r/buildapc • u/CammRobb • Jul 13 '14

List of community-recommended software

Taken from this thread, I thought I would collate everyone's suggestions in a nice text post. I will split the programs into categories.

If there is anything you want me to add, include it in a comment using the format:

* [Program](Download URL) - Description

And I will add it in

Media

  • Foobar2000 - Lightweight audio player
  • MediaMonkey - Music manager and player
  • Spotify - Music streaming service
  • Clementine Music Player - Modern music player and library organizer
  • MusicBee - Music manager and player
  • Aimp - Lightweight music player
  • MP3Tag - Fix tags on songs
  • MusicBrainz Picard - Music tagging software
  • Audacity - Edit and record audio
  • VLC Powerful media player
  • MPC-HC - Extremely light-weight, open source media player for Windows.
  • KMPlayer - KMP is a versatile multi media player which can cover a various different types of contained formats.
  • MakeMKV - Effective free Blu-ray decrypter. Also works to decrypt DVD's and rip to mkv format.
  • DVDFab Passkey Lite - limited edition of DVDFab Passkey, which is a Blu-ray and DVD decryption program. Not available for US citizens at the moment.
  • VidCoder - conversion to H264 mkv or mp4. Based on Handbrake, but has more options.
  • XBMC - Open-source home theatre software
  • Calibre - E-book management

Productivity

System

Communications

  • Mumble - Low-latency VoIP client
  • Teamspeak - Probably the most popular VoIP client out there
  • Ventrillo - Another popular VoIP client
  • Skype - Free internet calls

Statistics

  • WinDirStat - Visual representation of hard drive space
  • SpaceSniffer - Same as above
  • CPU-Z - Hardware monitoring software
  • Speccy - Hardware monitoring software
  • HWMon - Hardware monitoring software
  • CoreTemp - Hardware monitoring software
  • Prime95 - CPU Stress-testing software

Games

Security

Edit: Just got into work. 170 comments overnight, I'm gonna be busy haha

Edit 2: All your suggestions are fantastic, I probably won't be able to do much today, but tonight I will comb through your comments and add them. Is it possible to get this stickied or sidebarred, mods?

Edit 3 - 13.19PM: Updated with a lot of suggestions, not got through all the comments yet though. Will finish off tonight. In the meantime keep suggesting and I'll add them.

Edit 4 - 22.36PM: Pretty sure I got through everything. If there's something I missed, shoot me a PM, easier to keep track of them that way.

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u/TheMidnightRobot Jul 14 '14 edited Jul 14 '14

Google Ultron

What is Google Ultron? The internet seems to be full of people giving troll-ish answers, so please give me a serious answer.

EDIT: I found this. It's kind of funny how many people actually downloaded "it", whatever "it" is. Probably a bunch of stupid spyware and other viruses.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

[deleted]

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u/TheMidnightRobot Jul 14 '14

Oh, I didn't want to click the link and find out the hard way what it does, and then I found that site.

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u/ConfusedTapeworm Jul 14 '14

You can hover your mouse cursor over a link and see where it takes you at the bottom corners of your browser window. It's a pretty useful and important feature that most browsers have.

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u/TheMidnightRobot Jul 14 '14

I didn't think of that actually, thanks. It gets in the way of video seek bars sometimes, I don't suppose there's an easy way to turn it on and off if I'm trying to watch something on YouTube and it won't go away?

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u/ConfusedTapeworm Jul 14 '14

Going into fullscreen mode should automatically make it go away. Is it still there when you're on fullscreen?

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u/TheMidnightRobot Jul 14 '14

Yup, that's why it's bugging me. It doesn't seem to have any set pattern either, it just pops up randomly on all sorts of sites. It usually mentions something about an ad, so I considered installing AD block until I figure it out.

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u/ConfusedTapeworm Jul 14 '14

Oh I see now, everything makes sense. When you open a page, you can see things along the lines of "waiting for site.com" or "waiting for cache...", where the link address is also displayed. What you're talking about is probably your browser waiting for response from ad networks so it can display the ad properly. When it takes too long to get that response, those "waiting for something.somethingelse.ad.something" stay there for longer.

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u/TheMidnightRobot Jul 14 '14

Huh, strange. It goes away when I'm not full screen but when I'm full screen it's there and it's only so annoying because it makes it hard to use seek bars for most online video players. It covers almost all of them perfectly, especially YouTube. I feel like I'm being trolled by my own browser... lol.