If you are a PowerPoint user who does anything with audio or pictures, there are two tools I think you should download RIGHT NOW: IrfanView and Audacity. I nabcasted about both of these today (yeah, two tools in 45 seconds. That took some serious editing.) When I was done with the nabcast, I created two screencasts, for those of you over here on the main blog.
Audacity:
Audacity lets you record, edit, manipulate, and save recordings of all types. When I don’t want to go to the effort to use Camtasia to do my recordings, I use Audacity. Bruce uses Audacity to make electronic versions of old records. It lets you take out hisses, pops, add effects and repeats, and do a myriad of other things. The other common use for Audacity is to take several songs and merge them together into as ingle soundtrack. This allows you to play more than one audio file at a time during your presentation without having to worry about when one track ends and when the next should start. The video I made for you shows how to save a recording as an MP3 using Audacity, which is probably in the top ten things I do with the tool.
IrfanView:
IrfanView is used in our house to translate pictures from one format to another. It is an easy to use editor that works like you expect it to work. We also use it to open graphics that come to us in a format we can’t otherwise read and work with them. The video here shows you how to take a picture, trim it, resize it, and make it your desktop background.
Check both of these tools out. I think you will find them quite useful.
[tags]audacity, irfanview, graphics,audio, mp3, conversion[/tags]