Monday, October 1, 2001		Downloads of the week

Bitbop Tuner is quite an amazing program that will record your favourite music from the Internet. It works like a VCR, but is even smarter. By entering a list of bands and solo artists into the program, Bitbop will automatically search thousands of the Internet radio stations and pick real time broadcasts based on your selections. Impressively, Bitbop can find stations quickly. By saving the stream of each track to a specified directory, it allows you to listen to all your ‘recorded’ music later. You can then click to the tuner part of this application that offers full playback of the audio. It’s not an entirely stand-alone program. You’ll need to have RealPlayer installed on your system. Bitbop Tuner is completely automated and requires no user interaction. That’s because there’s a handy Auto Record function. Great for those with dedicated connections, you can simply enter your artists, walk away and come back to a folder full of requested streams. The program lets you set a system priority so that it doesn’t suck your PC’s resources. While you are in front of the computer, Bitbop Tuner’s interface displays information on each current broadcast such as artist, track, station, network and sound quality. This software is free, courtesy Audio Mill. Download available from www.rocketdownload.com

Calypso makes multiple e-mail accounts handling easy. Calypso organises e-mail accounts, messages and information into a collection of folders called a mailbox. You can create more than one mailbox, each with its own password, to allow different users to share the same computer. Each mailbox can manage multiple e-mail accounts and you can have more than one mailbox open at a time. Calypso uses the latest 32-bit technologies and can run in a Windows environment on a PC type computer that has a connection to the Internet. Calypso can run on a ‘private’ network that is not a part of the Internet. However, the mail protocols used on the private network must be compatible with the Internet standards. Calypso uses international standard methods for sending and receiving e-mail across the worldwide system known as the Internet. Calypso is compatible with open system electronic mail implementations and can communicate with another party even though a different e-mail program is being used. It requires Windows ’95, Windows ’98 or Windows NT. If you use a dial-up connection to access the mail system, make sure you are connected to the network before trying to send and receive mail. It is possible to have incorrect default dial-up settings in the Windows environment. If your default dial-up settings are incorrect, Calypso will not be able to send or receive e-mail. You are free to use this version permanently, however, Micro Computer Systems, Inc. does not provide phone or e- mail support for Calypso E-mail. Download from http://download.mcsdallas.com/binaries/calypso/calypso.exe

Dirkey is a small utility that enables fast access to local and network folders by allowing the user to define folder bookmarks. These bookmarks can be defined on the fly whenever you are browsing your file system in Windows Explorer or Open/Save Dialog boxes. When Dirkey is active you can just press the Dirkey shortcut key (Ctrl+Alt+1..9) and a bookmark will be set on the current folder. All bookmarks are global and are preserved when your computer is turned off (or the program is shut down). You can go back to any book marked folder by using Ctrl+1..9.The active Windows Explorer, Open/Save or Browse For Folder Dialog will display the book-marked folder. You can also open bookmarks in a new Explorer window by choosing "Explore..." from the popup menu of the tray icon (right click the icon). The program always operates on the top level window (the window that has the focus in Windows), the shortcut keys will only be available in this window. The shortcut keys do not interfere with default shortcuts of the currently active program, since the Dirkey shortcut keys will only be active if the active window is either an Explorer window or Open/Save Dialog box. You can edit, copy and paste bookmarks and change program settings in the main Dirkey window. To display the window, you can use the Ctrl+0 shortcut key in an Explorer Window or Open/Save Dialog, or choose "Open Dirkey" from the tray icon popup menu, or by just clicking the Dirkey program icon (there will be at most one running instance of the program at any given time). Download available from www.protonfx.com/download/DIRKEY077.EXE

Do you often download files from the Internet? Is your hard drive crowded with these files? Have you ever asked yourself which files you have already downloaded more than one time? Perhaps you already burned files to CD and now retrieve them again? Do you want to find these files and eliminate the duplicates? Maybe you want to frequently find duplicate files without checking your entire backup CDs every time again? Then CloneSpy is the right tool for you! What can CloneSpy do? CloneSpy can help you save hard drive space by detecting and removing duplicate files. In this manner duplicate files have exactly the same contents regardless of their name, date, time and location. Moreover CloneSpy is able to find files that are not exactly identical, but have the same filename. Perhaps you have different versions of a file and you want to find all of them and remove the older versions. Furthermore CloneSpy can find zero length files. Those are files that do not have any content. Altogether with CloneSpy you can process files that are duplicates, have the same file names, are duplicates and have the same file names and are zero bytes long. CloneSpy offers you a complex mechanism to decide which files of the duplicate or same name files should be deleted. But it is also possible to leave this decision to the user. With CloneSpy you can build checksum files from files on CDs (or even on hard drives, etc.) and use them to check if you have these files already on your system. The checksum files will prevent you from playing DJ every time you search for duplicates. Grab it from http://www.clonespy.de/english/download/cspy12.zip 

— Raman Mohan