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Are your MP3s LAME? Don't Bonk us if we say we hope so. FAAC is, we're happy to take the FLAC. Weak puns, maybe, but great tunes; if you encode your digital music files in a high-fidelity format such as FLAC. It's simple: the best way to get the best sound from your portable tunes is to start out with higher quality files, ideally using a low-loss or lossless format. Hanso Converter offers high-quality ripping and converting into FLAC, FAAC, AAC, Bonk, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, each of which yields better sound quality than the basic MP3 … Read more

Video Downloader Super Lite promises to allow you to download videos from the Internet through a proprietary browser on your iPhone. This alone is a very powerful tool for those who want to take training videos, Webinars, or even music videos on the go from your favorite Web sites. There are, however, a number of limitations, and the performance of the app was variable depending on the video being downloaded and the speed of our connection.

Upon initial installation, you can immediately start browsing. The app uses a very simple Web interface with a banner ad placed below the address … Read more

Sound Effects Free is exactly what it sounds like: a repository of various sound effects that you can use for free on your iPhone. Like many other free apps featuring sound effects, GIFs, videos, or icons, the app is ad supported and has a paid upgrade that gives you more of the sound effects and removes the ads. In this case, the upgrade is relatively limited in scope, but if you enjoy the sound effects -- which are generally decent -- it is a worthwhile purchase.

The interface is simple. When you open the ad, you'll be asked a … Read more

No matter what technology we develop, business cards are still a standard in networking circles. They are the first thing you see when you meet someone. But increasingly our lives are managed by the electronic devices we carry, and business cards get lost so easily. So an app like ScanBizCards Lite is perfect to quickly take a photo, scan the contents of the business card and store it for later on your iPad or iPhone.

To start, the app asks if you'd like to register to share your scans with a universal account between devices and your desktop. This … Read more

Windows does it all, or nearly so, out of necessity: it's simply easier to integrate system utilities with the system. Most of the time, the built-in Windows tools are all you need, but there are exceptions. One feature we've long entrusted to third-party tools is uninstalling software. Not that the Windows Control Panel's uninstaller doesn't get the job done; it does, most of the time. But the alternatives build on the Windows tool's capabilities to do a better and faster job of uninstalling programs, especially those stubborn apps that the Windows tool often can't … Read more

If you own a smartphone, you likely have used Instagram, the megapopular photo editing and sharing app now owned by Facebook. But it's not perfect. Set up like a social network, finding individual photos on Instagram and saving them or sharing them via your device can be cumbersome, which is why InstaFlow from FTRD UK LTD offers one of the better Instagram upgrades on the App Store. Quick and easy to install (save the obligatory log-in to your Instagram account), InstaFlow allows you to quickly and easily see all of your images, popular photos from other Instagram users, and … Read more

Animated GIFs -- short sequences of images that act like tiny moving pictures -- have been around since Netscape Navigator 2.0 (!), but thanks to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and particularly Tumblr, these little slices of Internet hilarity have exploded in recent years. By this point, even your mom knows what they are (see Jennifer Lawrence at the 2013 Oscars for a major mainstream-media example), but it's not too late for you to get in on the craze. One of the best things about animated GIFs is that they're easy to make, especially with tools like Any GIF … Read more

Working with Facebook and its many functions typically requires large parts of a computer's display. Face for Facebook for Mac shrinks the screen size required for Facebook, but still permits use of all its features.

Available as a full, unrestricted version through the App Store for $1.99, Face for Facebook installs without any user steps involved. A trial version would have been a great idea so you could try out its potential benefits before purchasing, but the low price makes this less of a problem. After installation, the program starts cleanly and immediately requests that you sign in … Read more

It's easy to schedule an automatic shutdown in Windows. Simply open the Control Panel and click on System and Security. Find Administrative Tools and click Schedule tasks. When the Task Scheduler opens ... well, perhaps "easy" isn't the right word. "Complicated" comes to mind, maybe even "difficult." However, scheduling an auto shutdown in Windows is actually extremely easy to do with Shanezzar's Auto Shutdown 2.0. This compact freeware simplifies the process of scheduling an automatic shutdown in Windows NT, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. It also supports the Log … Read more