Monday, May 19, 2003		Downloads

MOST of us use paper diaries or their digital counterparts to store phone numbers and addresses. Now we have an excellent printable notebook that can be kept in PC and printed whenever required. It is a freeware and the program is so flexible that it can be configured to the requirement completely. The other freeware — Cdex — featured in this column is a utility for converting .wav files into compressed formats. We know .wav files are large and take up a lot of space on the hard disk. This program helps control space usage besides converting these files to popular formats like MP3.

BarBus-PNB

BarBus Printable Notebook (PNB) is free software to keep phone numbers and addresses. The information can be stored in different notebooks depending on the nature of information. For example, the notebook "Contacts" is the address book and the notebook " keeps information on favourite Websites. You can create as many notebooks as you need. E-notebooks are stored as .pnb files. Each .pnb file can contain one or more e-notebooks. You can customise field set for each e-notebook. Pages can be printed via print template. Print template defines the size of the page, field location etc. Editing print template file can make the face of the printed page the same as the other pages in the paper notebook. When you create pageset, you define how many records one page may contain. Default value is 10 records per page. If all records are used, new page is created automatically. As a result when you add or delete some records, the records placed at other pages do not shift. Only one page is changed. The other pages remain unchanged. You can print the changed page and replace in your paper address book. Download from www.barbus.biz

CDex

CDex is a utility for extracting sound files from CDs on CD-ROM drive, and for converting .wav files into several other (compressed) formats, like the popular MP3 format. To use CDex, you need at least Microsoft Windows ’95/ ’98/NT/ME/2000/XP operating system, Adaptec’s ASPI for Win32 Manager (version 4.54 or better), a CD-ROM which has digital audio extracting capabilities (most IDE drives and SCSI drives will do), Intel Pentium or compatible processor, lots of free disk space to record your .wav / Encoded (MP3) files and a player (say Winamp). To get started, first select the configure button (F4) and select a proper output directory. Secondly, select the CD-ROM tab and make sure that the CD-ROM settings are correct. At least, make sure that the logical drive letter is set up correctly for your CD-ROM, otherwise you might have problems with reading the CDPlayer.ini file. Optionally, you can select another encoder (like changing from LAME to Ogg Vorbis, or Fraunhofer). You can select the encoder by clicking on the MP3 tab. Finally, you have to fill in the CDDB settings. At least make sure that you specify the e-mail address when you want to use the remote CDDB functionality. Once you have set up everything, click OK. The settings will be stored to the CDex.ini file that is located in the Windows directory. Now that the set up has been completed, you can rip files. Download from www.cdex.n3.net