagScanner – Complex tag editor that supports almost any audio file type you might think of.

Alternatives: - Mp3Tag

BEST FREE VECTOR GRAPHICS PROGRAM

Inkscape - great open source vector graphics editor, a free alternative to the expensive Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE SUBTITLE EDITOR

Aegisub – fabulous open source program, offers a huge range of advanced features, almost anything you might need to make good subtitles.

Alternatives: – Subtitle Workshop, Submagic

BEST FREE DVD SUBTITLES RIPPER

SubRip – Simple and easy to use open source program that can extract your DVD subtitles to .srt files. The program was not updated lately but it still is a solid freeware program.

Alternatives: –