Features

Audio editing
Audacity

Price: Free

From http://audacity.sourceforge.net

The open-source Audacity is an audio recorder and editor - and a podcast-maker's dream.

If you're just looking to record audio to your hard disk, it doesn't come much simpler. Just click on the program's chunky record button and Audacity will record from your audio input straight to your hard disk. But Audacity's editing tools match its more expensive commercial alternatives. For example, you can combine tracks, quickly cut audio, import audio from multiple formats, and dub over existing tracks to create multi-track audio mixes. It's also highly extensible. You can add VST plug-ins, popular at the professonal end of the market, which provide a visual interface similar to the physical switches and knobs on audio hardware.

Audacity can import and export Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Wav files. However, like most audio editors it cannot import protected files from music stores.

Alternative: Adobe Soundbooth (£163)

3D Modelling
Google Sketchup

Price: Free

From www.sketchup.com

Here's a tool that finally makes 3D modelling as simple as 2D drawing. To create a model in Google Sketchup, you simply drag your mouse to draw shapes, then use its Push/Pull tool to extend these into three dimensions.

Sketchup's unique tools include the ability to import a digital image and adjust a 3D perspective grid over it so that the model matches the image. It isn't a replacement for the market-leading AutoCAD LT, and is best used alongside it to generate models quickly. You can even import drawings created in AutoCAD's DWG and DXF formats.

If you need advanced control of materials and lighting effects, you'll have to look elsewhere. Sketchup's greatest achievement is making it easy to quickly generate 3D designs from scratch, but you'll have to upgrade to Sketchup Pro (£256) to export most of its models to other 3D applications.

Alternative: AutoCAD LT (£745)

Video editing
VirtualDub

Price: Free

From www.virtualdub.org

VirtualDub is an open-source capture, editing and file format transcoding tool that is fairly straightforward to use. However, beginners could find it a little difficult to get started, as you may need to spend time hunting around for suitable codecs to let the program deal with some video formats. For example, it's happiest dealing with AVI files and so is ideal if you want to tidy up or dub AVI footage. However, you'll need to download a DivX plugin to get it to work with DivX movies.

VirtualDub is based around Video for Windows (VfW), an older Windows standard not supported by some digital video devices, so you may need to download a compatible codec to import video from a digital video camera.

Adobe's Premiere Elements has more features and a more intuitive interface, but once you've got VirtualDub working the way you want it, it's a fast and efficient video editor.

Alternative: Adobe Premiere Elements (£70)