Week 9: Editing Pictures

In this week’s class, we need to do module 3 which is about picture editing. The main software that we use to do this module is Adobe Photoshop CS3. It is a free software and we can download it from the internet. We do not have to install this software, we can just click on the icon to use it. Many of us stored this software in the pendrive. It is convenient for us to bring it anywhere that requires us.

We need to do a task that requires us to combine two pictures together and edit them so that they can fit together and convey a message to the viewer. I have edited two pictures that I think can be use to teach about vacation to my students. I can use this picture to teach writing skills to them as ask them to write about their recent vacations.

I have edited the pictures using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoscape. These are the pictures that I have edited for the task;

AFTER

BEFORE

I have inserted my picture into the Taj Mahal’s picture. I also edited it to be brighter. After that, I uploaded it into Photoscape and insert some writing to it. It is very enjoyable as I laugh at myself on how silly I look on the picture. But is a very knowledgeable experience as I now know how to edit pictures using these softwares.

All and all, as a future teacher, I can use these softwares to make teaching aids for my students later. It would be a great help to have this skills for the sake of myself as a future teacher and my future students.

Week 8: Module 1 Submission

In this week’s class, we need to submit Module 1 that we have commented on. We need to look over the tutorials inside the module and comments on it. We need to write whether there are missing steps, where to get the software, how to install it and anything that got to do with the tutorials. Even though module 1 was so thick, I manage to comment almost on every page of it.

We also received a new assignment which is Module 3. This module is mainly about audio editing. We need to use audio editing software such as Audacity in order to complete the module. I have heard about this software before and I also have used it to record and combine audio files. So it would be a great improvement for my knowledge in the future.

I wanted to share some audio editing softwares that we can get from the internet. All of these audio editing softwares are free.

Power Sound Editor

Power Sound Editor Free is a visual audio editing and recording software solution, which supports many advanced and powerful operations with audio data.

You can use Power Sound Editor Free to record your own music, voice, or other audio files, edit it, mix it with other audio or musical parts, add effects like Reverb, Chorus, and Echo, and burn it on a CD, post it on the World Wide Web or e-mail it.

mp3DirectCut

mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for compressed mp3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files for audio editing. Using Cue sheets, pause detection or Auto cue you can easily divide long files.

Music Editor Free

Music Editor Free (MEF) is a multi-award winning music editor software tool. MEF helps you to record and edit music and sounds. It lets you make and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

Wavosaur

Wavosaur is a free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing, processing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files. Wavosaur has all the features to edit audio (cut, copy, paste, etc.) produce music loops, analyze, record, batch convert. Wavosaur supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing. The program has no installer and doesn’t write in the registry. Use it as a free mp3 editor, for mastering, sound design.

Traverso DAW

Traverso DAW is a GPL licensed, cross platform multitrack audio recording and editing suite, with an innovative and easy to master User Interface. It’s suited for both the professional and home user, who needs a robust and solid DAW. Adding and removal of effects plugins, moving Audio Clips and creating new Tracks during playback are all perfectly safe, giving you instant feedback on your work!

Ardour

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

WavePad Sound Editor

WavePad Sound Editor lets you make and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction. WavePad works as a wav editor or mp3 editor but it also supports a number of other file formats including vox, gsm, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg and more.

Expstudio Audio Editor

Expstudio Audio Editor is a visual music file editor that has many different options and a multiple functionality to edit your music files like editing text files. With a given audio data it can perform many different operations such as displaying a waveform image of an audio file, filtering, applying various audio effects, format conversion and more.

Eisenkraut

Eisenkraut is a cross-platform audio file editor. It requires Java 1.4+ and SuperCollider 3. It supports multi-channel and multi-mono files and floating-point encoding. An OSC scripting interface and experimental sonagramme functionality are provided.

Ecawave

Ecawave is a simple graphical audio file editor. The user-interface is based on Qt libraries, while almost all audio functionality is taken directly from ecasound libraries. As ecawave is designed for editing large audio files, all processing is done direct-to-disk. Simple waveform caching is used to speed-up file operations. Ecawave supports all audio file formats and effect algorithms provided by ecasound libraries. This includes JACK, ALSA, OSS, aRts, over 20 file formats, over 30 effect types, LADSPA plugins and multi-operator effect presets.

Audiobook Cutter

Audiobook Cutter splits your MP3 audio books and podcasts in a fast and user friendly way. The split files can easily be used on mobile MP3 players because of their small-size. Their duration allows smooth navigation through the book. The split points are determined automatically based on silence detection.

LMMS

LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

Mp3Splt

Mp3Splt-project is a utility to split mp3 and ogg files selecting a begin and an end time position, without decoding. It’s very useful to split large mp3/ogg to make smaller files or to split entire albums to obtain original tracks. If you want to split an album, you can select split points and filenames manually or you can get them automatically from CDDB (internet or a local file) or from .cue files. Supports also automatic silence split, that can be used also to adjust cddb/cue splitpoints. You can extract tracks from Mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap files in few seconds.

Qtractor

Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 framework. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio, and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI, are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

There are many more audio editing softwares in the internet. Some of them are free and some need us to pay before we can use it. All and all, no matter what software we use, I hope that we can use it for a good reason.

Week 7: The Progress

In this week’s class, there were no lecture, but Puan Foziah wanted us to do the module given last week. She gave us the whole three hours to do the module. Everyone was so busy and focusing on their laptops or computers and I was one of them. Eventhough we were given three hours, it was still not enough to complete the module. There are lots more to be done.

There are softwares that really helpful in the module. For example; Internet Download Manager (IDM). It helps me to download movies, videos from the internet, programs, music, document and many more. Installing this software in my computer was one of the best things I ever done to my computers. It makes my life easier!

I want to share some of the download managers that you can get from the internet. These download managers are really useful and they are free!

Free Download Manager

This popular, free, open-source download manager speeds up the acquisition of multiple downloads by breaking the files into smaller pieces, then downloading these simultaneously. Trying it out, I found I was able to download several full-length movies in less time than it took me to find these legal downloads. In thirty minutes of dilatory browsing, using the default setting of no more than four concurrent downloads at a time, I managed to burden my hard drive with 488 megabytes' worth of material, including three full-length film classics, a dozen flash video files from YouTube, a handful of movie trailers, two music videos, and an old Mighty Mouse cartoon.

FDM will automatically resume interrupted downloads, and can download using Bittorrent in newer versions of Windows, though it will prompt you before enabling the peer-to-peer protocol. FDM will also alert you if it detects spyware or adware in a prospective download.

Orbit Downloader

It is based on p2p and multi-source downloading technology with more efficient mirrors selection algorithm for faster download. It's also devoted to the new generation web to make downloading any social media easy and fast.

Moreover, Orbit Downloader features Grab Pro to facilitate video download from sites using anti-leeching technology like YouTube, Pandora, etc. It also comes with a software updater but it might not be as good as the top pick reviewed in Best Free Software Update Monitor.

It integrates with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Maxthon, supports most streaming media protocols and file-sharing service websites, and includes other features such as general and tagged download

GetGo Download Manager

Apart from downloading various types of files, it also helps to download your favorite videos from YouTube and other websites with embedded FLV flash videos with one-click.

It integrates with IE and Firefox browsers. With the program, you can easily set up a batch download using an URL pattern template and rename downloaded files automatically using a filename pattern template. Other features such as download scheduler, resume broken downloads, managing downloaded files, etc., are included.

The program has optional Standard and Search toolbars in the user interface. Upon installation, it adds a GetGo Toolbar into your browser, but that can be disabled.

FlashGet

FlashGet download manager is also worth a try as it is designed for speed and management of downloaded files.

It increases the download speed by applying multi-server hyper-thread technology and supports HTTP, FTP, BT, eMule and other various protocols.

FlashGet provides download monitoring for Internet Explorer and also integrates well with Firefox's FlashGot extension. It supports unlimited categories for managing downloaded files.

Upon first running of the program after installation, it shows a 'recommended message' on the right panel, but that can be easily disabled.

Uget

Uget is a cross-platform program designed to be simple, lightweight and easy to use. It’s an open source application written in GTK+. Debian and RPM packages are readily available for download and installation, but for Windows users, the GTK+ runtime environment needs to install separately before running the program.

The program supports pause, resume and queue downloads, and classification of download files, monitors clipboard and integrates with Firefox browser via FlashGot plugin. Other features include batch download and import downloads from html files.

MultiGet

MultiGet is an open source and easy-to-use download manager for multi platforms including Windows and Linux. It runs on most desktops without any configuration.

The program accelerates the download by multi-tasking with multi-threading on multi servers and supports http/ftp protocols which meet the requirements of most users.

It provides management of downloaded files in a good GUI interface, monitors the clipboard well but does not integrate with browsers.

Other useful features include multi-language support, optional auto MD5 check and reconfiguring the thread number without stopping the current task.


There are more of these download managers, these are just some of them. I hope that we can put all of them to good use in our later class. I hope that these managers will make my life easier in the future.