Western Carolina University

 

 

Specialty software can cost a lot of money, but below you can find links to legally FREE or educational discounted software. Free software is noted below.

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FREE SOFTWARE for all WCU Students, Faculty, & Staff.

Free latest Microsoft Office and Antivirus Software Downloads for Personally-owned Computers

That's right, WCU does offer you free software. Whether you are faculty/staff, undergraduate, online, or a graduate student, take advantage of any or all of the following FREE software available to you.

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ADOBE
Graphic/Web/Multimedia/Video/Interactive
http://www.adobe.com/education/

Adobe offers some of the most powerful software available for the creative arts industry like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver, Flash, Premiere Pro and After Effects. For a business, it can also be some of the most expensive. But luckily for you and I, Adobe offers educational discounts of up to 80% off the retail price. You can purchase individual softwares or save even more money by purchasing "suites," which have several software programs bundled together for a low price.

 

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AUDACITY - FREE
Audio Recording/Mixing/Editing
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to: record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording and more!

 

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AUTODESK - FREE
2D & 3D Moding/Animation/CAD 
http://students.autodesk.com/

The same, full version software that over 9 million designers, engineers and digital artists are using at 100 percent of Fortune 100 companies in over 183 countries around the world is available to you as a student for *FREE. Experience the newest editions of 2D and 3D products, such as Autodesk® Inventor®, Autodesk® Revit®, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, and AutoCAD®.

*Free products are subject to the terms and conditions of the end-user license agreement that accompanies download of the software. The products, programs and other information contained on this page may not be available in all geographies.

 

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BLENDER - FREE

3D Modeling/Animation/Game Creation
http://www.blender.org/

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, animating, rendering, video editing and compositing.

 

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GIMP - FREE
Graphic/Image Manipulation
http://www.gimp.org/

As an avid user or Photoshop, I have to admit that GIMP is very impressive as an image manipulator. Almost all the same tools I use in Photoshop are available in this very powerful and FREE image manipulator. If you need to do photoshop work but can afford photoshop and want to save work as photoshop files, this is a fantastic FREE solution.

 

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INKSCAPE - FREE

Vector Drawing/Illustration
http://inkscape.org/

InkScape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. They also maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

 

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LINUX - FREE
Coding/Software Development/Operating System Development
https://www.linux.com/

Linux is a free and open-source computer operating system that runs on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers, routers, televisionsand video game consoles, to desktop computers, mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is a leading server operating system, and runs the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world.

 

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OPEN OFFICE - FREE
Word Processing/Spreadsheets/Presentations/Graphics/Databases
http://www.openoffice.org/

Similar to Microsoft Office, Open Office is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.  

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