Best Utilities Under 3MB (Preview)

Just to give you and idea of some of the programs I will be reviewing, here's a list. Many are under 1MB! The list is just in alphabetical order as these applications fulfill many different purposes, and ranking them would not be a useful measure.

Audio Book Cutter Portable (2.59 MB)
Deskwin Portable (410 KB)
DVD Shrink (885 KB) *
MirandaPortable (1.74 MB)
MowSaikSharp (84 KB) *
Notepad++ (2.26 MB)
PNG Optimizer (523 KB)
SpeQ Portable (581 KB)
uTorrentPortable (~890 KB)
XMPlay (300KB - 1MB) **

*Not technically portable but runs without needing reg keys
** Varies depending on plug-ins and skins

I may think of a few more and if you have any you'd like to see please let me know!

Best Utilities Under 3MB - PNG Optimizer

Some of the most useful utilities are often the smallest. Non-Open Source users may be used to a program that installs hundreds of MBs or multiple GBs at a time, but many of the best portable apps and useful programs are small enough to run off a floppy (Remember those days?). In this series we consider programs under 5MB, a size good enough for even a 64MB or 128MB flash drive.

In the previous post we considered Audio Book Cutter, coming in at 2.59 MB. Today we consider PNG Optimizer which installed is only 523 KB! You can get it here.

PNG Optimizer is kind of a niche program, designed to convert more bloated image formats into the web optimized PNG format. It supports BMP, TGA, GIF, or older PNG files, as well as screen shots pasted from CTRL-Print Screen. To convert files simply drag them over the small window screen, and PNG optimizer will create new PNG files with the same name in the same directory without deleting the original file. The speed is fast, taking only a couple of seconds per image, and the program displays the status and progress of each file.

When pasting a screen shot using the CTRL-Print Screen operation, simply click on the Optimizer window and paste. The program will create a PNG file with automatic naming conventions in the PngOptimizer\Data folder.

The program is best for batch conversions especially when a lot of raw files are created, such as in animation projects. Most of the functionality in the program can be found in other graphics editors but for single operation conversions, this tool is a nice little add on. There are several other programs that may have slightly better optimization algorithms, but for portable use this is the best out there.

Interlude: Audio Book Cutter Portable or "Maybe this will get me to finally listen to my pastor's sermons"

Sorry for the long time between posts. Rather than getting into the next part of the portable browser wars I thought it would be nice to do a couple of short reviews on some really neat programs I've been using lately and get back to the longer articles when I have the time.

First off is the beta test of Audio Book Cutter Portable which you can find here. With this program you can take your longer Audio Book or podcast files and split them up into shorter files, all without re-encoding the MP3's. This makes it much easier to find your place, especially on an MP3 player or when burned to a CD, and makes the splitting process very fast, under a minute for files about an hour long at 64kbps.

The installation is simple, download and run the EXE. Once installed splitting files is easy:

To Split an MP3:

• Select the file
• Choose a prefix and average length (I recommend 3 minutes)
  
• Choose an output location and go

In order to split the file Audio Book Cutter uses silence detection to make clean breaks in the file. For speech and music with clear breaks this method works well, but for trance or dance mixes where the sound is basically uninterrupted, the cuts tend to be much larger than the desired average.

Also, while track information is stored in the file, there is no option for setting the album title, which registers as unknown on most players. This means that any other files with unknown albums will also be played with the audio book files if the user wants to play by album. It is relatively simple in Windows, however, to set this album value.

The default prefix is track which works well when outputting the files to a new folder. However, the user should be careful if they want multiple books in the same folder to rename the prefixes accordingly otherwise the already created files will be overwritten.

All in all a useful application for those who want to find their place in podcasts on their MP3 player, and coming in at about 2.5 Megs, this program is a must have for portable app audiophiles.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention. When playing the files back on an MP3 player there is a slight (less than a second) pause whenever track transitions occur. This may be primarily because of the player and not the program. It is not enough to disrupt the listening experience.