What I really love about this freeware app is that it isn’t just a place to store your recipes by typing a list of items you need to make it, and some text of explanation. In fact, I’m testing the application as I write and I am more and more impressed with it. I added “curry” as an ingredient and I immediately got three suggestions (curry, green curry and curry powder). More on the details later on, let’s take a look at installing it.

Gourmet recipe manager is meant for the GNOME environment, which means Linux, however, it works an all systems supporting the GTK environment, which means Mac and PC users can rejoice! The current Windows version is 0.13.4, one version behind the latest. Is suggest downloading ” gourmet-0.13.4-1-full_gtkglade-2.12.9.exe” which includes the GTK environment. One note to Windows users. i couldn’t run the app, I got some error, then I went to its install folder, ran “Gourmet_debug.exe” and now it works. I don’t know if this will work for you, let’s hope so. Ok, let’s see what this app can do!

The whole system of Gourmet Recipe Manager is awesome! Adding a recipe is a 4 step process. First you have to add some general info like type of food, cooking time and so on. The you can add ingredients, which I have previously said is done in a very cool way. There is a small details menu at the bottom, expand it and add the items there, I think it is more accurate and easy to use this way. When you enter an ingredient the ingredient key and shopping category will change automatically. I haven’t come across an ingredient it doesn’t recognize, from curcuma to coriander, it knows all spices, and everything else! Once done just add the instructions and the notes. I think it makes sense to make the instructions as short as possible and add notes for less experienced budding chefs.

When you have a recipe you have another set of tools at hand. Taking a look at the recipe card you can take a look at the nutritional info. You may have to add the missing info, but this is as simple as clicking on an automatic searcg entry. For example, there were two selections I could make for chicken breast, I just had to choose on. i immediately got detailed nutritional information on my recipe, great for when you’re going on a diet, or if you want to live a healthy life.

You also have a shopping list generator. Again, the whole mentality of the app is in here. Some very simple things are added to make your life easier, like being able to drop an item into an “already have” list. This is great since a recipe may well need salt and pepper, which you probabyl already have at home. You can then print the list and start shopping. You can actually add other items to the list, so you can input your non-recipe items if you want.

As you can see I’m very excited about this application. I like cooking and eating, but this is only partly the reason. For me it represents the perfect piece of software. I’m sure it has some problems, I’ve only been using it for a day, but the whole mentality in which it was developed is great. This is the type of software which gives you exactly what you need for the purpose it is used. It has great practical things built in, and despite the narrow niche it fills, it is quite flexible. I’m off to donate on the sourceforge page!

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So far in this series of posts I’ve taken a look at Windows Media Player, iTunes, Media Monkey and Helium Music Manager. Today I’m going to review Microsoft’s 3rd Media software offering; the Zune 2.5 Software:

Zune 2.5 Software

I realise the Zune software may not really be considered a serious music management alternative unless you actually have a Zune Mp3 Player, however like iTunes I think you’ll find there’s a lot of reasons to use this program.

The original Zune software was horribly bad, so the decision to start over from scratch was a good one. Unfortunately this meant the initial Zune 2 release lacked some of the functionality of Zune 1, but made up for it by actually being stable and reliable.

Comparisons to iTunes is inevitable, this is after all Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s product. Seemingly the design process for the software was, ‘lets look at iTunes, and do something completely different’, which is actually a good thing.

The result is a very usable and attractive application, in fact although its not designed for advanced users at all, I still enjoy using it just for the well designed UI and attractive theme. Actually what I like best is the playback visualisation. Rather then the usual clouds and swirls, the Zune software displays a full screen of tiled album art, which looks really good:

Tag management and album art retrieval is basic at best, but functional at least. The usual features are included such as smart-playlist creation, sorting by genres and a rating system. The rating system is unusual, simplified to just 3 ratings: ‘nothing’, ‘broken heart’ and ‘heart’. I actually like this because I really hate debating over wether or not a song deserves a 4.5 stars or just plain 4, however I know a lot of people won’t be happy with it.

Really I think Zune’s strength is in it’s interface. In fact I often do use it to browse my library and play songs, just because it does it so nicely. For anything more then that I would suggest the previously reviewed music managers such as Media Monkey.

Conclusion: Great design and UI but lacking in advanced features. Use in conjunction with another music manager or tagger.

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Helium Music Manager

Are you the sort of person who likes to keep every piece of mp3 meta data correct? You have album art for every song in your music library and spend hours keeping your favourite artists’ Wikipedia entry up-to-the-minute?

Well it’s a shame then that many music jukebox applications don’t provide the functionality for people like you. If you’ve ever wanted to be able to browse your library by genre, sub genre, sub-sub-sub genre, music label and city of origin then I have found something in which you can do it.

Helium Music Manager provides a way to actually use every piece of data you have on an artist. You can have biographies, lyrics for every song, associated artists, see which bands individual musicians have been in and much more. Everything is analysed and collected into graphs and statistics, so you can see how much of your library was produced by EMI during the year 1970 if you so wished.

The biggest problem with Helium is just that it takes a lot of time to get your collection organized… there is no ‘batch tag’ option and for every artist you will need to go through and individually download and save data, lyrics, details, biography, reviews etc. However if you don’t mind that, or purchasing it, then I would defiantly recommend this as a music organiser alternative.

Conclusion, if you’re obsessed with your music this will let your organise it totally, however it’s not the most intuitive application at all and may cause some frustration for a lot of users.

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