Best new audio, stock media and terminal resources: 28 October

On 28 October, thirty free tools and websites joined the directory, along with ten open-source projects from GitHub. I've grouped them into planning and writing, learning and quick lookups, audio and music, stock photos and video, small design helpers, and open-source tools you run yourself. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you rely on it.

Planning, writing and finding files

TimeTree lets you keep separate shared calendars for family, friends or work groups, where everyone can add events and leave comments. The core app is free on phone and web but shows ads, and attachments, a vertical view and pinned events need Premium. Nuclino brings documents, a wiki, boards and canvases into one workspace that teams edit together in real time. Its free plan covers up to 50 items, 3 canvases and 2GB of storage, and publishing and history need a paid plan.

Text Blaze expands short shortcuts into reusable text, with dynamic fields, dates and forms for things like support replies. The free plan allows up to 20 active snippets, and forms and rules need Pro. Calmly Writer is a free online notepad with focus mode, Markdown, dark mode and word count, and your text stays in your browser with no signup. Its desktop and Android apps are a one-time purchase. Dillinger shows your Markdown rendered side by side as you type, exports to HTML or PDF and connects to GitHub, Dropbox or Google Drive. WordCounter gives live word, character and sentence counts with reading time and keyword density; expect ads and promotion of paid writing tools.

Listary finds files and launches apps on Windows as you type a few letters, and speeds up open and save dialogs. The standard version is free, with some advanced options in Pro. Shottr captures full-screen, window, area and scrolling screenshots on the Mac, with annotation, blurring, pixel measuring and OCR. You can use it free for as long as you like, though it occasionally reminds you to buy a licence.

Learning, research and quick lookups

PubMed, run by the US National Library of Medicine, indexes more than 35 million citations from medical and life science journals. Search is free, but not every paper is free to read. Sololearn teaches Python, JavaScript, SQL and more through short lessons, quizzes and a code playground; many courses are free, and unlimited practice and AI help need Pro. Symbolab solves equations, integrals and word problems and includes graphing. The free version gives answers and some steps, full step-by-step solutions need Pro, and it's easy to lean on it instead of learning.

Visuwords turns any word into an interactive diagram of meanings, synonyms and related words using Princeton WordNet. RapidTables has hundreds of quick calculators and converters for maths, finance, health and web design, free with no account but with ads. who.is looks up domain registration, expiry dates, name servers and DNS records; many records are privacy-redacted, and monitoring more than one domain needs a paid plan. Windy shows animated maps of wind, rain, temperature and waves with several forecast models side by side. It can feel busy for casual users, and finer forecast steps need Premium.

Audio and music

Radio Garden puts thousands of live radio stations on a 3D globe, free in the browser and on iOS and Android, and makes easy background audio for focused work. Vocal Remover splits a song into an instrumental and a vocal track in about ten seconds; quality varies by song, and you should only use tracks you have the rights to.

For projects, licences matter. Free Music Archive hosts music from independent artists, much of it under Creative Commons, but terms such as attribution or non-commercial use vary by track. BBC Sound Effects opens up the BBC's archive of recordings, free for personal, educational and research use, while commercial use needs a paid licence. Incompetech hosts hundreds of tracks by Kevin MacLeod that are free with attribution, and a paid licence removes that requirement. Zapsplat offers a very large library of sound effects and music; free users download MP3s with daily limits and must credit Zapsplat, while Premium adds WAV files and attribution-free use.

Stock photos and video

Coverr offers free HD and 4K stock video clips and music for commercial and non-commercial work without credit, and the free library works without an account, though the site pushes its paid AI tools. Kaboompics has thousands of lifestyle and interior photos, often in full shoots with matching colour palettes, free for commercial use. ISO Republic shares curated photos and video clips under CC0. picjumbo offers free photos for commercial use, with exclusive packs in Premium.

The NASA Image and Video Library collects images, videos and audio from decades of NASA missions. Most NASA media is not copyrighted, but check the NASA media guidelines and avoid implying endorsement.

Small design helpers

Fancy Border Radius lets you drag handles to make organic blob shapes with CSS border-radius and copy the code, and css.glass builds frosted-glass card effects with a live preview. Use glass effects sparingly, as they can hurt contrast. Avataaars Generator builds a cartoon avatar you can download as PNG or SVG, free for personal and commercial use. Undesign collects hundreds of free design tools and resources by category, though some links may go stale.

Open-source tools to run yourself

Stats puts CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network and battery readings in your Mac menu bar, and Hammerspoon lets you automate windows, hotkeys and much more on the Mac with short Lua scripts, which needs some comfort with code. Pake wraps a website into its own small desktop app, built from the command line. Kanata remaps any keyboard with layers and tap-and-hold keys from one config file; macOS needs an extra driver.

Several of these live in the terminal. lazygit puts Git in one clear screen, Zellij splits a terminal into panes and tabs and keeps sessions running, ripgrep searches folders for any word or pattern very quickly, and Starship shows your Git branch and language versions in your prompt, with icons that need a Nerd Font. Mermaid turns short text into flowcharts, sequence diagrams and Gantt charts and works inside GitHub, Notion and Obsidian. Fabric runs a library of AI prompt patterns from your terminal, and it needs your own AI model or API key, so watch what you send to it.

All of these are waiting in the full Best Productivity Resources directory, along with every other tool and guide. Filter by category, pricing and platform to find your fit.