ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

BearShare is a service that helps you download free music and share your music files with your friends. The software comes with a music search cum download manager with an integrated IM client. Here is a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of the software.

PROS of BearShare :

1. As it is a P2P software your music search has no limits. You have a chance of finding just about any song by any artist and belonging to any age which is not possible in case of most websites.

2. It has a built in player with good functionality which enables you to play the downloaded songs in the same window. You can also preview the files being downloaded.

3. The search results also give you the details about the media file thus enabling you to select the files to be downloaded on the basis of Bit Rate, duration or ratings too.

4. You have a profile on BearShare and the software has a built in IM client which enables you to interact and communicate with people and friends

5. The software supports many mp3 players and can be used to manage them.

6. Unlike most other P2P clients, BearShare doesn’t bug you with garbage results during its search. Also it has a parental control option and it informs you whenever a file with explicit content is found.

CONS of BearShare :

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Well, the reason why I started late (live blogging) is because I found SearchCamp really boring. In the morning session there were people coming out and speaking about search engine marketing and it looked more like an advertisement of their own search engine marketing companies.

In the morning session : Mahesh Murthy (only guy who was making some sense & impressed the most in the whole camp) of Pinstorm displayed some really interesting trends (related to search engine marketing) for 2008. Arvind covered up the session pretty nicely, so go ahead and read the 8 Trends for 2008 in search engine marketing.

Afternoon session : Thankfully this session was much better than the first one. There was debate on whether one should go for In-house search engine marketing or it should be outsourced to the search engine marketing companies. On one side there were 4 people from various search engine marketing companies and on the other side there was only 1 guy who was talking against outsourcing of search engine marketing.

The session was quite interesting but I’m convinced that the search engine marketing should be done by the search engine marketing firms only. They are the ones who’ve got resources and can do the task well.

Quiz session : At the end of the day was the quiz session in which Sulekha (the gold sponsor of the event) distributed t-shirts to those who answered the questions correctly and yours truly was able to score 1 t-shirt!

The question on which I was able to win the t-shirt was “what is the recent valuation of FaceBook?” Can anyone answer this one ???

Overall, experience at search camp was pretty good, I met lot of people out there and Arvind, Sagaro, Syed are one of the guys who were really cool and made the event a better experience for me, at least much better than the horrible morning session!

Wanna host a party tonight?

Gone are the days when DJs were required to carry huge cases of vinyl records and heavy expensive equipment to each and every place where they play. Welcome to VirtualDJ! Created by Atomix Productions, VirtualDJ offers mixing music, videos and even lets the user produce cool scratch sounds like a real vinyl Turntable!

VirtualDJ offers four options at startup aimed at users ranging from beginners who just want to listen to music to pro DJs playing at parties. The working window is a smart two track window which resembles a real turntable. Individual tracks can be loaded into each ‘vinyl’. Beginners can just mix the two tracks by using the crossfader options after enabling the Sync option and pros can really bring down the dance floor with the various real time options like cueing and looping. And with infinite number of cue points that VirtualDJ allows, each song can be saved with pre-programmed effects, all synchronized accurately.

Also, one among the main features is the graphical representation of each and every option. This ensures that one can spin records live with unbelievable accuracy without any prior preparation.

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Aspiring musicians or even closet artists do not have to worry anymore about investing in expensive studio equipment. They don’t even need a basic mixer now. Fruity Loops now re-christened FL Studio is back. Produced by Image-Line softwares, this is a complete package; a delight for the electronic musicians, both hobbyists and professionals.

A user friendly graphical interface greets the user at startup. A self explanatory pattern editor makes creating new and funky beats, all at the drop of a hat. The piano roll that each pattern offers makes easy, the ‘in-detail’ editing for the real professionals. Also, the play list window is the easiest looping interface I have come across, offering infinite number of separate tracks. Looping has never been as easy as this, both in snap mode and non-snap mode.

The software allows the user to export the created track as mp3, WAV, mid, zip and flp.

Recording from an external source:

Though FL Studio is an all in all complete package to make excellent music, there is always room to connect the software to an external source to record live; be it audio input or MIDI interface. But smooth audio recording (without any time lags) requires an ASIO driver.

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We are all moving towards a faster world! Speed tops the list of performance parameters everywhere and especially the world of computers has always been marked with this syndrome. Faster Internet speed, Faster data channels, Faster processors. It is a world where things happen in nanoseconds. After all faster work is what the PC was actually made for! And so the last thing you want is a sluggish PC to give you in.

Now although the speed of a Computer is by large decided by its configuration and the dependent hardware drivers, one can tune it up to provide an optimum performance. There are various tools available for this and here are going to review one of them which is Uniblue’s SpeedUpMyPC.

After using and analyzing the software we came up with the following reasons to show it our thumbs up:

1. Like all other Uniblue products, SpeedUpMyPC has a simple and neat interface.

The overview tab gives you a general idea of the PC health and the issues at hand. The Optimization tab consists of the various optimization features while the clean up tab comprises of all the features that are related to memory management. To help you decide when and how to start the software, there is the settings tab.

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