Being a musician I’ve spent a lot of time working with programs that convert audio formats and other ones that burn CDs and DVDs and so on, but I’ve never really had a program that could do pretty much everything I wanted to do with digital media in an all in one package.

Well, I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally found a powerful all-in-one multimedia package. It’s called Blaze Media Pro. You can use it as a video converter or as an audio converter - well both really. It just depends on your needs.

Now, some of you only know me from my humor blogs, but I also have two music and guitar related blogs. I’ve been saying for ages that I’ll be posting video guitar lessons and perhaps some audio clips, but I just haven’t gotten around to it because we didn’t have software that did everything we need to do to produce decent video and audio for the blogs, but with Blaze Media Pro I’ve got everything I need!

There are so many features it’s hard to know where to begin! As I said earlier the main features that you might be interested in are video and audio conversion, but you can also use it as a CD or dvd ripper and burner, editing audio and video, recording, playback, video capture, video creation, audio and video merge and much more. You can even burn VCD and SVCD with Blaze Media Pro. Now that’s a cool feature.

When using playback on a music CD you’ll discover that you can perform lyric search, MusicID audio recognition, audio tagging and so much more. This program is going to make it so much easier for me to do video podcasts on my music sites.

You might be wondering what formats this software can convert? Well it’s audio conversions include WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG, AIFF, MPEG-4, ALAC, AAC, M4A, AC3, FLAC plus it can also do two way conversions for AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, ASF, WMV, Flash (SWF and FLV), PSP, 3GP, iPod and MOV for video.

The software can be used to edit MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI and ASF formats, plus there are quite a few special effects and color adjustment operations that can be used when editing a video. Not to mention the fact that audio files can easily be insert into or extracted from the video, plus all the major image formats - GIF, JPG, PNG, RAS, TGA, TIF and more can be inserted or extracted when editing or creating a video.

If you’d like to try this great new all in one multimedia program you can buy it directly from the Blaze Media Pro website or you might want to take it for a test drive first and download their free trial version.

If you, like me, have been looking for an all in one package like this I really think you’ll be impressed with this software.

Let me know if you try Blaze Media Pro - I’d love to see what you do with it.

As I surf the web I keep seeing more and more blogs with Podcasts - audio and video podcasts. I’ve actually been thinking of doing video podcasts on my new site Guitar Licks as I’d like to talk about music, instruments and maybe even give mini video guitar lessons on the site.

One things that’s been stopping me though is that audio and video podcasts take up a lot of bandwidth and storage space.

Luckily, If I decide to go ahead with my plan I won’t have to worry about that anymore because I just visited mypodcast.com where they offer Free Podcast service. I can store my podcasts on the site, and have unlimited bandwidth too. All for free! That’s fantastic!

So, I wanted to let all my readers know about this great new site. I know the people who are already doing their own podcasts will be interested, but maybe some of you are like me and you are just thinking about doing podcasts. Why not give it a try over at mypodcast.com. You have absolutely nothing to lose and a lot to gain given the popularity of podcasts.

Go for it!

Have you heard of the Sharea.com social networking site yet? No? Ok, I’ll tell you about it. Sharea is an online community where you can share you life, upload photos, videos, and audio files, and even create blogs. You’ll be able to organize all of your media as well with an easy web 2.0 interface that lets you simply drag and drop your files into albums or sections of your choice.

You can share you information and files with everyone or set a level of privacy that you feel comfortable with, like maybe just sharing with family and friends- those you’ve invited. You can set certain media so that it can be viewed by all, and you can set other items that you’ve created or uploaded onto Sharea so that it can only be viewed by Friendly contacts, or you can give some people full privileges to see everything that you’ve put on Sharea.

Sharea is completely free to join and once you’ve signed up you can start uploading your own media as well a browsing the site to look at other peoples media files and blogs. You can even comment and vote on other peoples media and blogs, chat with others, search for items of interest, share your opinions, and get organized.

Also, when you sign up you’ll have an upload limit of 3000 MB, unlimited storage and bandwidth, unlimited media albums, 3 privacy levels as I attempted to describe above, 3 media blogs and Instant messenger. If you enjoy using social network sites you’ll probably enjoy Sharea. Give it a try.