Slice Splits Your MP3 OGG & FLAC Files Fast & Free!

Do you have a large music library or audio files scattered all over your hard drive? Then chances are that you have a couple of CD wraps or songs that are too long to easily listen to all at once. I’m sure you’ve have the frustration of being in the middle of a great song, and then have some one interrupt you with something to do, causing you to lose your place in your favorite song. Ever try to let a friend listen to a great 30 second guitar solo in the middle of a song, only to spend two minutes trying to find it? These long songs used to be a burden to listen to and they took up lots of a hard drive space. But now, thanks to the free program Slice, you to will be able to enjoy these songs at the your convince!

Slice is a free audio splitter made by NCH of Australia. Slice can split MP3’s, OGG, WAV and FLAC files in to two or more files with the simple click of a button. You can decide to split files into X files, into files of a certain length or after a certain length of silence. When slicing files, you can chose from many preset quality settings or you can specify your own constant or variable bit rate settings.

Because a picture is word a thousand typed words:

Main Interface: 

Options: 

Encoded file output options: 

Slice is a great free program that we use regularly to split hour long lectures into four minute tracks. Slice only takes about 10 seconds to split an hour of audio, which is great because the previous version of Slice took about eight minutes to do this. If you want to make your life easier, then head on over to NCH.com and get your exclusive of Slice for free!

Computer Ownership

Via The Economist

Zune Software Prevents It From Charging

Recently a friend ran in to a very frustrating problem. The battery in his Zune mp3 player had gone completely dead. When he plugged it in to his computer to charge, the Zune software would try to sync the Zune with the computer and one the syncing started, the Zune would turn off because of the low battery. Unfortunately, one the Zune was off, the battery would charge a little and the Zune would turn on, the syncing would start and then it would shut off again. After an hour of this, he called me because he was worried that constantly turning on and off his Zune could damage it. I told him that the Zune was fine and that all he had to do was look through the Zune software settings and turning off the setting that automatically starts syncing.

Once the auto-sync setting was turned off I informed my friend that that feature was one only on older versions of the Zune software and that he should update to the latest version to get lots of new features. After he connected to the internet (dial-up was why the auto update didn’t work.) I had him unplug his Zune, launch the Zune software, click settings, general and then the check for updates button. After the update was complete, he plugged in his Zune and let it get to a full charge, then he reconnected to the internet and launched the Zune software. Next he clicked settings, device and device update. Once the Zune was all up to date. there were no more charging problems.

Have you had any frustrating problems with your mp3 player or music management software? Tell us about it by leaving a comment!

Adobe Air For Linux!

Today, Adobe has finally released Adobe Air or Linux and it can be downloaded here! For those of who don’t know, Adobe Air is a free program for Windows, Mac and Linux  that lets people build feature rich web programs using Flash, Flex, HTML or Ajax. These programs can also be deployed as desktop programs that seamlessly integrate with their web counterpart.

You can read more about Adobe Air in our original post, and to get great free Air apps, you can go to RefreshingApps, or the Adobe Air Market Place. You can read more at ArsTechnica.