Free and good? It’s for the birds!

Actu­ally it’s for you and me, and I’m refer­ring to the free online suite of tools that flies under the Avi­ary ban­ner. Actu­ally, it’s more than a suite of tools, Avi­ary is also a com­munity by and for con­tent creators:

At Avi­ary, we believe that every­one in the world should have access to power­ful cre­ation tools. We there­fore chose our com­pany mis­sion to be We make cre­ation access­ible to every­one. Our power­ful set of tools helps ful­fill this mis­sion by enabling small busi­nesses, stu­dents, artists & cre­at­ors across dif­fer­ent genres.

What this means for us is that there’s now an awe­some set of media cre­ation tools avail­able for you to use, for the cost of your inter­net con­nec­tion — yes, the Avi­ary tools are free (though they ori­gin­ally had a sub­scrip­tion busi­ness model).

My most recent for­ray into the bird­house had me using the Myna audio edit­or to trim down a mix I’d cre­ated for anoth­er blog post review­ing Seline HD (a cool iPad instrument).

My mix had too much dead space at the head and tale of the selec­tion. A few quick tweaks in Myna, and the mix is much as you see above.

Then, with a few clicks of your mouse, you can mix it down, and down­load it or copy some pub­lish code to embed it in your web­site or blog post (as I did here).

bard1.egg by bgri­er on Avi­ary

But this is just one of the Avi­ary suite of bird-themed tools. Oth­ers include:

• Phoenix — Image Editor
  An image edit­or has lay­ers, masks, effects, undo his­tory, and all that oth­er good stuff.
• Talon — Screen Capture
  Use Talon to cap­ture screen­shots web pages from your browser or desktop and crop, res­ize or mark them up.
• Raven — Vec­tor Editor
  The world’s first online vec­tor editor.
• Pea­cock — Effects Editor
  It does so many won­der­ful and amaz­ing things, we decided to call it our visu­al laboratory.
• Roc — Music Creator
  Use Roc to cre­ate music and loops for use in Myna and ringtones.
• Fal­con — Image Markup
  Use Fal­con to quickly cap­ture images and web pages from your browser or desktop and crop, res­ize or mark them up.
• Tou­can — Swatch Editor
  A col­or swatches and palettes tool will help you find col­ors you did­n’t even know exist.

And as I men­tioned above, there’s a whole set of Avi­ary com­munit­ies focused on the tools, and on cre­at­ing, dis­cov­er­ing, mash­ing up and pub­lish­ing content.

It’s free — so can you afford not to take a peek into the bird house?

This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my stuff here.