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AudioGuru is a program that lets you see all relevant information (and not so relevant too) about audio files. With it, you can open an audio file to see all the metadata, like covert art, text lyrics, bitrate on a per-frame basis and scan it for errors.

It can be useful to compare your encoded files for compression rates. Also, if you have some audio files that play weird in some players, you can scan them with AudioGuru to check them.

You can integrate it in the explorer shell menu for easier access to scan files.

Support all the major audio formats, such as MP3, AC3, MP4, WavPack, MPC, APE, among others.

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I was looking for some Firefox extensions and i remembered that i wanted to make a post about some of the best IE7 add-ons i know for people that use Internet Explorer 7.

Well, i searched through my bookmarks and there were some links i saved a while back.

If you want to enhance IE7 and add some nice features to it, first try navigating through the official Add-Ons for Internet Explorer website. Almost 400 are listed there.

The official IEBlog has a post titled Must Have Add-Ons for IE7. That post is a little old but you can check it out.

There is also this article in Computer World that covers some of the best.

Personally, i think that IE7Pro is really great and covers some of the most needed features in IE7, like an ad-block program, tab history and inline searching. If you use IE7, you will love this one.

Sadly, the offering of add-on is nowhere near Firefox but at least there some great ones you can use everyday.

A few weeks ago i told you about this program here.

So, in short, Visual Task Tips adds thumbnail preview to the windows in the taskbar, just like Windows Vista does. The only difference is that this program doesn’t support live previews, at least not yet.

Visual Task Tips 3.4 latest changes:

• Text tooltips placement errors fixed
• No more hungs on “busy” applications
• Problem with tasks located outside of primary monitor bounds fixed
• Minor drawing performance optimizations
• Updates check removed from the program, RSS news added on the website

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I just uploaded Launch 1.1.

This a minor revision of Launch because i did not receive any bug reports. The changes, while not too many, were introduced to provide more functionality and to improve what was already there.

The most important is that now the main window shows itself in the lower left of your screen, just like the standard Run box dialog of Windows.

Now you can run a file or exit the program by pressing ESC or ENTER, respectively.

The program page has been updated to reflect the new version and release date.

Version History Download

Most applications today insert entries in the context menu of file and folders, making it display a little slow (specially on windows XP) and making useless entries sometimes.

What is really bad, is that many of them don’t provide options to enable or disable those entries.

Fast Explorer makes configuring your context menus really easy. It displays a huge list of entries organized by file types. When you select a file type, the program displays its actual entries in the right side of the window so you can uncheck the ones you don’t want to appear when you right-click on this kind of files.

This way, you can get rid of entries you don’t need and make your context menu display faster and make it smaller by displaying only the entries you want or need.

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From the makers of Comodo Firewall Pro comes this great free backup application.

With Comodo Backup, you can make copies of your data, use incremental or full backups.

The scheduling capabilities are great because you can make backup sets that run in different time intervals to make sure you have everything up to date and copied only as often as you want.

The feature i like the most is Synchronization, because it can monitor folders for changes and make backups as soon as something changes. This way you can maintain folders, external or network drives up to date with the information you need on them without worrying to run a backup set.

Features advertised in their website:

• Easily backup files or folders anywhere on your computer, network, DVD-RW, CD-RW or FTP server
• Files can be written to a multi-session DVD if it already contains a file with the same name
• Email, FTP, zip and configuration passwords are stored in the registry with encryption
• Protect yourself against ever losing those critical files that took hours to create
• Quickly recover your data in the event of data loss
• Schedule backups to run automatically at a time that suits you
• Synchronized backup feature – save a file and it gets copied instantly
• Send E-mail notifications to team members about the status of a backup job
• Save Disk space by compressing your backups as ZIP files
• Configure in minutes with our intuitive interface

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Many sites list hashes, a unique file string based on different algorithms, for their file downloads so that every user can verify the integrity of those files, or even check if the file they got its the same that the one that is on the site.

HashTab makes this a snap by adding a tab called File Hashes to the properties window of every file. If you need to verify a file, right click on it, select Properties and click on File Hashes tab. It automatically hashes the file and shows the calculated string based on the algorithms you choose.

It supports the most used algorithms, including MD5 and CRC32. Another great use for this is to check pairs of files to see if they are identical, because this algorithms produce unique strings for every file, except when they are 100% identical..

I use this very often for patched files in unattended installations or if i want to check a file i got from somewhere else, comparing it with the hash provided in the official source.

HashTab does not support SFV (Simple File Verification) files. If you are looking for a program to check SFV files, i use SFVLite, which is great for checking this type of  files.

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Shark007, a fellow member of MSFN Forums makes this codec pack. It contains everything you need to playback audio and video files in Windows Media Player and Media Center.

All codecs are set to their default settings and it does not contain any extra media player, so you can use whatever you like to play media files. It supports Windows XP as well despite its name.

When dealing with codecs, more does not equal better.
Having the least amount on your system is the best configuration.
This is exactly what the Vista Codec Package does for you.

Windows Media Player and Vista Media Center will be able to play all your files.

Shark007 updates his pack very often to correct issues or include new versions of the codecs. There is an entire forum section devoted to this codec pack. You can get more information about the codecs included and get troubleshooting tips there.

Vista Codec Package does not include any QuickTime components ut Shark007 makes an addon that supports full browser playback and download of QuickTime files. This addon is called QuickTime Lite for VCP.

I have always preferred to use only the codecs i need and i recommend that you do this as well, but if you don’t have the time or knowledge, Vista Codec Package can fill this for you.

Website Download Vista Codec x64 Components