Latest Posts from Download Squad

Voicebox is one of those little utilities we all eventually find and then fall in love with. Voicebox just converts text into speech via an .aiff file. But oh how nice it works! It's one simple window with a big text box for typing. It then has a drop down box for choosing one of the many built-in voices for Mac OS X. You can adjust the pitch and speed of the text being spoken as well. Plus it ends up being exported as a simple .aiff file. Perfect. The shareware version only allows you to have 20 words of text spoken. Of course if you really wanted to you could just keep doing 20 word files and then mixing them together in another program, but I personally think it's worth paying for. Great for electronic artists who want fake robots talking over their songs or for radio. They stopped development it looks like at 1.4, but go check it out and see for yourself!

 iChatStatus used to be the hip iChat plug-in that let you display your current iTunes track in a number of ways (albeit small, but a number). But since Tiger's version of iChat (3.0) has been out, many people have just simply stopped using iChatStatus. iChat 3.0 comes with the option of displaying your iTunes music track while you're chatting. Plus, iChatStatus hasn't been updated in quite awhile. Sorry iChatStatus. You were good to us before you got mauled to death. We salute you!

Yes. You're reading right. Blizzard released an update for Starcraft: Brood War. A seven year old game that the company is still backing. Way to go. The update fixes some bugs and online play problems. They also "fixed a typo." Clearly that was needed. Your units displayed within the minimap will now always be on top to ensure that they are not hidden by another player's units. If you still play Starcraft and won't give it up, download the update if you haven't already.

Drip is a utility for Linux that'll convert a DVD to a nice DivX file. This is a great program that's very easy to use and has a nice layout. Of course we know you'll be using it to make War of the Worlds home movies into DivX files....right? You do however need a bunch of things already on your system to install it and get it working though. You can see that full list here. The download itself is just a tarball so you should be used to those, and if you aren't...well...whatever. Drip works pretty efficiently too. I don't exactly have any "home movies" laying around to try out but I was able to test it out on some other DVDs laying around. You know, free ones. Give it a try if you're looking for an easy way to get DivX files in Linux.

Sometimes we want to let the whole world know what we're up to. I mean everything. We have blogs, webcams, chat rooms, and tons of other things to let us communicate with people. A lot of people take pride in what music they listen to and like to share it with others. Whether for just the public eye or to see if anyone else likes the same kind of music, you still need a way of getting it on the web easily. iTunes Publisher does just that. Currently at 4.3.3, it's a great little program that let's you export your iTunes library in a number of ways. You can customize it by font and look, what columns you want shown (Artist, Album, Song, etc.), and how you want your data exported. The best way is probably via a webpage. It's listed nice and neat with tables so that everyone can just scroll away. Plus it's one file and you can easily upload it and update it anywhere. I highly reccomend checking it out if sharing your musical tastes with the world is your sorta thing.

We Mac users always try to stay away from the Microsoft empire as much as possible.
However, sometimes we're forced to deal with certain things; in this case, Windows Media Audio.  WMA format isn't very good in my opinion. Aside from having DRM 99% of the time and poor quality audio, the compatability issue is the problem. You can only play it in Windows Media Player or  a rare third-party player that supports it. This is where EasyWMA comes in. Using a nice Cocoa interface, you can just select what format you want to convert it into (MP3, AIFF, etc), drag the .wma files into the box, and just click start. Now you have super-compatible MP3 files at your disposal for any program, digital audio player, or CD.  It's just that easy (yeah, we all saw it coming).

Allright, anyone who has ever downloaded movies off P2P will know this. You sometimes just get unplayable, third-world formats. Why? Because people just don't get it, which is something we can't fix. However as far as the movies go, there is hope in the form of VLC Media Player. VLC is the solution for anyone who has had issues with playing movie formats. It's available for a slew of platforms from Windows to Linux to PocketPC. I even swear by it. If VLC can't play it, it's an unplayable format. If you download movies off the web, P2P, or wherever and go to open them in Quicktime, you may find yourself with an error message about the codec. Just use VLC. It can handle VCDs, AVI, MPG, DiVX, xVID, and many other acronyms. Another great feature is that it can do movies full screen and has great control. If you don't have Quicktime Pro, you're kinda out of luck here which is why VLC is so great. Plus, it's free, so go get it and try it out now if you haven't already.