Hi everyone!
This section will collate all useful software, websites, and resources that will help all of you create wonderful word libraries in Little Reader. I hope that you will find these links useful.
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If you are using LR LITE and wish to have more powerful sound editing functions than the Windows Sound Recorder, you can try using Audacity. NOTE: LR HOME BASIC comes with the Easy Voice Recorder which has powerful editing features yet is extremely easy to use.
Audacity – a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds.
For those of you who are more tech-savvy, you can use this application to manually edit your sound files, using different encoders and noise removal functions.
Here are some of Audacity's features that you might find useful:
• Recording and playing sounds
• Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo) so you can trim your recordings and remove unwanted noise and “dead air”
• Adjusting the amplitude (loudness) of your recordings
• Noise removal (but mind you, don’t expect miracles! smile )
• Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample
• Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux and BSD) amongst others.
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Wikimedia Commons – a database of 3,061,816 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
If you are looking for good quality images for your Little Reader categories and playlists, be sure to check out Wikimedia Commons. They have millions of sharp images of various objects, animals, and places which you can just grab and save on your hard drive. The search function is particularly helpful, so if you are looking for a specific image, simply type in your request, and view all the pictures you may want to use!
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Wikisend – Upload and download lots of files, big files, small files, data files, media files, archives or backups - any files. With Wikisend it's simple and free.
This is particularly useful when you want to share media or files with other people which may be too large for you to upload here in the forums. You don't even need to sign up or register for anything, simply upload and they will give you a link which you can pass on to other people so that they can download your file.
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Free Video to Flash Converter – This is a very useful free program that lets you convert your heavy .avi video files into .flv and .swf flash files that are much lighter in filesize.
The interface is very simple and self explanatory. There is a field for an input file, the field for an output path, and lists with preconfigured formats for FLV and SWF. (If you're not too familiar with what you want for presets, it's always a safe option to choose the defaults).
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K-Lite Codec Pack – a collection of codecs and related tools. Codecs are required to encode and/or decode (play) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play 99% of all the movies that you download from the internet.
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SoundSnap.com – Looking for sound effects to add to your categories? Go to SoundSnap.com and search for the sound effect or picture audio that you want. Searching for files is easy, and you'll even be able to preview the files befor eyou download them, so you won't have to get anything you might not want. You can download in either .mp3 or .wav file format.