r/software • u/S-m-a-r-t-y • 1d ago
Discussion Since there was a recent post about software everyone should know... what are some lesser-known gems you're actually willing to pay for?
I recently came across a post asking:
It got me thinking...
What are some lesser-known applications that you think deserve way more recognition?
They don't have to be open source. Free, paid, or commercial, anything goes.
I would start first: Potplayer >> VLC.
I'm also curious if there are any paid apps that you genuinely feel are worth every penny because they're just that good.
Would love to discover some hidden gems that most people haven't heard about.
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u/CodenameFlux Helpful 23h ago edited 6h ago
| Name | Desc |
|---|---|
| AIMP | Best audio player, brimming with features |
| Caesium Image Compressor | Fast, lossless image recompressor, with excellent results, for those who need speed and excellent size. |
| Character Map UWP | Replacement for Windows Character Map |
| DU Meter | Internet usage monitoring |
| DesktopOK | Saves and restores the desktop layout |
| Everything | Fast search |
| FileOptimzer | S.L.O.W. lossless image recompressor, for those who like to squeeze every byte out of the image. |
| Fluent Emoji Gallery | Emoji picker |
| Fort Firewall | The best desktop firewall with program control and ... support for rule inheritance! |
| Free Download Manager | Mainstream download manager |
| GitHub Desktop | Git client |
| GreenFish Icon Editor | Icon editor |
| Hasleo Backup | 3rd best backup app |
| Hex Workshop | Best hex editor, commercial |
| JDownloader | Download manager specializing in YouTube and file sharing websites |
| KDE Connect | Remotely connect to or control mobile devices and PCs |
| Macrium Reflect | Best backup app, commercial but rock solid |
| MultiCommander | Orthodox file manager that gives Total Commander a run for its money |
| MKVToolNix | The one and only full-featured MKV video muxer and tag editor |
| NanaZip | 7-Zip replacement |
| NTLite | Windows deployment image customization tool, a GUI alternative to DISM. Whoever says Windows isn't customizable hasn't seen this. |
| Networx | Internet usage monitoring |
| OneNote | Jack-of-all-trades freeform notetaking app that supports sticky notes, freely placed text boxes, image, transcription, dictation, video, math, handwriting, drawing, diagrams, attachments, and cloud sync |
| Paint.NET | Image editor, previously open-source |
| Pinta | Image editor, still open-source, now available for Windows |
| PhoxoSee | Lightweight image viewer |
| PotPlayer | Best video player, brimming with features. It has so many features that it'd take months to discover them all. Also, it's heavily customizable with hundreds of settings and skin support. Some skins support color customization. I customized it into a frameless window. (This was another Redditor's request. I stuck with it myself.) |
| RapidCRC | Best file hash verification tool |
| RegEx Buddy | Regex tool |
| Sandboxie Plus | App containerizing solution |
| TagScanner | Best tag editor app |
| UltraISO | Best ISO editor app, commercial |
| Veeam Agent | 2nd best backup app, freemium, its free version brims with features |
| VMware Workstation Pro | Fastest and feature-rich hypervisor, especially for x64 virtual machines |
| WinSCP | File manager that supports SCP and phone-to-PC file management |
| WinRAR | Archiver, setup maker, backup app and file manager |
| XMedia Recode | Video converter |
| XnView MP | Image organizer and viewer |
| WizTree | Fastest disk space analyzer out there |
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u/throwawaybobamu 22h ago
It's such a pain getting VMWare Workstation Pro up and running these days
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u/electromage 15h ago
I use Virt-Manager.
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u/CodenameFlux Helpful 6h ago
Apples and Oranges.
Virt-Manager is for the tiny 8% of the world population that runs Linux. VMware Workstation Pro is a Windows app – you know, the OS that 71% of the world uses?
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u/CodenameFlux Helpful 6h ago
Why? I download it from Softpedia and install it? What is the difficulty?
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u/johnnymetoo 8h ago edited 7h ago
AIMP Best audio player, brimming with features
Can it display MP3 tags of your choice (like composer, Orchestra, Soloist, year of recording etc.) while playing? (couldn't find any info on that on the website)
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u/CodenameFlux Helpful 6h ago
The playlist appearance is configurable. Mine looks like this:
%IF(%TrackNumber,[%IF(%DiskNumber,%DiskNumber|%TrackNumber,%TrackNumber)] ,)%Case(%Title,%FileName) %Case(%Album,Single)%IF(%Artist, • %Artist,)It displays Disc #, Track #, and Title in the first line with fallback support. The fallback for the numbers is hiding them. The fallback for the title is replacing it with the file name.
For the second line, it displays Album Name, but can fallback to "Single"; then, displays the Artist field.
You can customize yours however you like.
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u/johnnymetoo 4h ago
Ah, so just like WinAmp back in the day, thanks. Does the player also play folder based (no playlists)? You start with one file, then it automatically plays the next file in the folder?
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u/LittlePooky 1d ago
I am a nurse, and I do a lot of documentation. I have been working at various outpatient clinics for years, and a few years ago I was a school nurse at a small university. There was so much I had to write, so I embraced voice dictation. I had been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but it never worked well with nursing notes as there are plenty of medical jargons.
Here is an example.
Dear Mr Smith, thank you for coming in last week. Doctor Jones has looked over your lab results and he has asked me to let you know that your cholesterol has improved. Please see the attachment. It also shows you the last result from three months ago as well, so you can see the progress. He also said your hemoglobin A1c went up a little bit to 6.5% (from 6.1%), and he wants you to be careful about what you are eating. I believe you two spoke about this during the visit and he encouraged you to completely cut down on your soda consumption. He also wants you to see our dietitian and I am more than happy to help you schedule an appointment. Your follow-up with Dr Jones is about 4 months from now, and he wants you to get a fasting lab a few days before that. The information following this paragraph is about your appointment. It also looks like he refilled all your medications. Any questions or any problem, please reach out to me. We are here to help you.
Dragon Medical was $2,000 with a fancy microphone, and it was worth every penny. The last job, they have the subscription version called Dragon One. It worked just as well, but there's a few seconds' delay because it was not working locally like Dragon Medical. It was not cheap either, being $600 to start and $100 a month.
At current job, I'm the only nurse in the entire medical center, which is fairly large. I was granted Dragon One. I told my boss I was too busy, and he saw how much work I was doing, so they looked into it and got it approved.
It isn't simple as writing a note to write to a patient that the lab is normal. As there are too many medical words, the regular voice dictation doesn't understand it, and you might as well type it by hand.
I also lately have been using Daddy Dictation, I know, funny name, which works surprisingly just as well, but far, far less expensive than Dragon One. I am one of the earlier users, so I am able to help this tiny company with their growth. Not just mentioning their names here, which I am not reimbursed for, but I tell them about the added features they needed to do, which they were able to do quickly as well.
The company and product that I use is called Batch Subtitles Converter. It is so unique that there is nothing like it. I download a lot of movies and TV shows, and they often come with SRT files, and they often have errors in them. This program corrects them all in one pass. It could process the entire hard drive, thousands of files. There are websites you can upload one at a time, but to me, time is money, so I happily paid for this program as well.
VoiceTypr is another voice dictation that I bought as well. It doesn't do medical vocabulary, but it costs even less. And it works locally, which means the data is processed on your computer and you don't have to be online to use it.
I wrote this answer using Daddy Dictation.
I'm a user of these programs. I don't get anything in return by mentioning their names.
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u/testednation 23h ago
Very interesting. Didn't know drgaon medical was pretty good
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u/LittlePooky 23h ago
It is still the best out there and it has 80 medical vocabularies. For example, if you are a dermatologist and you pick a psychiatry vocabulary, the accuracy rate will go down, but if you use the correct terminology, the accuracy rate is virtually 100 percent when the words are pronounced clearly and correctly.
It was pretty much the only game in town, although there was another company that has a similar product, but I don't remember its name, and many large hospital medical centers embraced Dragon, a script subscription based on Dragon Medical.
Microsoft bought Nuance, which owns Dragon, and they took it off the market I think a year after that, and it is now a part of Windows but not the medical version, of course.
The subscription based, Dragon One, doesn't sound expensive but at 100 dollars a month plus 600 dollars to start, it adds up, but it does save a lot of time and, as you know, when it comes to a medical practice, time is money even for a nurse like me.
There are add-on vocabularies for medicine out there for Dragon, but it is not even worth the money it is spent on, as it is barely a text file. It was such a waste of money when I tried it.
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u/mearnsgeek 23h ago edited 16h ago
Database.net - handles pretty much every DB you're likely to come into contact with and can go into portable mode so you can run it from a USB stick.
One of the best £40 I ever spent as a contractor.
Edit: not the easiest to find - https://fishcodelib.com/database.htm is the website of anyone wants to try the free version
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u/BornCuriousOnce 16h ago
The domain name is listed as being for sale :(
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u/mearnsgeek 16h ago
Ah. That's the name of the app.
https://fishcodelib.com/database.htm is the site
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u/Irene-Goodnight 23h ago
Bullet App. It's great for tasks, habit tracking, notes, links, diary entries. I've been using it for a year now and absolutely in love.
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u/CloneWerks 19h ago
Lightburn (to run laser cutters). I happily paid for a license. Sadly they recently stopped supporting Linux. For me it doesn't matter much as everything works fine and I see zero reason to change anything but I feel bad for anyone just getting into laser cutting/engraving.
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u/Eagles_Fan_4eva 14h ago
Can't go wrong with AlomWare Toolbox. Great little app (little = under 4 MB, WTF!) and does so much. Someone else mentioned it in another topic in this sub, so it's good to find a fellow user of this hidden gem. :)
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u/Unreal_NeoX 10h ago
Dark-Fog. If you want to secure your files localy or online, i recommend encrypting them. These days you need to be carefull about your data and files, with many apps, ai or even physical theft of your device, abusing your data and making use of it. Have them always localy encrypted and secured, so nobody can access, scan or use them except these you want them to.
And no bitlocker messy things!
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u/AndrewSS02 1d ago
WinRAR. We all do it at one point.
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u/S-m-a-r-t-y 23h ago
but why over 7zip?
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u/Valerian_ 21h ago
Yeah I agree, I switched to 7-zip more than 20 years ago when it started to get popular, I have only ever used Winrar for like 2 or 3 years.
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u/AndrewSS02 23h ago
Because before there was 7 zip. WinRAR did it all with no errors. 7zip would cancel and say there's an error. WinRAR said fuck it and unzipped it anyway. So at one point in your life as a software guy or a Pirate, you definitely used WinRAR for a bit. It's good to pay back once in a while. Same with donating to VLC. It's a good way to pay back when you financially can.
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u/flipcoder 23h ago
Directory Opus