Software : Sonos teams up with Bandcamp to DJ your next house party

---

• Sonos teams up with Bandcamp to DJ your next house party
• Round up: The best free accounting software 2016
• Editor's pick: How mindmapping app FreeMind can help you plan the ultimate road trip

Sonos teams up with Bandcamp to DJ your next house party Posted: Sonos, the makers of the excellent multi-room speakers, is making it easier to keep the music going at home. The latest beta update for Android, Mac, and Windows simplifies music selection and queuing. Sorry iOS users; you'll have to wait for these new features. The update allows you to start any song from an album, playlist or queue and Sonos will continue playing whatever's next in the track list. No more abrupt stops in your music flow. The update also tweaks how you select a song to play. Previously you had to tap on a song and then select "Play Now" or "Play Next," but the updated app allows you to simply tap once to play. If you're using the Mac or Windows control apps, you double click to play a track. To make sure your tunes never stop, Sonos made it much easier to queue up songs. Instead of tapping on the song title to see listening options, there's now a menu button (three dots) that appears to the right of each track. Tapping on the menu button shows options for "Play Now," "Play Next," or "Add to End of Queue." No need to jump back and forth. The minor interface tweaks continue with options for "Play All" and "Shuffle" being relocated at the top of Albums and Playlists. Want to listen to an entire album? Simply tap "Play All." If you're bored of the playlist order, tap "Shuffle." Indie grooves Last but not least, Sonos announced it's adding Bandcamp to the list of supported music services. If you're not familiar, Bandcamp is an awesome marketplace for independent music artists. Musicians set their own prices and can sell merchandise alongside their music. It's a great place to discover music that's not in the Top 40. Sonos now lets Bandcamp users stream their purchases for convenience, but also supports downloads, even in lossless formats like FLAC. Bandcamp joins big names like Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, Soundcloud, and Tidal on Sonos. Which is the best music streaming service for you?

Round up: The best free accounting software 2016 Posted: The best free accounting software Free accounting for home businesses Whether you're a freelancer or a flautist, a graphic designer or a greengrocer, if you're running any kind of business you really need some kind of software to stay on top of things - as we discovered, the age-old system of chucking everything into a drawer and panicking at tax return time isn't the best. But that doesn't mean you need to invest huge sums or learn something hopelessly complicated. The best free accounting software is easy to use and enables you to see how well you're doing and who owes you money. 1. GnuCash A simple, open source approach to bookkeeping GnuCash is designed for individuals and small businesses, and was initially conceived as an open source alternative to apps such as Intuit's Quicken. It's available for Linux, GNU, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Android, OS X and Windows, and it's been kicking around since the late 1990s - but the most recent update was just last month. It handles invoicing and credit notes, accounts payable and receivable, employee expenses and some payroll features too, and it's quite happy with multiple currencies, cards and accounts. Its sheer flexibility makes it our top choice when it comes to accounting software for kitchen table businesses. 2. Money Manager Ex Straightforward enough for home use, as well as small businesses Another superb open source tool, Money Manager Ex is well designed and packed with enough features to rival premium software. It's easy to understand, and you'll have your accounts and transactions set up in no time. Money Manager Ex's simplicity makes it a particularly good choice for sole traders or your own home finances. It's a portable app, so you can save and use it straight from a USB stick without installing it. There's even an Android app for updating your accounts on the move. 3. TurboCASH A heftier accounting tool that will suit owners of SMBs TurboCASH is a free accounting app that's been in continuous development since April 1985, and it's hugely popular in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. It's available in 23 languages and boasts an online community of more than 100,000 users. Designed for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), it's probably a bit much for freelancers or sole traders, but if you need something a bit more useful than a cash book TurboCASH can handle VAT, debtors and creditors, purchase orders, multiple companies and multiple users. 4. Wave Slick online accounting that works well for freelancers With more than two million users, Wave is one of the most successful online accounting services - and it's completely free for accounting, invoicing and receipts, although if you want personal technical support you'll need to pay for it. Payroll isn't included in the free service either, and you do get the odd advert - just as you do with pretty much any free online service. It's a very well designed and carefully thought out application, and while it's probably a little basic for medium sized businesses it's a good option for sole traders, freelancers and small firms. 5. NCH Express Invoice Generate forms, invoices, quotes and orders in moments With versions for PC, Mac, iPad and Android, NCH Express Invoice caters for most kinds of businesses - and if you have fewer than five members of staff, you can have it for free without time limits or other restrictions. It's designed to create invoices, quotes and orders easily, to automate recurring ones and to send them by email or fax, and there's a decent range of reports to pore over. The app is really just a front-end for a web-based service, but that's no bad thing unless your business struggles to get a decent internet connection. 6. VT Cash Book Minimalist bookkeeping that uses Excel for the grunt work It's not going to win any awards for aesthetics, but VT Cash Book isn't there to look good: its priority is to record day to day cash transactions with the least amount of fuss. It uses Autocomplete to speed up data entry, supports multiple bank accounts and bank reconciliation, can be used to prepare VAT returns and enables you to create profit and loss, balance sheets and ledgers. It installs alongside its companion program, the paid-for VT Transaction+, but you don't need to buy the latter to use the former. 7. Invoice Expert A good option for anyone selling physical products The free version of Invoice Expert is limited to 100 customers/products, but it retains the features of its US$69.95 (about £52.46, AU$92.14) sibling including inventory and customer management, invoicing and quoting, purchase orders and inventory management. It's a little bit intimidating at first glance, especially in the template-editing screens, but it's straightforward enough. It's an American program but it uses your Windows location to set the currency, so it should adjust itself accordingly. 8. Adminsoft Accounts A complete money-management toolkit for small business owners These days genuine freeware - that is, software that's given away for free without adverts, bundled software or ulterior motives - is a rare thing, but it describes AdminSoft Accounts: more than 300,000 people have taken advantage of what is a surprisingly thorough accounting system (and an unusually honest set of terms and conditions). It can handle not just invoicing and statements but remittance advices, stock control, purchase orders, budgeting and some HR functions too. It's a UK program so the default is pounds sterling, but it works happily in other currencies too. 9. QuickFile Free small business accounting in the cloud - no software needed Designed specifically for non-accountants, QuickFile offers free tiers for small businesses while still delivering automatic invoicing, purchase receipt management, quotations and multi-currency support. It's cloud-based rather than a software download, and if you like the free version you can upgrade to an ad-free, more advanced version with bulk invoicing, revision history and a host of power user features for £45 (about US$60, AU$79) plus tax per year. 10. Apache OpenOffice Make your own accounting sheets using the free office suite You don't necessarily need a dedicated accounting program, especially if your requirements are pretty straightforward. For many businesses and sole traders, all you really need is a simple spreadsheet - and with a price tag of zero, OpenOffice fits the bill nicely. It's well worth browsing the library of templates once you've downloaded the main app, as there are plenty of user-created templates that you can easily tweak to suit your own specific requirements - not just for accounting, but for other common business tasks too.

Editor's pick: How mindmapping app FreeMind can help you plan the ultimate road trip Posted: Plan a road trip with FreeMind Plan the ultimate road trip with FreeMind Road trips take a lot of organization - as well as planning the major waypoints on your journey, you also need to consider driving times, places to stay, activities, what to bring and (perhaps most importantly) how to allocate your budget. Rather than writing everything out as a series of disconnected lists, creating a mindmap, or spider diagram, will help you think laterally, link ideas and get a lot of information in a small space. Free mindmapping software FreeMind will help you get everything on one page, without the hassle of pens and paper. Every mindmap in FreeMind begins as a blank page, with a single central label. Each label that branches off this one is called a node, and these are arranged in a hierarchy: parent, sibling and child. You can add new child nodes by tapping 'Insert' and create new sibling nodes by tapping 'Enter'. Start by listing the places you're planning to visit on your trip as child nodes from the central point, then create child nodes for each location for activities and places you're interested in. You can then prioritize the activities for each location. You could also create nodes between locations showing how long it'll take to drive from one to the other, and add costs to each activity. Things might start to look confusing as your map grows, but you can temporarily collapse branches by clicking a parent node. Double-click the node to expand it again. You can also make things clearer by applying formatting - putting each node inside a bubble, applying colors or attaching icons from the menu on the left. Hold Shift and left-click to format nodes as a batch. Now create a new child node for the essentials that you need to pack, and any preparation required to get them ready. Once you've completed each of these tasks, you can mark with with a tick, chosen from the menu on the left. If you decide to reorganise your list, you can move nodes between branches, and even move branches to a more logical place by dragging and dropping. Other nodes will shift to make room. If two nodes are very similar, select both and link them via the Tools menu. You might also find it useful to make a list of background reading before you embark on your trip. Add a hyperlink using the Insert menu, then type a descriptive label for it. These could be links to maps, tourist information guides, hotel booking sites or anything else you think will come in handy. You can link to files on your PC in the same way - though you'll need to save your mindmap first. The MM file format can only be opened by FreeMind, so if you're planning to share your map consider installing PDF24 Creator, which can convert it to PDF format via FreeMind's Print menu. Mindmaps can be useful for all sorts of other projects, including weddings and house moves, as well as essays and even novels. Download FreeMind and give it a try before hitting the road.

You are subscribed to email updates from TechRadar: All latest Applications news feeds. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States