Week 7: Tutespark: What is better?

The Tutespark this week following the lecture of creative commons was to download and explore free software.

In order to do this students were advised not to use generic computer software such as, Internet Explorer and Garage Band, just to name a few and instead were instructed to replace common software with competitive open source software, which was to be used to three days.


I choose to use Firefox and Audacity in this trial and was surprised with the results.

Firefox compared to Internet Explorer and Safari seemed to have a faster downloading speed, with easy to use functions.

Usually I use Safari to browse the Internet, but when I replaced this with Firefox, I found that there were less downloading errors, a quick connection speed and no annoying updates popping up on the screen.
Overall I believe that Firefox is a great open source program that proves to be more successful than Safari and Internet Explorer.


The second open source software I used to Audacity, a free music editing program.
I compared Audacity to the Mac music editing software known as Garage Band.

These two were hard to compare. I found that Garage Band was better for making songs and music featuring lots of different instruments. Whereas, Audacity was good for making sound art and 'out of the normal' music complications.

Audacity unlike Garage Band does not have the feature of importing instruments, I can see many sound editors not taking to the structure of Audacity as much as Garage Band.

Although, I did find Audacity easier to use with its simple layout and editing techniques.
The better software I found was Garage Band because of its ability to make professional sounding songs.

In concluding, I believe that all people who use generic software should take on the test of using open source software. Many would benefit from using these unfamiliar programs and in addition may even save money.