The best Text Editor ?

...once was UltraEdit, no doubt. But you had to pay it sixty bucks.
Then PSPad came. And it was (is) freeware and very good.
But the excellence was reach when a GPL, open source product saw the light: Notepad ++.
Today, lots of people are using N++, considering it the best free text editor for Windows out now, and i guess they're right.

This comparison will show you why:

Notepad++ has code folding, automatic multiple highlighting, column mode, a very rich choice of languages for code-coloring, can compare files in an elegant way, and so on... in addition, it uses a very low amount of memory to work, and it's fast like hell.

Downloading the hex plugin (just copy it into your "Program Files\Notepad++\Plugins" folder), it can hex-edit too (Article on Hex Editor Plugin: )

Let's give it a try, i don't think you will ever come back ;)

Official Notepad++ site:

P.S: It lacks of FTP / SSH connectivity, but do you really need such kind of things on a text editor ? Filezilla is there for that ;)

How to record a song played by your PC

If you are looking for something like the Windows Sound Recorder but more professional AND freeware, you are in the right place.

The best easy-to-use but nevertheless quite professional software out there is Audacity.

It is cross-platform, that means that it's not OS-dependent: you can get a version of it for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux too.

Believe me, unless you have very unusual needs, you'll be ready to get started immediately:
press REC to record, STOP to end the task, SAVE the project or EXPORT him as MP3, WAV or Ogg Vorbis. End of story.

Once you get more confident with it, you can do a lot of stuff without having special skills:

• record multiple tracks (automatically, it creates a new track everytime you press Stop and Rec again), that you'll be able to mix down in a single one or to manage individually, according to your needs;
• apply tons of effects (fade in/fade out, filters, normalize, reverse,..);
• set ID3 Tags (meta-informations about Author, Title, Year, Genre,..)
• synchronize tracks, generate noise and so on...

As usual for the open-source products, you can find a good guide for free too ;)




NOTE: If your system is playing, but your Audacity is NOT recording, you should check your INPUT AUDIO SETTINGS, and verify that Recording Control and Stereo Mix are both enabled.

To open Input Audio Settings:

• Open your "Master Volume" window by double-clicking the speaker icon in the System Tray area (or through the Control Panel, Sound and Audio Device Properties, Volume, Advanced tab);
• Click on Options menu, select Properties, drop down the combobox and select your Input peripheral (every soundcard has integrated an input and an output device);
• Click ok and adjust the settings until they're good (recording volume affects the quality of the registration, so raise or lower it to an appropriate value).