Multimedia

Yet another post for you with some advise. Previously I suggested several programs enhanceing security on your computer, today free multimedia recources are the topic. These are my personal favourites, so in no way should this be considered a comment on the quality of others that are not mentioned.

Audio

Foobar: can be used as audio player, I just use it to convert music files.
KMPlayer: see below under video.
MediaMonkey: great for updating tags for your musicfiles, capable of converting to other formats (i.e. flac, wav to mp3 ) more details here.
VLC Player: see below under video.
Windows Media Player: can update your tags but cannot play all formats, nor can it convert files.

Video

DivX Player: do not use it for playing video, merely its codec function should you insist on using Windows Media Player.
KMPLayer: easy to use, has numerous internal codecs and as such capable of playing all the videofiles I have. Added benefit, subtitles for those pesky foreign films!
VLC Media Player: most consider this the best available, although less userfriendly than the KMPlayer. Has numerous internal codecs and as such capable of playing all the videofiles I have. Added benefit, subtitles for those pesky foreign films!
Windows Media Player: since I discovered the KMPlayer, and the VLC Media Player, I no longer use this for video files.

Subtitles

Open Subtitles: when you are looking for subtitles for those unintelligible languages. How to use them is explained here.

P2P
eMule: not fast, but lots of music archives. 
Tribler: nice simple 
Vuze: great for video

Restoring seperate media tracks from one single file

A CD may be ripped into one single large copy, usually a flac or ape-file. Extracting individual tracks, or splitting, is easy using Foobar. You will need a so-called cue-file. This contains the relevant information telling Foobar, or some other program, where the tracks start and end, and also what their tags are. When you open it with Notepad, or any other text-editor, it looks somewhat like this:

TITLE "Album title"
PERFORMER "Name of artist"
FILE "filename.ape" APE
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "First track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "Second track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 06:42:00
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "Third  track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 10:54:00
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Fourth track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 17:04:00
  TRACK 05 AUDIO
    TITLE "Fifth track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 25:44:00
  TRACK 06 AUDIO
    TITLE "Sixth track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 30:50:00
  TRACK 07 AUDIO
    TITLE "Seventh track title"
    PERFORMER "Name of artist"
    INDEX 01 38:24:00

(Note: the file in this example is an ape-file, make sure that the coloured words, in the above example ape and APE, are the same. Should the file, you are splitting, be a wav-file then change both into wav and WAV. Save the changed file. INDEX identifies the points in time the tracks are located in the single file, here "filename.ape".)

If you have no tags (in the above example TITLE and PERFORMER) just extract the tracks, and either add them manually or find them using MediaMonkey (I like it, but you can use others such as Windows Media Player too). What to do with those cue-files is explained here. (Note: the links I use, in this post, may discuss other software, ignore it and use either Foobar or MediaMonkey. They work the same way and are from sites I know and trust) In short, if you open the cue-file in Foobar it will show you the tracks. Select them and choose convert, i.e. into mp3.

With the above in mind you can listen to your expanded music library or start watching those great films. Have fun!