Multimedia editing and analysis software

Zero-cost solutions recommended here: software included with your computer (providing basic functionality, sufficient for Music 666), or open source tools (which can be quite sophisticated).

Audio

Audacity, super open source and cross-platform (mac and win) audio editor. Get to know it. Another open source tool is Ardour.

GarageBand for mac has many features as well.

Metadata:

Certain audio file formats have slots for metadata; these include BWF (broadcast wave format) and mp3. This is a pragmatic approach, since when encoded within the file (as opposed to a separate metadata database or table) the metadata will travel with the file automatically. MP3 format includes provisions for unfortunately limited information in the so-called ID3 tags, of which there are two versions (v1 and v2), the latter holding much more than the former. Various ID3 tag editors are available; I've been using fixtag, written in java. iMusic can also edit ID3 tags but the problem is that it stores some information in its own database, so it's hard to tell whether the information you're adding is actually getting stored in the file or not.

For analysis, try Praat, developed for linguistics but suitable for short music segments also.

Video

Windows: Movie Maker, included with Windows up to Vista; Live Movie Maker for Windows 7. Many professional packages are available; probably Adobe's Premiere Pro (see below) is most widely used.

Mac: iMovie is simple video editing software included with every mac; suitable for presentations. Professional package for mac is Final cut pro

You can download a 30 day trial version of the industry cross-platform standard, Adobe Premiere Pro

Image

Windows and Mac operating systems provide simple image editing software, e.g. iphoto for mac. More sophisticated is the open source cross-platform project, GIMP.

Text and qualitative research generally

We'll use the cross-platform HyperRESEARCH - not open source or even free, but a trial version is provided.