Edit Audio and Graphics With Free Programs!

Good software can be really expensive, but it can also be FREE! Here is a list of great open source software tools and links to their homepages where you can download them. As if all the gear you have to buy to play your music doesn't cost enough, the programs to record, edit, and promote your music can wind up costing you even more.

As a company that believes that intellectual property should not be used primarily for profit generation, F Nice Records uses open source software as much as possible. The world of software is finally at a turning point where really good applications are available free to use and modify. Take Advantage of it!

Below you will find programs to create and manipulate images, compose documents, and record and edit audio, as well as a free and powerful operating system so you don't have to be a slave to Apple or Microsoft. 

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is an excellent solution for anyone who does not want to have to buy the horribly overpriced Microsoft Office suite but who still needs to be able to read and create documents compatible with Word, Excel, and the other office programs. OpenOffice is a very powerful set of programs that delivers scarily similar functionality to the Microsoft Office suite. It is free software with versions for just about every computer system from Windows to Solaris Unix (and Mac OS X and Linux of course).

Inkscape

Inkscape is a fantastic vector illustration program. It contains many of the features of expensive commercial vector programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw, and is freely available for download and use.

Vector graphics are very versatile because each object in an image can be individually selected and altered. Furthermore, it is easy to change the size of vector graphics without losing any quality at all. These features make vector programs like Inkscape ideal for quickly creating promotional flyers and graphics to be screen printed on merchandise.

Inkscape is cross-platform, meaning there are versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; all of which are free. This is nice because it allows users to share images and collaborate on projects without need a specific operating system or expensive software.

The GIMP

The GIMP is another amazing open source graphics program. The GIMP can edit images in much the same way as Photoshop. It contains excellent tools for touching up photos, altering colors, and distorting images. The GIMP is also a great piece of software for opening and converting between many different image file formats, because it can open and save to a great range of image and compression types. The GIMP is also fully cross platform, running on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and other Unix variants.

Audacity

Being a record label it only makes sense that we'd have some audio recording and editing software up here. Audacity is just that. As with all the other software here it is fully cross-platform and runs and Mac, Windows, Linux, and other *NIX variants. With Audacity you can do multi-track editing and conversion at least as well as with software that you'd pay a couple hundred dollars for. Audacity has a pretty good set of basic effects built in, and you can find a massive number of plugins through their website.

Audacity can save files as as lossless multi-track projects in it's own format, and can also export to WAV, MP3, and the open formats OGG and FLAC (OGG is a open source replacement for mp3 that has less loss, and FLAC is a lossless replacement for WAV). It can also handle conversion between these formats.

Fedora Linux

So all these free programs are great, but they don't do you a lot of good if you do not have a solid operating system to run them on. Fedora Linux is a totally free, stable, and very powerful operating system, supported by Red Hat Linux. If you are using an illegal or outdated version of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X (or worse Macintosh OS 9), then you should seriously consider switching over to Linux.

F Nice Records uses Fedora Linux as the backbone of our computer network. As you can see from the above software there are plenty of excellent applications for Linux that make it the perfect tool for any aspiring artist who needs to do a whole lot for very little money. Save your cash and use it to buy new equipment or invest it in getting some great merchandise printed. That's what we do!

You can download .iso images of Fedora installation discs for FREE right from the Fedora Project homepage.