Looking for a fun new thing to learn or need some software to do a task? Below you will find a list of free software/websites that may fit the bill. Need a computer? Come to any Calvert Library location to use our public desktop computers or laptops. Calvert Library has no affliation with these companies.
We recommend the free, browser-based program called Tinkercad for beginners. Other free programs are Blender and Sketchup. Blender is available on the public internet computers at all Calvert Library locations. Designs can also be downloaded from Thingiverse, a design community for sharing 3D printable objects.
A full-featured music player designed with sound quality and wide, customizable functionality in mind. Over twenty audio formats are supported. Audio is processed in 32-bit for crystal-clear sound. The player features an 18-band graphics equalizer with extra built-in sound effects. You can extend the existing functionality adding Input, DSP and Gen plug-ins from Winamp. You can convert AudioCD to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA. Similarly, you can grab sound from any audio device on your PC to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA formats.
AndreaMosaic is a free image processor that lets you create mosaic or ’tiled’ images using a source image of your choosing and a set of tile images to make it up. You can create multiple tile sets of images, have it use tiles of different shapes (square or rectangular), and lots more.
Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity is free, open source software.
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. It can be used to model, shade, animate, render and composite and create interactive 3d models. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Blender are included and the proper one automatically used on each machine for maximum performance. Blender website Blender tutorials
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
Create an account on codecademy.com and start learning to code. Lots of interactive courses to get you started and a whole community to learn from.
FotoSketcher is a free program allowing you to apply effects to your digital images to turn them into works of art. It includes over 20 effects and requires no artistic abilities to use. 18 different languages are included and switchable under the Help menu.
For more than a decade, the GCFLearnFree.org program has helped millions around the world learn the essential skills they need to live and work in the 21st century. From Microsoft Office and email to reading, math, and more, GCFLearnFree.org offers 125 tutorials, including more than 1,100 lessons, videos, and interactives, completely free.
The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image render-er, an image format converter, etc. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of GIMP are included in a de-duplicated fashion for maximum performance in a smaller install size. GIMP tutorials
IrfanView is a fast, compact and innovative freeware (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows with support for numerous file formats (supported formats), multilingual support, paint tools, skins, slideshow, EXIF/IPTC/Comment text, Adobe Photoshop Filters, directory viewing, batch conversion (with image processing), multipage TIF editing, file search, multimedia playing, printing, embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF, color depth changes, scanning support, basic editing, IPTC editing, effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.), screen capture, icon extraction (EXE/DLL/ICLs), lossless JPG rotation, Unicode, hotkeys, and more. All standard plugins and translations are included with this package.
Choose from thousands of online courses to learn in-demand skills from real-world industry experts. Get started with LinkedIn Learning with your library card.
LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. The main feature is lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough-cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re-encode and thereby losing quality. Or you can add a music or subtitle track to your video without needing to encode. Everything is extremely fast because it does an almost direct data copy, fueled by the awesome FFmpeg which does all the grunt work.
Calvert Library has MinecraftEdu on our public computers! Lots of Minecraft players have created great tutorials to get you started if you are new to it or are trying to figure out some new component to the game like farming, resource generation, buiding mechanisms and more. Lots of links to various written tutorials sometimes with links to videos as well.
Notepad++ is a full-featured text editor with features like: Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding, User Defined Syntax Highlighting and Folding, PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) Search/Replace, customizable GUI with vertical tab and vertical document list, Document Map, Auto-completion: Word completion, Function completion and Function parameters hint, Multi-Document (Tab interface), Multi-View, WYSIWYG (Printing), Zoom in and zoom out, Multi-Language environment supported, Bookmarks, Macro recording and playback, Launch with different arguments, and more. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are included for best feature support.
NET is image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit packages are included for maximum compatibility and performance.
Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. Pixlr tutorials and Templates Pixlr website
PngOptimizer cleans your PNG files of useless or wrong information. Reduces your PNG files weight. Converts into PNG other lossless image formats (BMP, GIF, TGA). Supports animated PNG (APNG). Creates easily available PNG screenshots. Offers a simple and productive user interface. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit version are included and the correct one automatically selected for best performance. Note that it will not currently run on Windows XP 64-bit.
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Scratch Help Scratch website
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VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility. It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of VirtualDub are included and the correct one is automatically used for your current machine to ensure best performance.
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, WMV, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.