If music be the food of love, then eJay is probably the equivalent of a quick fumble round the back of McDonalds. Its takeaway tunes can be swiftly composed and the program requires absolutely no knowledge ...

Back in the eighties, if you'd have told someone that in the future they'd be able to carry around a tiny music player the size of a lighter which was effectively a jukebox with thousands of ...

With so many video and audio formats currently available, there's never been a better time to have an all-in-one encoder that can deal with anything thrown at it. Pegasys has gradually been expanding its range and ...

Now here's a thing. A piece of software that animates a still photograph; specifically a still photograph of your face. Rather than taking a video and playing it back on your PC, you can take just ...

A lot of people think about writing a novel. It sounds like a marvellously fun idea, until you actually sit down at your monitor and start typing away. Or rather, staring away. The first problem any ...

Tesco started this off. Early in 2007 it unleashed a range of software - rebadged Ability products - adorned with its logo and quite low price tags. Woolworths clearly thought that it'd have a bit of ...

Although there's nothing intrinsically wrong with iTunes, for many people the overwhelming attraction is what it works with; the Apple iPod. But when you spend your day working with Windows and Windows programs, it's peculiar to ...

X-OOM, a division of the German company BHV Software, has just launched this application which lets you transfer all those old tunes you have languishing around on vinyl or cassette onto your hard disk. The program ...

When it comes to typists there are generally two types, if you'll forgive the pun (though you really shouldn't). There are touch-typists and then there are those who prefer to exercise their psychic powers and press ...

Any parent who has had to sit through the seemingly interminable Big Cook Little Cook on television will perhaps view this educational CD-ROM as some form of virtual purgatory. After all, it's a programme based around ...

Fish. We watch them to feel better about ourselves. They help us to relax, to unwind, and generally to remember that however bad life might be, at least we're not swimming around in a one foot ...

MP3 Maker 12 is designed to handle your collection of electronic music. Although the title says 'MP3', it's just as happy with WAV, WMA, OGG and AAC files. It can record them, organise them, convert between ...

Although there are several software packages on the market that will play DVD films on your PC, Cyberlink's PowerDVD has always been one of the most user-friendly, both in terms of the operating system and in ...

We have a lot to thank the open source software community for, including Linux, the GIMP and now VLC Media Player. VideoLAN started as a student project at the École Centrale Paris, with the goal of ...

Specialist software for specialist jobs more often than not comes with a specialist price tag. That's certainly the case for Final Draft, a product that usually sells for £150, although we found discounts of £30 at ...

Digital composers of the world rejoice, because Magix's latest music making suite is now available. The question is, does it sound sweet or sour? Is it a symphonic piece of software or the programming equivalent of ...

Finally for this round-up, it's a quick trip over to the GSP range and the budget release of The Cat In The Hat. The program is one of the Living Book range of titles, and that ...

Age is something that slightly hurts Jump Ahead: Reading Year 1, too. Because while it boasts that it supports the National Curriculum, things will inevitably have moved on a little in the years since Knowledge Adventure ...

We've looked at Thomas The Tank Engine games before, but for those who haven't chosen to take the plunge, Focus has now bundled two of them together in a specially-priced double pack. So, for a tenner ...

There's an increasing trend among software publishers to lump a set of applications together and tack on a label such as 'Suite' or 'Studio', no matter how well or poorly those applications interact with one another. ...