Anywho, I've noticed that (some, mainly new) people don't know how to do some stuff, and I see lots of requests for color reductions and the like, plus music-related crap such as converting and/or editing. Well, all I'm doing is recommending some programs any serious ZQuester would find extremely useful. (well, aren't I presumptuous?
)Audacity
I use mainly for converting MP3s and WAVs in a way to shrink their file sizes, also useful for mixing and splicing the aforementioned file types. Occasionally to convert MIDIs into MP3s with no change in the sounds (simply by recording while a MIDI is playing).
Anvil Studio
MIDI editing and creating. Not much else to say other than it's very good and useful (for obvious reasons
)Synthfont
For directly converting MIDI's into MP3s (or WAVs) and changing the sounds of the instruments (because it uses soundfonts). Some soundfonts sound better than others. IMO, the one that comes with SynthFont is crap, but the one that comes with FinaleNotepad is VERY good. Of course, if you already FN, go ahead and copypaste the .sf2 file.
IrfanView
IrfanView is a livesaver when you need to convert images to other formats, such as PNGs and BMPs into GIFS, PNGs and BMPs being a ***** to work with in ZC/Q. It's also good at reducing color depths, to 256, or 16 without losing too much quality (unlike MS Paint which does some kind of weird pixelization crap when you open a BMP/PNG and save as a GIF)
Adobe Photoshop and Acoustica MP3 to WAV Converter are also good, but they're not free. Just do what I did and find cracks/registration code generators.
That about covers it, at least, these are the programs I use. If anyone has any others to add go right ahead
