Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

The list isn’t very long, but since I’m at it (and it is the holiday season), here’s a list of software that I would (and have) paid for over the last year. Amazing utility for little cost:
* “DBPowerAMP”:http://www.dbpoweramp.com/. I’ve only been using this for a short while, but it is amazing in that it allows conversion from essentially any music format to any other. You can directly go from .WAV to .FLAC or to .AAC. Also, it has the only decent bailer for the iPod so you don’t have use iTunes and synchronize your entire collection, you can take pieces of anything and just copy them over. It’s $19 for the Sveta Portable Audio (that includes their convertor) so that is probably the most amazing bargain. I still the freeware Musicmatch for editing tags (nothing is better) and Exact Audio Copy to copy CDs (because it does the filenaming better), but this is becoming indispensible.
* “Tsunami MPEG Encoder”:http://www.pegasys-inc.com/. Another utility where I paid $25, but lost the serial number. This is probably the best and cheapest MPEG-2 encoder. It does variable encoding and is very artifact free. They have a huge number of tools now, but the latest is called TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. It is $58, but worth it if you really want to fill your DVDs.
* “SmartFTP”:http://smartftp.com. OK, I actually paid $30 for this and have never gotten the serial numbers right, so I’m technically still using it as freeware. It is the most amazing utility for those of us who use Linux sites for hosting. Super convenient and very fast (that’s a theme for this list BTW). Biggest CON is that the queue feature is very unintuitive. Very useful, but not intuitive. You basically drag the files to the queue area and then say where it goes. The opposite of drag and drop.
* “MovableType”:http://movabletype.org. Paid my $99 for an unlimited license. Still the best and most used blog platform around.