OPEN & PLAY MEDIA FILES
Take your music collection with you wherever you go
Minimum USB: 32MB
A friend is having a party, and they’ve asked their guests to bring some music – you included. Impress other guests by taking your tracks on a USB stick with Musicbee ( www.snipca.com/32537). It’s a portable music player that lets you play your music directly from the stick without having to drag it on to your host’s computer (and potentially infringing copyright). It’s also a neat solution for a family holiday where there’s just one laptop to share, allowing each member to take their own music library with them and play their own tracks when they want to.
It looks great and has 10- and 15-band graphic equalisers to tweak the sound quality to how you want it, too. It supports gapless playback so one tune plays straight after another (tick the ‘remove silence…’ box – see screenshot right), can convert stereo tracks to surround sound and supports plug-ins from Winamp, a rival music player that’s been around for more than 20 years, to expand its built-in features.
Open unrecognised files
Minimum USB: 64MB
JPEG, GIF and PNG are perhaps the most common image formats in use today, but they’re far from the only ones. Over time, preferences change, computers and file formats become more efficient, and old technology – including old formats – fall by the wayside. Unless you keep converting your data to the latest format every few years, there will come a time when it can no longer be opened – by Windows or anything else.
Next time you come across an old folder full of images whose file format you can’t open, Irfanview ( www.snipca. com/32551) may provide your best solution. Available on the Portableapps platform, it opens 119 image formats and 27 audio and video formats (see some of them in the screenshot below). On top of this, it can even give you access to images not intended for PCS, like those originally generated for use on the ZX Spectrum, Amiga and more.
While you’re at it, add a copy of the portable edition of VLC Player ( www. snipca.com/32552) to your toolkit. It opens a wide variety of video files, supplementing standard digital and DVD formats with niche options like subtitle files and legacy media like the earliest releases of Realvideo, which are now over 20 years old. If someone asks you to help recover lost footage from a birthday party, wedding or Christmas bash, VLC Player could make you their friend for life.