PhotoStory+and+Audacity

Photo Story lets you create slideshows using your digital photos. With a single click, you can touch-up, crop, or rotate pictures. Add stunning special effects, soundtracks, and your own voice narration to your photo stories. Then, personalize them with titles and captions. Small file sizes make it easy to send your photo stories in an e-mail. Watch them on your TV, a computer, or a Windows Mobile–based portable device.
 * Photo Story 3 Information ** 

The approach is intuitive and wizard driven so first time users of PCs, digital cameras and photo processing on the PC are really catered to in this product. Users import pictures into the program, perform a whole range of simple to rich edits and then add the photo to an evolving slideshow timeline. Most of the operations are intuitive including drag and drop repositioning of images in the timeline.  For example, in the picture above Photo Story is smart enough to detect the black borders and asks if the user want to trim them away. At the bottom of the picture viewer are five icons for color correction, red eye removal, rotates the picture left, rotate the picture right and a more complete photo editor. That editor enables the user to do the following edit operations: black and white, sepia, charcoal effects, watercolor style, diffused glow, negative, color sketch - this is a smattering of the dozens of effects available in photo editing programs like Adobe Photoshop - but still impressive.

The next phase of Photo Story telling has users add texts and captions by clicking the next button at the bottom left of the screen. The timeline of photo at the bottom remains but the photo viewer now becomes a title and captions editor. Click on Next takes the user to the narration and transition stage of creating a photo story. Yes, users can add narration to each photo or the transitions between photos. Dead simple to do.

Now that the slideshow is done, Photo Story output becomes somewhat of a sticky wicket. Photo Story output only runs in XP or a PC with Media Center. Its easy to use and free - as long as you buy into the Microsoft and Windows only output options and XP only limitations. First, if you don't have Windows XP forget Photo Story. Even if you do, make sure its a valid (//not pirated copy//) and XP has been properly activated. So if you have the latest Microsoft XP and/or Media Center enabled, Photo Story is okay as a freebie. 

** Audacity ** is a digital audio editor and recording application. Audacity is cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems.
 * Audacity Information **

Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.
 * Some of Audacity's features include: **
 * Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3
 * Recording and playing sounds
 * Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (//with unlimited Undo//)
 * Multitrack mixing
 * A large array of digital effects and plug-ins.
 * Amplitude envelope editing
 * Noise removal
 * Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transformation algorithm
 * Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample
 * The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed while maintaining pitch (//Audacity calls it changing tempo//), in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc.
 * The ability to change the audio's pitch without changing the speed.
 * Contains major features of modern multi-track audio software including navigation controls, zoom and single track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (//cut, copy, paste//)
 * Converting cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by automatically splitting one track into multiple tracks based on silences in the track and the export multiple option.
 * Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (//including GNU/Linus and BSD)// amongst others.
 * Audacity uses the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface (GUI) on several different operating systems.