Software : Downloads: Download of the day: Paint.NET

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• Downloads: Download of the day: Paint.NET
• Round up: The best free music player 2016
• Round up: The best free photo editor 2016

Downloads: Download of the day: Paint.NET Posted: Download of the day: Paint.NET Paint.NET is an incredibly advanced free photo editor. It includes layers, filters, advanced color adjustments and a wealth of automatic tools for retouching and perfecting your pictures. Paint.NET includes all the essential tools you need to get your pictures looking great, including automatic red eye removal, a clone stamp for removing blemishes, and one-click optimization of levels, brightness and contrast. Alternatively, if you'd rather get hands-on, its advanced options give you complete manual control – the choice is yours. Why you need it With Paint.NET you can sharpen unfocused images, remove noise, fine-tune colors, smooth, crop and zoom to achieve professional-looking results. There's also a powerful magic wand tool for selecting and editing areas of similar colors, dramatic zoom blur effects, and a unique 3D perspective tool. Paint.NET's interface will be familiar to anyone who's used Adobe Photoshop or other premium photo editors, but it's intuitive enough for complete newcomers to grasp quickly. All the common tools are presented as icons in panel on the left, with filters and other adjustments in simple drop-down menus along the top. Once your photos are looking good, you can get creative with Instagram-style vintage effects using the vignette and sepia filters to give a retro look. Paint.NET also supports user-created plugins, which add even more filters and functions. We're particularly fond of the Liquify extension, which lets you warp images just like the Photoshop tool of the same name and is ideal for fine-tuning portrait photos. Best of all, Paint.NET records every change you make in a list that's only limited by the space on your hard drive, and lets you undo and redo as many changes as you want at any time. Key features Layers Automatic photo-enhancing tools Plugins and extra filters Unlimited undo list Works on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 Price Free

Round up: The best free music player 2016 Posted: The best free MP3 software for Windows The best free music player All music libraries are different, and a dedicated music player can help you get the most out of yours. If you're still using a general purpose media player, you're missing out on a wealth of features that can make organizing, expanding and enjoying your music a breeze. A clear winner emerged in our tests, but the other four options are all superb in their own right and well worth a look – especially if your music collection is fairly small, or you really need software that can handle video as well. 1. MusicBee Easy to use and feature-packed – easily the best free player around MusicBee is a music player created for serious music lovers and includes everything you need to manage and enjoy your collection, no matter how large (it's reportedly handled a library of over 500,000 tracks without a hiccup). Switching to MusicBee is easy. The first time it runs, the app scans your PC for music and lets you import your files from Windows Media Player or iTunes. Tracks are catalogued, but aren't moved unless you've checked that option under Library Preferences so there'll be no surprises. Once your songs are imported, tagging them is a piece of cake; simply hit Shift+Enter to open the tag editor and go to work. MusicBee's automatic tagging is superb, but you can update each track's metadata yourself using industry-standard tags for each file format. As in Windows Media Player, adding artwork is as simple as copying and pasting, and it isn't limited to the album cover – you can also add pictures of the artist, lead singer, band logo, and photos from live performances. These additional pictures are used throughout the player as navigation aids, and as visualizations while tracks are playing. MusicBee also searches for song lyrics to display as each track plays. The player is designed to make the most of your PC's hardware, including top-end soundcards and surround-sound setups, with upmixing for stereo sound. Continuous playback eliminates silences between tracks (ideal for Pink Floyd fans), and you can choose to add silences or fades, normalize volume, and experiment with the equalizer. MusicBee is also great for streaming from internet radio stations and listening to podcasts, and supports both SoundCloud and Last.fm. You can even link it to VLC Media Player to stream video podcasts. The player supports almost every audio format around and converting files is simplicity itself, with presets for different playback devices (though for MP3 encoding you'll need to download the LAME codec). If all of that isn't enough, there's even an Android app for controlling MusicBee remotely, and support for WinAmp plugins. You won't find a more comprehensive free music player, and although it's not open source, it's completely free to use and tinker with for personal use. 2. AIMP A well-designed app to manage even the messiest music library Like all the best free music players, AIMP makes organizing your songs a breeze – even if your collection is currently a sprawling, disorganized mess of tracks in different formats and locations, with incomplete or missing metadata. Your AIMP library can be built using files from multiple directories and ripped from CDs, with automatic track numbering and tag filling to help you get it in shape. AIMP supports a huge number of formats, and additional encoders are available as user-created add-ons. Most music player extensions are extra visualizations and skins that, although cool, have little practical use. By contrast, AIMP's plugins include some real gems. Some of the highlights are a YouTube extension that lets you build playlists from multiple videos, an add-on for streaming music from a SoundCloud account, and an extension for controlling AIMP remotely via a web browser. The app also features some unusual built-in tools, including an alarm clock function that starts playing at a certain time, a wind-down setting that shuts down your PC at the end of a playlist, and a voice remover for making your own karaoke tracks. It's not as feature-filled as MusicBee, but its thoughtful design and carefully curated feature-set earn it a respectable second place. 3. MediaMonkey Great automated tagging and organization for a hands-off approach MediaMonkey plays and organizes both music and video, and unlike some dual-purpose media players, it does an excellent job of both. It identifies tracks with missing metadata and searches for the information online, and like MusicBee, its superb tagging tool lets you tag files using industry-standard formats. You can also tag music during playback, which is a great option that avoids the need to preview snippets of tracks before labelling them with a mood or genre to generate playlists. MediaMonkey organizes your musiclibrary in a logical hierarchy, and its File Monitor ensures everything is kept up to date as you add, edit and remove files. It works well, but if you want total manual control you'll need to install a third-party plugin. As a slightly trimmed-down version of a premium product, MediaMoney's interface has a little more gloss than its open-source competitors, but at the expense of some features. The paid-for Gold version includes a party mode that locks the interface to prevent guests messing with your carefully curated playlist, built-in conversion for TVs and mobile devices, and MP3 encoding for ripped CDs. None are essential, but their absence pushes MediaMonkey's free music player to third place. 4. foobar2000 A modular music player and manager suited to small collections foobar2000's advanced tagging tool makes light work of cleaning up a messy library, with options including batch processing, automatic metadata completion and track numbering, and copying and pasting data between fields. This free music player will look up metadata for untagged tracks when you rip an audio CD, and can identify and erase duplicated tracks. foobar2000's library doesn't update in real time, but it can detect changes and remove dead links. foobar2000 supports all common audio formats, and includes a Quick Convert tool with various presets and options for creating your own profiles. If you encounter a file that it can't open, extra codecs are available as user-created plugins, which are installed via the Preferences menu. Rather than flashy skins, foobar2000 features a customizable modular interface that gives you the information you want in a format that's convenient for you. Modules include album art, search box, playlist manager and various visualizations, with optional tabs for easier navigation. Custom layouts can be saved as themes for future use, and you can experiment with different settings using a built-in scratchbox. All in all, foobar2000 is an extremely lightweight and adaptable option that suits smaller music libraries. 5. VLC Media Player Primarily a video app, but also a capable free music player Open source VLC Media Player is best known for its video-handling chops, but it's also a superb music manager that can play almost any format without installing any additional codecs – and convert between them, too. VLC can also stream music from a local network or the internet, including internet radio stations, which you can set up as a playlist for quick access. Managing your music is easy – just drag files and directories into the Media Library, and VLC Media Player will sort them all into folders. You can organize tracks by album, artists, genre of any other metadata, and use the built-in search tool to find the song you want. VLC also supports extensions. Most of these are designed to optimize video playback, but a few – including ones for silencing ads on internet radio stations – are specifically for music-lovers. VLC is lightweight and works happily on all versions of Windows from XP onwards. Versions for Mac, Linux, Android and iOS are also available. If you're looking for a single app to handle both music and video then it's hard to beat, but for music alone, the dedicated tools above will serve you better.

Round up: The best free photo editor 2016 Posted: Best free photo editing software The best free photo editor With phone cameras now ubiquitous, we're taking and sharing more photos than ever. But even the best phone camera is likely to produce a dud or two, and even the best shot could stand to be better. Photo editing, then, shouldn't be the sole reserve of those who can afford to stump up the cash for a subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud. And no, Microsoft Paint or Apple Preview won't cut it: you deserve more than mere cropping or a few sliders to tweak. So we've overhauled our list for 2016, and selected the very best free photo editors you can download, ranging from fully-featured Photoshop clones to simple, easy to use ways to add filters and effects to your favourite snaps. These are by no means the only free options, though; if we've missed one of your favourites, let us know in the comments below. 1. GIMP Silly name, exceptional photo-editing software The elder statesperson of free photo editing, GIMP is the most full-featured cross-platform Photoshop competitor going, and gets our vote as the best free photo editor. It's not without its crashes and glitches – that's the too-many-cooks open source development philosophy in action – and it lacks the polish of its commercial rivals. Some of the filters, in particular, seem as if they haven't been touched since it was first released 20 years ago. That said, if you're looking for a desktop free photo editor ready for just about any task, GIMP is it. Its interface will be immediately familiar to Photoshop users, particularly if you switch on the highly recommended single window mode, and it's still in active development, so new features and filters are regularly added. There's also a plug-in repository to extend Gimp's range (although it's not been updated for a while). We'd recommend grabbing the stable version, but don't overlook the development build if you want to try some new features. 2. Paint.NET Basic photo editing with layers, filters and plug-ins Sometimes it pays not to be overloaded with bells and whistles. Paint.NET's simplicity is one of its key features; it leaves it a fast, easy to operate free photo editor that's perfect for those little tasks that don't need the sheer power of GIMP. Don't be fooled by the name, though. This isn't just a clone of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint – though it was originally intended to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve. Interface-wise it's reminiscent of its namesake, but as it's grown Paint.NET has added essential editing tools like layers, an undo history, a raft of filters, numerous community-created plugins, and a 3D rotate/zoom function that's useful for recompositing images. Yes, it's lacking in certain areas, but if your machine is lacking in power or RAM we can't think of a better choice. 3. PhotoScape A simple, unusual editor that can handle more than just photos PhotoScape is, ostensibly, a rather simple free photo editor. But one glance at its main menu reveals a wealth of features: RAW conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd (but useful) function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper. The meat, of course, is in the photo editing. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features. We'd definitely point this towards the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are functional and not at all beginner-like, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap. Steer clear of the rest of the tools, though: you'll find better elsewhere. 4. Google Nik Collection A professional-level filter selection, now made free Google's unending determination to corner just about every market sometimes pays dividends for the pincher of pennies. Take its purchase of German developer Nik in 2012, for example - its Nik Collection photo editor plugin range retailed for US$500 at the time, and in early 2016 Google decided to do away with the price tag and release the powerful collection for free. We suspect support and updates might be somewhat limited going forward, but this does enable you to bag seven quality photo-editing tools as-is: lens and film emulator Analog Efex; colour corrector Color Efex; monochrome converter Silver Efex; noise reducer Dfine; selective colour tweaker Viveza; and Sharpener and HDR Efex, which speak for themselves. These are perfect free plugins if you're already using Photoshop, and you can add them to compatible host applications when you install them, but they can also be run as standalone photo editors if you hunt down their executable files. They won't appear in your list of Windows apps - you need to look in C:\\Program Files\Google\Nik Collection. To edit a photo, drag it onto the EXE file of your chosen editor. It's a strange system, but it works! 5. Pixlr High-end photo editing – and quick filtering – in your browser An ad-supported online photo editor, Pixlr comes in two flavours: Editor, the more equipped package; and Express, perfect for applying quick fixes without the bloat of the bigger package. It's actually the online editor we tend to gravitate towards, both because of its clean, modern dark interface and because of its efficiency even on systems without much processor muscle. Some of Pixlr Editor's tools, particularly the filters, can be a bit tricky to use because you're not given a proper preview, but the results – when you do eventually get the sliders right – are almost always satisfactory. With support for layers, masks, and a fullscreen mode which means it might as well be a full-on desktop app, Editor (pictured) is a consistently pleasant tool to use. And don't discount Express; a bit of low-effort clicking can really make a huge difference to your photos. 6. Fotor Overall photo enhancement in an easy-to-use package Fotor is a photo enhancer first and foremost, more than it is a photo editor; if there's specific area of retouching you need doing with, say, the clone brush or healing tool, you're out of luck. But it includes a stack of high-end filters that really do shine. There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant colour tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools. Fotor's most brilliant function, and one that's sorely lacking in many photo editing packages, is its batch processing tool – feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand. 7. Vintager Give your photos a quick, classic film look Instagram, eh? Not only has it been an inexplicable social media hit, it's created a love of fancy photo filters the world over. For that classic vintage look on Windows you can't do much better than free photo editor Vintager, a haven of filters, borders, layers and lens-glint bokehs to make your hastily-fired shots seem like they were meant to look that way. It looks simple on the surface, with a straightforward interface which gives you quick access to filters and overlays, but there's a bit more muscle in here. You can adjust highlights and shadows, muck about with the colour balance of your shots, and even dive into curves and levels. There's also a very handy photo collage mode in which you can compile up to five individually tweaked shots into a single whole. Vintager is probably not going to be your primary photo-processing tool – there are others which do all this and more besides – but for a dead simple way to add flair to photos before uploading them there's not much better. 8. Sumo Paint Powerful in-browser editing, but fewer tools than we'd like Sumo Paint is powerful, no doubt about it. It's a full-featured photo editor that sits in your browser, with various artistic tools and paintbrushes thrown in for good measure. Perhaps its range of polygonal shapes and symmetry tools won't suit being plastered over your photographs, but it's high on the list of options if you're looking more on the creative end of things. There are sacrifices to be made, though. Notably the appropriately sumo wrestler-sized ads that eat up your screen space, and the slight performance hit you'll get from running it in-browser. If you want to get rid of the ads or run it on your desktop, stump up for a US$4 (about £3, AU$5.) subscription. We struggle to recommend it too highly on this basis – while Sumo Paint does have a few tricks up its sleeve, the real magic can be found in plenty of other free apps. 9. IrfanView An image-viewer with added batch editing and conversion Tiny, speedy and relatively unique, IrfanView does things that others don't. Utterly free in the classic, non-laden-with-adverts sense, it's predominantly an image viewer. Given its compact size it's perfect in that role, launching quickly and unfussily and making it easy to flick through a stack of snaps quickly. But it's not limited just to showing you your pictures. IrfanView does batch processing and format conversion very well – we keep it around for that reason alone. It's also useful for screen capturing, and includes support for Adobe Photoshop filters. That means you can use it as a host for, for example, Google's Nik Collection, or any other free filters you might find. Its direct editing tools are reasonably limited and the internal filters aren't particularly stellar or exciting, but give it a try and we're sure you'll find your own reason to keep IrfanView installed. 10. On1 Effects 10 Free Selective filtering for advanced photo effects The 'free' suffix offers some indication of what you're getting here: On1 Effects 10 Free is a cut-down version of On1 Effects 10 proper, pulling out just a limited selection of its filters. But we're still happy to recommend it, mainly because of its methodology. Instead of being forced to apply an effect to a full image, you can use On1's Perfect Brush tool to smear that effect on the areas you're interested in enhancing, which is a great way to create a unique look. Its quick mask and refine brush tools also make masking off areas of your image particularly easy, so you can make elements pop. Essentially this is an taster for the full version, but its diminished filter range – HDR, vignette, vintage, glow etc – is still useful and worth trying if you're after vibrant effects; you'll have to try another program for sharpening, blurring and noise reduction, so On1 Effects Free isn't great if you want to preserve the honesty of your photos.

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