Recently I had to transcode a batch of music from one format to another. A friend of mine recommended MediaCoder, a free media conversion utility for Windows XP and up.

At first boot the interface looks daunting, but newer versions have apparently made the transcoding process much easier. When MediaCoder starts, it opens a web form in Internet Explorer which guides you through a set up wizard. This wizard asks simple questions regarding what you would like to convert and how you would like to convert it. When you’re done, the application itself pops up behind IE and goes to work. Users who would rather dive right in to the application are free to do so without having to go through the wizard. MediaCoder supports such audio formats as MP3, Vorbis, AAC, FLAC, WMA, and RealAudio. It supports video in H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG, Theora, WMV, and virtually anything else you can think of. It gives you full control over how you format your media. Among the options you can change are the target bitrate, the number of audio channels, and whether you would like your video to be cropped. There are also predefined templates available for certain devices. For example, if you want to convert a video to an iPod-compatible .mp4, you open up an iPod template, set the desired quality level, and watch MediaCoder go to work. It will resize and re-encode the videos automatically, so all you have to do is move them to your device. All in all, it’s a very cool utility for transcoding anything from an mp3 file to a full length 1080p movie.

Do you need to create a PDF file, but don’t want to drop a small bundle on Adobe Acrobat?

You might want to try PDF995, a great free program that lets you create PDFs from within any application. Creating PDFs is quick and easy with PDF995. You just select the “print” command from any application and choose PDF995 as your printer. It only takes a few minutes to create a PDF version of your document that can be viewed on any computer with a PDF viewer. The free version of PDF995 displays a sponsor page in your web browser each time you run it, but it’s only a minor distraction. If you would prefer not to see the sponsor page, you can upgrade to the full version for only $9.95.

DropBox is a very simple and easy to use website for uploading files.

Any types of files can be uploaded and transferred to any person in the world. Just upload your file, and a link will be generated for the uploaded file. Along with the link, it contains 3 “recipient” email address fields. The downloadable link is then sent to the Recipients. There is provision for giving a short message to the Recipients. No registration is required for uploading and downloading files. Files size can vary from 1KB – 10GB. User who want to send more files can become premium user to access more facilities.

How many times have you downloaded an ISO image files (typically huge installation files) for software and looking for a CD/DVD for burning them so that you can use them for installation.

This is the issue which Daemon Tools solves for you. Daemon Tools is one of the best optical media emulation software applications for Microsoft Windows. With Daemon Tools one can create virtual disks from variety of image files and make them work similar to an optical disk drive. It mimics itself as an optical drive and enables a user to install software from the virtual disk or back up physical CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray discs into “virtual discs”. Daemon Tools Lite is available as a free download and the latest version is 4.30.4 which even supports Windows 7. The free version is meant for personal and non-commercial use. The new version supports advanced image protection and compression features.

Reporting is the major task for any enterprise, which needs frequent reports for its day-to-day activities.

In older days going through the records of their transactions, which were very tedious task, generated the report manually. Jasper Reporting Engine is a powerful open source Java Reporting tool that has the ability to deliver content on screen to the printer or into the PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV and XML files. The reports can also be published to the web sever. Generates many types of charts in GIF format that can be customized. Creates dynamic charts and it has provisions to upload the reports and charts to web. Creates page oriented ready to print document in a simple and flexible manner. This system was developed keeping in mind the future possibilities in technology and addition of utilizes. This program is highly user friendly with the usage of menus and description.

Synergy is an application that allows you to share a mouse, keyboard, screensaver and clipboard between multiple computers.

If you have more than one computer, each with its own monitor, you can install synergy as a server on one computer and as a client on the others. After a simple configuration you’ll be able to move your mouse to the edge of one monitor and it will enter the monitor of another computer. You can then use your keyboard as well as copy and paste text between the computers. The screensavers for all computers will also activate together. If you have a password set to unlock the screensaver you only need enter the password on one computer to unlock the screen on all of them. Synergy runs on several variants of Unix, Windows 95 through XP and Mac OS X. Best of all, it is distributed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE and available as a free download.