HEY HI HERE'S SOME NEAT WINDOWS PROGRAMS I USED TO USE aAA
FOREWARNING: i'm not the best at explaining things sometimes, please bare with me. also, some of these programs have ceased development, so they are a tiny bit outdated.
the w is for software that has a wikipedia page.
the [FOSS] means that the software has a free and open source liscense. NOTE: not all FOSS licenses are created equally, check what the specific licenses and check the rights of such licenses.
---MEDIA PLAYERS/MEDIA COLLECTING-----
---VIDEO [not exclusively but main thing is video]---
Kodi w [FOSS]: in short, a piece of software aiming to be a media center for local files [whether that be mp4, mkvs, movs, mp3s etc etc]. brings all of 'em into one place connected by a GUI. has a bunch of 3rd party plugins for it, but be careful and make sure you're dl'ing them from a trustworthy source [general rule of thumb, but just reiterating that]
VLC w [FOSS]: has a bunch of [relatively] easy to use settings right out the gate, reliable for playing practically any video format under the sun along with being able to transcode from one format to another and also compressing video and audio.
MPV w [FOSS]: a media player with a minimal style GUI. don't let that fool you though, mpv is highly customizable, you can practically shape it into whatever you need in a media player [a bit trickeier to earn how to do though so (as opposed to vlc's settings)]. funnily enough, the best resource i know for this is for anime specifically.
MPC-HC w [FOSS]: a fork [tl;dr: a distinct derivative of a previous piece of software] of mpc. mimics the UI of windows media player, if that's your thing. usually is configured with the K-LITE codec pack and MADVR video processor. best resource i know for this is also for anime specifically, and the same website as previous.
---AUDIO/AUDIO COLLECTION------
foobar2000 w: customizable, has a lot of 3rd party plugins for it, ability to sift through metadata.
MusicBrainz Picard w [FOSS]: a piece of software that automatically adds metadata tagging to your audio files. you sometimes have to manually say "hey this album is this album, actually. please re-ID it" but has a pretty good strike-rate otherwise.
Clementine w [FOSS]: functionality is similar to foobar200, but FOSS this time and has spotify & last.fm [among other services] capabilities [oh, and the ability to fetch missing tags using the MusicBrainz database]
----EBOOK/EBOOK COLLECTION----
Calibre w [FOSS]: when it says on the website "caibre is the one stop solution to all your ebook needs" it isn't joking. convert from format to format, change metadata, send files to e-readers, etc etc. has a bunch of plugins for it as well
----CONSOLE EMULATORS---
Retroarch w [FOSS]: a frontend that aims to have all of your console emulators in one place, under a unifed interface, like Kodi but with roms & emulators [technically, Kodi does have emulator support (and can serve as a exe launcher iirc), but The Main Usage(tm) is with video files, hence it being in the video category]. if you want all of your emus accessable under one interface, retroarch is the main guy. (most of the emulators i mention here have libretro cores). if you want them to be separate things however, here's the rest of the list.
-----Atari---
Stella w [FOSS]: an atari 2600 emulator, the settings are a bit more trickier to fiddle with than the other programs i will mention, though works well once you get it running. unfortunately, this is the only atari emulator that i've personally used before, i can't speak on any others.
---NIntendo---
SNES9x w: as the name suggests, a snes emulator. has a good lot of settings, including filter settings like mimicking old crt scanlines.
Project64 w [FOSS]: a nintendo 64 emulator. [NOTE: i'll get metaphorically hit with with a rock if i don't mention this, project64 used to be bundled with malware, but it's completely safe today, now with just a 30-second long popup asking you to donate.]
mGBA [FOSS]: a game boy advance emulator, has pretty easy to configure settings.
DeSmuME [FOSS]: a nintendo ds emulator, can change screen layou [i.e you can change it horizontal for games like brain training].
---Sony----
Duckstation: a ps1 emulator[NOTE: you have to obtain the BIOS for the ps1 yourself before you can start to emulate]
PPSSPP w [FOSS]: a psp emulator, UI stands out from the rest of the programs on this list, closely resembling and mimicking the actual layout of the PSP.
---DOS---
Dosbox w [FOSS]: a full on DOS emulator, can run most programs that run on a dos-based operating system [with exceptions like pc-9800 games]. unfortunately, the emulator on this list that i've used the least, so i don't have to much to say on it.
ScummVM w [FOSS]: not technically an emulator, but a set of game engine recreations built for DOS adventure games, like the Monkey Island series and sam&max.
----ART----
Krita w [FOSS]: tricky to learn at first UI and configuration/settings wise, but worth it once you learn it.
Medibang: comfortable to use UI, easy to learn. [though, as the ack of marking suggests, not FOSS]
---MISCELLANEOUS-----
-WIKIPEDIA RELATED [how do i describe these?]--
Kiwix w [FOSS]: an offline web browser, for offline usage of websites like wikipedia, stack exchange, and bulbapedia. uses .zim files to store these website's information. you can download these files on their website, and you can even generate your own zim file [granted, if the website you are requesting a zim file of is small enough]
Wikitaxi w: similar to kiwix, but instead requires a database dump of wikipedia [which you can download here] along with time for the program to convert it into a .taxi file. beware, this is a long process.
---TEXT EDITORS----
GNU Emacs w [FOSS]: a text editor and elisp interpreter. i used this program primarily for the tools folks have built with it, like a notekeeping mode and a rss feed reader. a bit tricky to learn at first, but very much worth it in the end, if only for the tools. emacswiki is a very good resource for just about anything you need to know.
Notepad++ w [FOSS]: a simple and easy text editor program, very good for editing configuration files, like what you might want to do with mpv [see top of this post].
---OTHER[the miscellaneous of the miscellaneous]-----
Flashpoint Archive w: a program and project for the purpose of preserving flash games and animations [although has other web plugin projects archived as well, like shockwave]. has two versions, one where it simply has the client for it and you search and download the projects you want, and one where it downloads ALL of the content, no online usage after it downloads required. [the latter is, as expected, very large, beware before download.]
Cleanflash: a distribution of the original adobe flash player [for some reason, adobe kept giving out updates to flash player to users in china, even after the discontinuation date. cleanflash is built on this, albeit with any of the bad bits like adware cleaned up and removed, hence the name.]
Rufus w [FOSS]: a program built for creating bootable usb flash drives. [i.e, you want to have a bootable usb drive for a certain Operating System to install on another computer.]. very simple to use, just give it an iso file and a target device [the device you want to flash the iso to] and bam.
