We're going to take a quick look at SourceForge, a site that hosts projects developing open-source software, to show you how you can find some free programs and get them set up on your computer. This can be a little intimidating in some cases, as the projects are being updated and posted by the same people actually writing the code — there's no marketing or paid tech support team there to make things clear for you and explain the software in plain English. With a little practice though, you should be able to navigate the site and find some cool tools to download.

To get started, check out the Software Map, a list of popular downloads and a breakdown of what's available by category. Some of these are really technical, like the SysAdmin or Clustering categories, but you'll also see more familiar categories, like Games and Multimedia. We'll take a look at what's available in Multimedia.

 

Right away you can see a list of projects, the most popular ones first. On the left is a tree view showing we're looking at Multimedia projects now, and letting us choose sub-categories to narrow our focus even more, looking only at DVD-related software, for example. From just this first page of projects, there are already several really cool programs showing up:

Audacity is a powerful audio editing program that lets you make recordings, edit and cross-fade multiple tracks, apply filters to create different effects, and output your results. As the program page notes, it's a popular tool with amateur podcasters, giving them the ability to easily correct volume levels and edit out background noises, letting their productions sound slick and polished.

Media Player Classic is a throwback to older versions of Windows Media Player. The project intends to emulate the look-and-feel of WMP before it started incorporating features like burning CDs, integration with online stores, and managing your media library. MPC wants to do just one thing: play video files. As a result, it's a much smaller, streamlined program that also happens to supports a ton of file types. 

For our purposes, let's take a look at Sweet Home 3D, a design program that helps you choose how to arrange furniture and optimize your room layouts, giving you 3D previews of what the possibilities look like. You can click on a project name to take a closer look at what it does, what recent changes have been made to the software, and check out some screenshots. If you're in a rush, you can always just hit that download button on the right and cut to the chase.

On the download page we're given a choice of operating systems. One of the great things about open source software is that if the core of the program is written to be machine-independent, programmers can easily maintain versions for different operating systems without having to start over from scratch for each. Here, we can get Sweet Home 3D for Windows, Mac, or Linux machines. One click on the download link, and we're on our way.

If your download is going too slow, you can try another mirror. Mirrors are just servers located around the world, sending out copies of identical files. Clicking on the "Mirror" link brings up a list of those hosting the file you want to download. The North American server in Virginia was only giving us around a 7KB/s download speed, but switching to the German server, even though it's much farther away, bumped up our download to a comfortable 275KB/s.

That's all there is to getting the software. Each program will have different ways to install it and configure it, which will be discussed back on the project page. Although you won't find the sort of one-on-one phone or email support like you often get with software you pay for, SourceForge projects have online forums and help pages to try and ease over any bumps you might run into. The developers creating these programs are doing so because they want people actually using them, so it makes sense that the open-source community puts forth an effort to make their programs as accessible as possible.

You can also usually find great information by checking out a project's external website, if it has one. For Sweet Home 3D, we can access it by navigating to "Web Site" under "Summary". Not only does this particular site include a user guide, but it has tutorial videos to help get you started.

If you explore the other categories on SourceForge, you should be able to find dozens of free programs that interest you in some way. Even if you're just curious, the price is right for doing a quick download and checking things out. Be sure and get back to us if you find anything really amazing that we need to know about and share with the rest of our readers.