Converting files for a larger audience

Today we have enabled the "Publisher" account on tradebit again. It is especially tailored towards the users, who want to sell in more places and do not want a monthly fee on their bill.

This includes among others:

- musicians

- hobby movie makers

- writers (like poets)

Let me list a few tools, which can help you to create the files and file formats you may want to use, to start selling your files.

PDF

The "Portable Document Format" got famous with Adobe - or better it made Adobe famous. Yet the software suite Adobe Acrobat is quite pricy for some users and if you just want to convert a Word document once in a while - it might be too expensive. But there is help: I personally use the "Bullzip PDF Converter", which is free and creates a PDF printer for you. Hit the print button in Word and select the fresh PDF printer... the result is a fine PDF file!

MP3

Invented almost 20 years ago (Fraunhofer had a celebration last week), MP3 became the file format for music. A good and free conversion tool to create MP3 files is Audacity. It takes WAV or other files and converts those in MP3 files. Fast and easy.

FLV

Not well known as the other formats, but growing in importance, is the flash video file format FLV. YouTube uses it, Myspace uses it and we do, too. It is a high compressed format, which lowers storage and bandwidth requirements. A nice Windows tool, which comes free also, is the RIVA Encoder for movie conversion, which I have mentioned in earlier posts. It takes AVI or MPEG movies and converts those nice little FLV files.

JPG/GIF/BMP

If you are a photographer and you want to prepare thousands of files for upload, preview, watermarking or whatever - try XNview. In my opinion one of the fastest tools out there for photo conversion. Did I mention that is is free?

With that collection, you have a nice setup and may start uploading right away!