AUDIO & VIDEO
The popular audio editor Audacity comes with a handful of tools, but there are plenty more you can add for free. The LADSPA add-on is one of the best, giving you access to more than 90 audio effects. Download it from www.snipca.com/28828, then load Audacity.
First, you’ll need to enable the new effects. In the Effect menu, click ‘Add/ Remove…’ at the top. In the window that appears, click the New option (top right) and you’ll see all the LADSPA effects. To enable them all, click Select All, then Enable (see screenshot right). Alternatively, scroll through the list enabling only the ones you want. Click OK, then return to the Effects menu. At the bottom of the list, you’ll see all the newly enabled effects, ready to be applied to your audio clips.
When it comes to media players, VLC’S comprehensive range of features is hard to beat (read more on page 20). As you might expect, there are loads of add-ons – download them from https://addons.videolan.org.
If you’re hard of hearing or you like to watch foreign-language films, install VLSUB to add subtitles to video files. Go to www.snipca.com/28829, then download the ‘vlsub.lua’ file at the bottom of the page. Next, move this file to your VLC extensions folder (unless you specified a different folder during installation, this is likely to be C:\program Files (X86)\VIDEOLAN\VLC\ lua\extensions). Load VLC and open the video file you want subtitles for. Next, in the View menu, select VLSUB. In the window that appears, click the ‘Search by hash’ button to see if the VLSUB add-on can locate the subtitles you need.
Alternatively, enter the name of the film or programme you want to watch and click ‘Search by name’. From the results, choose the relevant subtitles, then follow the link to download them. Finally, copy the files to the location where your video is stored, then reopen the video file. Your subtitles should now display when the video plays.