Sound utilities

In some previous posts I have written about how to make DVD's and have full control of how they are made.

This task is not easy - and it seems to cost lots of money. Anyway, here is a list of tools I have came across lately that seems to have some potential. This is not a review of these tools but I will give you the key selling points from my point of view.

Today I will only focus on sound tools.

Tool	Comment
AC3Tools Pro	A low cost tool (€49.95) to encode (and decode) AC3 files. You can encode only two channels, 4 channels or full 5.1 sound. It requires uncompressed WAV PCM files as input.
DMX 6Fire USB	This USB sound card with a retail price of €249 have 4 source inputs and 6 outputs, plus digital input/output. With this card you are guaranteed good recordings from your source.
Acoustica MP3 Audio Mixer	This low priced tool($24.95) can combine several input files in WAV, MP3 into a two-channel output. You can easily pan balance, fade volume and mix music to your own needs.
Wavelab 6	This tool seems to be great for recording and editing your music. It can handle from 2 to 6 channels, depending on the version. This tool is somewhat expensive, and no trial is available.

Subtitle Workshop

Subtitle Workshop is a tool to create subtitles for your movies.

Edraw is a cool drawing tool

It is not often I come across good drawing programs. Not bitmap drawing tools like GIMP og PhotoShop, but vector graphics.

Edraw Max (and other versions of Edraw) are much like Microsoft Visio that Microsoft Office users are used to use.

Vector graphics are graphics you can scale up and down without loosing any quality. If you scale up a bitmap image you will soon start to see dots and blur mages.

From what I can tell both Edraw and Visio are very good tools. Visio have lots of features not found in Edraw (like actually drawing you active directory by getting the design) but Edraw has many libraries with cool 3D images.

The price is right, less than $100 for the full version. And a lifetime of free upgrades.