Free Download A Day

Some folks just can't get enough karaoke. Whether it's the challenge of trying to match the original performance, the camaraderie of hangin' with the other performers, or your sincere desire to win at American Idol, you've just got to have more. It's not always convenient to head down to the local watering hole to get your groove on, but you've just gotta' have it. What to do?

KaraFun takes your computer and turns it into a high-powered karaoke machine, and more. Not only will it play most standard-format karaoke files, but you can create your own as well. Your mileage may vary in removing the vocals from your track, but you can always go get real backing tracks. Enhance playback by slowing-down (while learning a piece) or speeding-up (blow everybody's mind) the tempo. Change the key to match your range without sounding like you're singing with The Chipmunks.

KaraFun free is for home use only. It's a Windows application.

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Back in the day, Monopoly was my favorite board game. While it was always gratifying to get to choose the Scotty dog as a playing piece, and I always loved charging rent for Boardwalk (not so excited about paying it when I didn't own the property, however), probably the most exciting part was getting that pile of money to start with. All you had to do was to sit down at the table and you got a free $1500, by far the easiest money anybody ever made. Of course, you couldn't do much with that money, because it wasn't real, other than to the other players in the game. Nevertheless, play money can be oddly satisfying in its own way.

Printable Play Money lets you print all the money you could ever possibly need. Like the Monopoly money, you can't really spend it anywhere, but then maybe that's just a way to encourage saving, right? Use your play money to help teach kids how to work with money—count it, make change, that sort of thing. Or print a bunch of it and roll around on the floor in it, pretending you're Scrooge McDuck. Use it to light your cigars, proving to the world that you've literally got money to burn. (Don't really do that—fire's not safe, and goodness knows what type of nasty chemicals are in your printer's ink.)

Printable Play Money is free to download and print. You'll need a copy of the free Adobe Reader application to print out your fortune.

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Whether you like up-tempo music or prefer the slower stuff, you need to know how many beats per minute that new–or old–song has. Want to build a playlist of fast stuff? iTunes and other digital music players will let you keep track of the tempo of your various songs, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out just what exactly that number is for each of your tracks. Can you imagine hanging out with a stopwatch for hours–or days–counting beats? Neither can I.

BPM Analyzer by MixMeister can give you a hand with this daunting task. Just fire it up, open your audio files, or just drag-and-drop them onto this app, and you'll generate accurate listings of the number of beats per minute of your collection. You can update the ID3 tags in your music files directly from the tool, so there's no need for tedious and error-prone transcribing of this data. You can also generate reports and export this data to any other apps that can make use of it.

BPM Analyzer is free for non-commercial use. It's available for both Windows and Mac systems.

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Way back when, we all used to read books. That was before the rise of the World Wide Web, e-Books, and Kindle. You're reading along, but eventually came to the point where you needed to put that book down—maybe it was time for school, or dinner, or maybe it was lights-out and off to sleep. How do you keep track of where you were reading? You could always lay the book down face-first on a table, but that could crack the book's spine. Go ahead and dog-ear a page, but eventually all the pages will be dog-eared and that won't be much of a help. So they invented this neat technology called a bookmark. It's kind of like a PostIt, but without the adhesive.

If you actually read books still, maybe you'd like a nifty bookmark to go with it. Check out the selection offered by Free Printable Bookmarks. They've got a couple dozen different designs to choose from. Just grab one you like from such categories as Adventure Bookmarks, Mystery Bookmarks, Christian Bookmarks, and more. Each bookmark is available as a PDF file. All you need to do is download it, print it out, trim it to size, and let the reading begin.

The bookmarks at Printable Bookmarks are all available to download for free.

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Are you, or someone you know, expecting? Even though it feels like the pregnancy is going to last forever, the Blessed Event will be here before you know it. You're going to want to let everybody know about it: date, time, weight, and length—all the vital statistics. And the last thing you want to do after coming home with your new Bundle of Joy is to head off to the stationery store. So maybe you want to think about birth announcements that you can print yourself? That's probably a much better solution.

Printable Birth Announcements has over twenty different designs to choose from. They've got announcements for boys and for girls; announcements with room for photos and footprints; they've even got announcements for adoptions. And the best part, aside from the whole not-having-to-go-out-shopping thing is that they're available for free. Just pick the one, or ones, you like, download them, and print them out with your copy of Adobe Reader. Or if you want to customize your announcements, for a couple bucks you can grab Microsoft Word DOC-compatible versions that you can personalize.

Either way, congratulations on the new addition. And don't forget to start saving for college!

Download Printable Birth Announcements

Way back when, music used to come on things called "records." Those gave way to the audio cassette, which in turn was replaced by the compact disc. Lately, one of the biggest ways that music is distributed is via digital files—the MP3 and all of its cousins. Since these guys work with your computer, your smart phone, and a bunch of other platforms, they're quite handy to have. Of course, in order to listen to them, you do need the appropriate application. The phonograph played records; the tape deck played tapes, but your computer handles myriad other tasks, as well as taking care of your need for a soundtrack for your life. Luckily, it's not that hard to find that app.

aTunes is a digital audio player, similar in design and intent to iTunes, WinAmp, and all the others. One big difference here is that aTunes is written in Java. That means it'll run on any machine that handles Java—just try running iTunes on your Linux box and you'll see why this is important. You can listen to all the file formats you'd expect, and maybe even some you didn't. Use it to organize your music collection, and even rip tunes from your CDs so you can bring them along.

aTunes is a free download. It should run on any machine with a current Java runtime installed.

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While it may not be the biggest holiday on the calendar, who can deny that Dear Old Dad deserves his own day? Whether he sat up with you all night when you were sick, checked for monsters under the bed, taught you how to throw a ball, or helped you struggle through algebra, he's a heck of a guy. Help make his big day more special with some free printables.

Wish the old man the very best with a printable Father's Day greeting card or two. Add a special Father's Day gift tag to the goodies you've got in store for him. One of those gifts could be a special picture you've colored just for him—your own original work of art—that's sure to be posted prominently on the refrigerator. And you can always award him a World's Best Dad certificate.

All of us here at FreeDownloadADay.com wish your dad—and all the dads—the best Father's Day yet.

Blip is an interesting app that lets you see what you're listening to—or even draw it. Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order.

With Blip, you're given an area to draw in, and the tools to execute your work of art. Once you draw on this canvas, the magic begins. The application interprets your drawing and converts it into sound. Each region in your drawing represents a particular sound, with the length and pitch of that sound being a function of where in your picture a given point lies. You can complete the drawing of your masterpiece before you pull the trigger on the app, or you can keep adding to your picture while Blip plays what's already on the screen. Either way, it's pretty likely that you're going to end up with a one-of-a-kind musical creation.

Blip is a free Windows application.

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Whether it's in the smooth, measured hand of Mozart, or the frantic chicken scratchings of Beethoven, if you're a serious composer or arranger and want people to be able to help you to realize your artistic vision, you've got to be able to put your musical ideas down on paper. Getting those ideas in black and white can be a challenge. Whether it's page after page of manuscript paper itself to have to keep track of and organized, the writing of the notes, time signatures, and other musical notation, or most importantly the ability of your performers to actually read your writing, it's always going to be a challenge. A tool like Forte can help you to hear with your ears what you can already hear in your head.

Forte is a musical notation tool that lets you compose and write music on your computer. You can easily edit your work, including drag and drop capabilities. Transpose an entire piece, or just one instrument or voice, making it easier to replace that F horn with the E-flat one you really wanted. You can generate midi files as well, so if the Philharmonic isn't available to play your masterpiece, you can at least listen to an electronically-generated version.

Forte is a Windows application. It works best on systems running Windows 2000 or later.

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We're all familiar with the game "Name That Tune". Given a ridiculously short snippet of music, contestants try to win fame and fortune by correctly identifying a song—"I can name that tune in two notes, Tom!" Or if they come up short, they're sent home with some lovely parting gifts.

In the game show, if you didn't correctly name the song, at least they would reveal the right answer for you eventually. Today, though, if you hear a song on the radio, or even on the Internet, you might not be so lucky. That's a great tune, but nobody's there to tell you what it is, or who's performing it. Maybe you should ask Tunatic.

Tunatic comprises two pieces: a client app you install on your local machine, and a server that it talks to. Use a microphone to grab a sample of what you're listening to and Tunatic will do its best to tell you everything it knows about that song. It only works with recorded music, so you can't play the song back on your kazoo, and of course it only knows tunes that are in its database. So the next time your toes start tapping, give Tunatic a try.

Tunatic is a free download. It's available for both Mac (OS X 10.2 and later) and Windows (Win2k+).

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