Cakewalk Home Studio series has always been a trimmed down version of their flagship product at a more affordable price for the home studio owner. However, from looking at the feature set of this newest version, it certainly seems like an app that could satisfy most any home/project studio owner and many semi-pros as well.

Features:

While Sonar Home Studio does do everything you would expect, that being audio and MIDI recording, MIDI step-time sequencing, VST and DirectX plugin and instrument support, support for low-latency ASIO and WDM drivers as well as the old-school DirectSound drivers, it also does much more which one wouldn't typically expect out of such a program.

* It has a video playback window which allows the user to create sound tracks and add sound effects to a project. It supports AVI and MPEG video formats and will export video as well.

* It also has a music notation tool to allow the user to create and print musical scores.

* It allows export of mp3 and WMA audio for easy internet sharing.

* It contains a loop explorer to allow the user to find and use ACID-format loops quickly and easily, and comes bundled with a loop library.

* It comes bundled with a light version of Cakewalk Pyro to burn your music to CD.

* It also comes packed with a collection of tutorials to help you learn and understand the application, and get you up and recording quickly.

* Bundled with a collection of plugins that include chorus, delay, reverb, EQ and others (as stated earlier, 15 in total) it has enough to meet beginner's needs. Can also add any of hundreds of third party plugins with the previously mentioned VST and DirectX support.

* As mentioned earlier, the application packs instruments along with it as well including the Virtual Sound Canvas, Dreamstation and the Sfz SoundFont player. The VST and DirectX support also allows the user to add any third party VSTi or DXi as well.

* The user can use ReWire applications such as Reason, ReBirth, Project5, Kinetic and others with the ReWire support.

As seen in this article, Sonar Home Studio version 4 brings with it a whole batch of new features and functions. This new version can be an ideal choice for the new home studio owner that is on a limited budget but wants to buy a recording application that can help them in the short term, and be a good learning experience for upgrading applications later on.

Bring the professional power of SONAR to your home PC with new SONAR Home Studio Version 4. There is no better software for musicians taking the first step into digital recording. The newest member of the SONAR family comes with a comprehensive feature set that turns your computer into a multitrack recording studio, giving you everything you need to take your music from inspiration to finished CD.

SONAR Home Studio is built with the same core features as Cakewalk SONAR 4. Its intuitive tools make it easy to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional-quality music. It includes powerful tools; built-in instruments and effects; support for DirectX, VST, ReWire, and MFX instruments and effects; support for ACID format loops; and much more.

CloneDVD mobile converts your DVD movies quickly and easily into a format that your mobile equipment (Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs ZEN Vision, etc) can play. You can also convert your DVDs to other file formats, such as DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc. With CloneDVD mobile you can put your favourite movies or TV series on your mobile video equipment and watch them wherever and whenever you want. Let the kids watch their favourite cartoons in the car.

Incorporating the user-friendly interface of Elby's CloneDVD and the well-engineered open source project FFmpeg as the conversion engine makes CloneDVD mobile a fast, easy-to-use and quality product that is very reasonably priced. Copying a DVD to your mobile video machine is achieved in a few mouse clicks and without the need to rip it to your hard-disk. Note that copying protected DVDs also requires AnyDVD.

Features:

- Convert movie DVDs to play on mobile video equipment like the Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs ZEN Vision, etc

- Convert movie DVDs to other file formats like DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc.

- Utilises a high quality picture conversion engine

- Supports multi-angle movie DVDs

- Video Preview shows an overview of all selectable DVD titles

- Target size freely adjustable

- Supports chapter trimming

- Very easy to use: Our unique Filmstrip assistant will guide you step-by-step through all settings - easy for beginners

- Picture snapshots while converting

- Logging window available

- Stable, fast and does not require an ASPI driver

CyberPower Audio Editing Lab 14 is an ideal solution for audio editing and mastering. The program contains everything you need to create great sounding recordings and audio CDs, including professional tools for recording, analysis and editing. The user interface was designed with speed, accuracy and ease of use in mind.

large range of high quality audio tools and effects are integrated in Audio Editing Lab — including tools for dynamic processing, equalizing, numerous effects such as echo, amplification, noise reduction, reverb, chorus and flanger, as well time stretching and key transposition tools. Recordings distorted by noise, clicks, crackle, clipping or missing high frequency content can be restored.

Build professional banners, advertisements and other commercial animations in minutes, with an impressively short learning curve. Animation Workshop handles the elements of its animations as objects, eliminating the need to understand how animation files are structured.

Animation Workshop will assemble your animations from still images, text and other animations. It brings an inexhaustible library of graphic effects to the table. It maintains its text as editable text objects, rather than graphics — the text content of your animations will be editable after they're created.

Export Animation Workshop's animations to GIF, MNG, AVI, MOV and SWF (Macromedia Flash™).

Alive Text to Speech also enables you to listen documents, emails, news articles or web pages without conversion. It supports schedule converting. It also allow advanced users to finish the conversion of text to mp3 with Command lines. You can change the different voices and the readout speed for conversion or listening, and download more voices from Internet.

Key Features:

1) Read text in any application, including Emails, web pages, news articles, PDF, Word or Excel Documents, etc.

2) Convert text to MP3, WAV, OGG, VOX files.

3) Convert text Files to MP3, WAV, OGG, VOX files.

4) Install Alive Text to Speech Toolbar in IE (Internet Explorer) Browser.

5) It is very simple and easy to use. Just right click on files in the Windows Explorer, select "Convert to MP3"(or WAV, OGG,VOX) and convert them using your predefined settings.

6) Command line supported.

7) Converting text to mp3 in batches.

8) Schedule converting support.

9) Microsoft text-to-speech engine.

10) High converting speed, wonderful output quality.

11) Windows Vista compatible.

Xilisoft DVD to iPod Converter is powerful, easy-to-use DVD to iPod converter software which helps you convert DVD to iPod MP4 (MPEG-4) and MP3, AAC, M4A, etc, put DVD on iPod player, iPhone mobile with great quality and super fast speed!

Compared with other DVD to iPod software, Xilisoft DVD to iPod converter has more settings you can customize, for example, convert DVD to iPod video by custom file size, rip DVD's any segment, select target subtitle and audio track. You can get adjustable quality what ever you want to put DVD on iPod, iPhone mobile.

Hiren's Boot CD is a boot CD containing various diagnostic programs such as partitioning agents, system performance benchmarks, disk cloning and imaging tools, data recovery tools, MBR tools, BIOS tools, and many others for fixing various computer problems. It is a Bootable CD; thus, it can be useful even if the primary operating system cannot be booted. Hiren's Boot CD has an extensive list of software. Utilities with similar functionality on the CD are grouped together and seem redundant; however, they present choices through UI differences.

Microsoft Windows may have got more advanced but the need for effective maintenance is greater than ever. If you don’t houseclean your computer system regularly the digital garbage that collects over time makes it slower and can even cause inexplicable errors – usually when you need them least.

With the reliability of 11 years of experience, Ashampoo WinOptimizer 6 makes Windows maintenance fast and easy – and it works for Windows XP just as well as it does for Vista. It keeps your Windows computer running as fast and smoothly as on the first day you bought it.

In addition to efficient Windows maintenance you also get a whole suite of powerful, easy-to-use tools that enable you to configure and tune your Windows computer so that it works exactly the way you want it to.

The WinOptimizer Toolbox

AntiSpy Module New!

Context Menu Manager New!

Hard Disk Defragmenter New Version!

One-Click Optimizer Improved

Drive Cleaner Improved

Alcohol brings new meaning to the word multimedia! It is without a doubt a leader in its class, bringing the ability to emulate and record CDs and DVDs together into one amazingly easy to use software program.

Using the latest technology the program is constantly being developed and improved to add in new features allowing it to maintain its position as a leading software package.

Changes in version 1.9.8.7117, 2008-11-23:

- NEW A.C.I.D Wizard "Alcohol Cloaking Initiative for DRM"

- NEW Add Context Menu in explorer for burning image file

- NEW Improved Dumping/Burning engine more stability and speed

- NEW Latest SPTD layer version

- FIX Problem with some Drives Not showing correct manufacture ID of blank discs.

- FIX The incorrect 'Processor Info' display on some Operating systems, especially for Core 2 Dual new processors

- FIX addressed some blacklisting problems

- FIX Bugs reported by some users

- UPDATE Some language files

- UPDATE Devsupp additional support for more drives

Imagine being able to store your most used CDs as images on your computer and then just call them up at the click of a button and run them at 200X the speed of some CD drives when you need them without requiring the CD itself. How about being able to make a backup of that CD on to another CD either using the CD itself or just using the image you've made of it. This is what Alcohol allows you to do and much more.