Among this collection of 13 incredibly useful Websites, you’ll find treasure troves of music and audio, plus online photo and video tools. And if you have a lot of media items or other files that you want to share with family, colleagues, or friends, we’ve spotlighted several Web services that can help.
We looked at a total of 52 incredibly useful sites. For the others, check out the stories below.
- 16 Productivity-Enhancing Websites
- 13 Top-Notch Web Services for Business and Communication
- 10 Great Shopping, Dining, and Travel Websites
- 52 Incredibly Useful Sites: The Full List
More Music, Please
Get Out, Get Noticed
Whether you’re promoting your band’s latest gig, hosting a community crab feed, or just looking for something to do tomorrow night, Eventful‘s location-based listings of concerts, clubs, movies, and events make it easy to find your scene.
Snip Any Tune to Ringtone Size
Sure, your smartphone can make a ringtone out of any song in your music library, but will it jump to your favorite line? Nope. CutMP3 lets you upload any song to its music editor and then trim it down to the portion you want for your ringtone. Once you’ve picked your clip, just save the track to your phone and set it as your ringer. Easy-peasy, and totally free.
Book Bonanza
While the site itself is hideous, the selection of books is immense. Search by author, genre, or title, and download the book as a zipped set of MP3 files or subscribe to its chapters on an iTunes RSS feed.
In addition to the free audiobooks, Librophile.com offers a wide assortment of premium audiobooks for prices starting as low as $7.
Prettier Pictures
Citrify’s free, no-hassle photo editor lets you upload an image and start editing immediately. Add cool effects, captions, and adjust your colors, and then click ‘Save’ to put the finished product back on your PC’s hard drive.
Easy Movie Editing
What Photoshop.com is to pictures, Pixorial is to home movies. You get 10GB of storage space for your video files, and the ability to upload 800MB of AVI, FLV, MP4, MPEG, DV, and WMV files at a time.
Once your video is uploaded, you can use Pixorial’s simple online editor to assemble your footage in a storyboard and to merge clips together. You then add some transitions and titles, and choose how you’d like to share the result; you can download the movie as a high-res or low-res file, post it to a social network, or order it on DVD.
Super Slideshows
Creating photo slideshows is easy enough with most photo editing apps, but making your slideshows sing takes a lot of work. The Animoto automated slideshow creator turns your photos and videos into stunningly cool slideshows complete with music and impressive transition effects that look professionally made.
You upload your images and video clips, and then upload music or choose from the site’s fairly limited selection of songs. Give your slideshow a title, and a few minutes later you’ll receive an e-mail telling you the show is ready to view. You can share your video on social networks, e-mail the link to your contacts, embed it on a blog, or send it to YouTube. For $5, you can upgrade it to a high-res MP4 that you can take anywhere, or burn it to a DVD.
Animoto’s free slideshows are limited to 30 seconds, but for $3 per slideshow you can create a full-length video worthy of showing at a family gathering, a wedding, or a business conference.
Stream Your Life
Groups and companies can also use Livecage for free videoconferencing; it supports up to ten users at a time.
Stream From Anywhere
If you really want to share your life with the world, you want to do it wherever you are. Qik gives you the tools to stream live video straight from your Android handset, iPhone, BlackBerry, or nearly any other smartphone. Your friends and fans can watch your broadcasts live on your own site or on Qik.com, or they can come back later to watch the recording.
A Single Spot for Your Important Stuff
Anonymous Sharing
When you need to share a large file, or a collection of files, with someone, you could always use the tried-and-true YouSendIt service. But we prefer Drop.io for its ability to create anonymous drop boxes of up to 100MB for free, complete with user-defined expiration dates and password protection.
A Really Big Drive
Humyo offers 10GB of free online storage. Sweet.
Simple Sync and Remote Access
What separates Live Mesh from simpler services like Dropbox is its ability to remotely access your other PCs via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop service, as if you were sitting in front of them. Install Live Mesh on each PC you’d like to access, and then leave the systems on to keep them available. When the computers are turned off, their synced files and folders remain available through the Web-based Live Desktop.
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