Welcome back guys, I'm ThioJoe, and today we've got a bunch of cool free programs I
think you're going to like. All of them are at least Windows compatible, but some of them
should have versions for mac as well. You may have heard of some of them, but I'm sure
there are at least a few new ones that you'll be excited to hear about.
Now before we begin I want to give a big thanks to the sponsor of this video, Lastpass, which
I've actually been using myself for years. If you're not familiar, Lastpass is a password
manager that securely stores all your passwords for you, so you only have to remember one
master password. You'll never have to go through the trouble of looking for forgotten passwords,
or worry about being locked out of your accounts. And because it has a built in password generator,
you don't even have spend time coming up with strong passwords yourself. Lastpass basically
puts everything on autopilot, so you don't have to write, remember, or reset your passwords.
It keeps track of everything, so you can stay sane. Plus, it fills in the passwords on websites
for you, so you don't have to type them in. And like I said, this is the password manager
I've always used anyway, so you might consider this a bonus free program, and of course I'll
put a link in the description so be sure to check it out. And now, let's begin our list
of the other 10 free programs we're gonna talk about in this video.
Starting off, number 1 is a program called "Recuva", which allows you to recover files
on your hard drive that you've deleted, even if you emptied the recycle bin. So the name
is like a pun, Recuva, Recover... Yea anyway, the reason this works is when you "delete"
a file on your hard drive, or solid state drive, thumb drive, whatever, the file isn't
necessarily gone immediately. What actually happens is that block of space the file was
taking up has been "labelled" by the file system as free space, so it can be used for
something else. This means that even after a file has been "permanently deleted", a program
like Recuva can still look to see if the file is still there and potentially restore it.
Obviously the longer it's
been since the file was deleted, the more likely that something has partially or fully
overwritten it, so there's no guarantee the file isn't partially corrupted. But still,
theres no reason not to try, and this one has saved me some trouble more than once.
Next up, number 2, this one is great for anyone who wants a top notch professional video editor,
that is also free of course. And that is "Davinci Resolve", by the company blackmagic. For a
long time, this program has been one of the best color grading softwares out there, even
being used on films like X-Men and Tomorrowland. Though it was exclusively used for just color grading,
not editing. But now, they've completely revamped it, and made it into a full fledged editor
as well. There is a a paid "studio" version in addition to the free version, but it just
has extra features most people won't care about anyway. Now as you can imagine, a powerful
editor like this has a pretty steep learning curve, but I don't think it's any more difficult
than any other professional editor out there. It's no Windows Movie Maker for sure. But
like I said, if you want something you can eventually use for more complicated projects,
this might be the best free option out there.
Alright, number 3, this one is very straightforward. It's called "Speccy", and it simply shows
you all your computer's "specs", it's another pun, see? Anyway, the thing I like about this
one compared to other similar programs, is I think it just looks nicer. It has a nice
simple layout and the information is well organized. The summary page just shows basic
info about your main components, or you can dive deeper into each on the left, and it
will give you more information about your computer than you will ever need. But maybe
you might also find it interesting, you can just poke around, check your hard drive health
status for example, or whatever. There's a lot of information to compile in there, just look at it yourself.
Moving on, we have LibreOffice, which is technically a suite of a few programs, but who cares.
Actually, I shouldn't say that, because there is definitely someone out there who is very
upset I'm counting all these as one. But anyway, LibreOffice is essentially a free alternative
to Microsoft Office, which of course includes Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and so on. I can't
imagine it's quite as feature rich as Microsoft office, but if you're someone like me who
only uses the basic features anyway, LibreOffice is more than capable. Plus, if you need to
you can open and save the same file formats that Microsoft Office uses. So the word processor,
called "Writer" can open and save docx files, the spreadsheet program, called "Calc" can
open and save xlsx files. The other programs it includes are "Impress", which is like powerpoint,
"Base" which is like Access for databases, then it also has a Drawing program and one
for writing out math formulas. And yes, this is all cross platform, and if you've ever
used Ubuntu you know this is what comes pre-loaded as the editors.
So yea, definitely worth checking out if you don't want to pay Microsoft's subscription now, or pay
a whole bunch of money, if you don't even use it that much.
Alright, number 5 is pretty interesting, it's called "Bulk Rename Utility", and if you can't
figure out what it does based on it's name, well, I think you need to back to school and
finish first grade. But yea, it basically just allows you to rename a bunch of files
at once in different ways. And you probably won't appreciate how useful this program is
until you need it. Now when you open up this program, you're definitely going to be overwhelmed,
thinking what the heck am I looking at, because it sure ain't pretty. But it's really not
so bad, because it simply has all your options layed out in front of you, and clearly, there
are a lot of options. Say you have a whole bunch of files, all with different names,
and you just want to add a prefix to the beginning of them. Well, there's a section where you
can do just that. Or maybe you need to change all the files from upper to lower case, or
even just make the first letter of every word upper case. Yep, can do that too. Or maybe
you need to number all the files starting at 37, and remove 3 characters from the center
of every file name, while moving the first 5 letters to the end, and change the file
extension. Never though renaming files could be so complicated right?
Ok, onto number 6, Discord. Put very simply, it's a Voip program where you can talk with
others using text chat, voice, and video. But it's features extend way beyond that.
The main idea is you can set up Discord "servers" that are either private or public, and within
each server you can set up separate "channels" or rooms. So one use would be to set up a
server for you and all your friends, and maybe they want to do voice chat and play different
video games. Those who want to play one game can go in one channel, and another game in
the other. It also lets you share files like images right inline with the chat. And yes
it's free to set up servers, and you can customize them quite a bit. You can have different permissions
for moderators, and set them for different people,
make some channels restricted, add custom emoticons, a whole bunch of stuff.
Plus, it has an overlay that supports basically any game, so you don't have to alt tab out
of full screen to chat. Obviously there's way more to it, but you can check the rest
out yourself.
Next up, we have Rainmeter. This is a classic. It's an awesome program for customizing your
computer's desktop. You download different plugins and "skins" which are kinda like widgets,
that just sit on your desktop and, do stuff. They can do anything from showing the current
system volume, to current RAM usage, or the weather, act as links to programs and sites, really
anything you can think of. There are thousands of plugins with all sorts of designs out there made by all sorts of different people.
And there are a few sites that aggregate rainmeter skins like DeviantArt, so you'll just have to
search through them yourself. There's no way I can even scratch the surface right now,
but it shouldn't take long to find a few things you like. Or even make up your own skins.
Number 8, this is a really simple program called "Media Info", and well, it shows you
all sorts of into about media files, particularly audio and video. For example, you can right
click a video file, hit Media Info, and it will bring up a window with all sorts of stats
about that file. The bitrate of the video, what kind of video codec it uses, what audio streams
it has, the resolution, framerate, even what chroma subsampling it uses, for those of you
who know what that is. It's not something you'll probably use every day, but it can
be useful. Like if you download some videos you want to convert to smaller files, it might
help to know what the current bitrate is, so you know how much to change it to reduce
the size. Or maybe you're watching a movie and it looks choppy, you can see if maybe
whoever encoded it set the framerate too low, or it just has a huge bitrate that your computer
isn't able to handle. I'm sure those of you who can actually use this one probably gets the idea by now.
Coming near the end, number 9, Mp3Tag. You can kind of think of this one similar to the
Bulk Rename Utility, except mp3tag is specifically designed for changing and fixing the metadata
for music files. I'm sure everyone has experienced a time when they import a bunch of music
into iTunes or whatever music program,
and some stuff is either completely missing info, whether it's the titles, or
artists, or albums, or it's all just wrong. With this, you can go in and change any of
the tags for however many files at once. You can also do cool stuff like setting the tags
based on the file names. Maybe all the info is in the file name, but there are no metadata
tags so the music programs don't know. Here you can tell the program what part of the
filenames to use as the title, artist, and so on. Or you can do it in the reverse, and
change the filename based on the tags to standardize everything to your liking.
Maybe not something that everyone will need, but
for those that do, I think it will be VERY helpful.
And finally, one of my personal favorites, Flux. Maybe you've heard me talk about this
before, but Flux automatically adjusts your computer monitor's colors and brightness at
night in such a way so it's less likely to mess up your sleep. I think by now everyone
knows that looking at computer screens, phones, and televisions can make it harder to fall
asleep. This is because these devices produce lots of light in the blue-wavelength part
of the spectrum, which your brain thinks is sunlight, which is the same color. What Flux
does is remove this blue light from the screen, make it look a bit more orange. And interestingly,
a couple minutes after the screen changes colors, you'll probably not even notice the
difference, because your eyes adjust. And if you've been using it for a while and then
disable it, you feel like you're getting blinded by the screen, it's kinda funny, like no wonder you couldn't
sleep before, it's pretty crazy, you'll see immediately.
This is definitely one I think literally everyone should use and check out.
So, that's it 10 really neat free programs you will hopefully find useful. You can let
me know if you have any suggestions of your own down in the comments. If you want even
more free programs, you can look over here I'll put a thing to my last video you can
just click on. And if you want you can subscribe, I make a few new videos every week, and also
enable notifications or YouTube probably won't even show you the new videos in the first place.
But anyway looking forward to hearing from you either here or on Twitter and Instagram, so thanks
for watching, I'll see you next time, have a good one.