You guys are the greatest. What a wonderful, helpful community (and frankly, just what I needed after a very tough week of people being difficult, unhelpful and irresponsible). Thanks. I love the tutorials for Audacity - and will probably want to play around with that some. But before I got those responses, I did some more searching and found a very simple program called MP3 Key Changer. It allows you to save up to 3 versions for free - so that will suffice for my daughter's purposes of creating one higher pitched and one lower pitched version. The free version may also save only a portion of the song - but my daughter only needs a few bars, not the whole song. The full software costs $45. So if we want further transposing, I think we'll learn Audacity. In case anyone finds this thread and is interested, this free download trial from CNET can be found here: http://download.cnet.com/MP3-Key-Changer/3000-2139_4-10463799.html My daughter loves singing, though. And I can imagine her learning audacity to change the background tracks so she can sing any song she wants in her own key. Bob - your links were great places to start learning Audacity. And Chugger - your screen shots are worth a thousand words. My daughter is 13 - and not quite at the stage of intuitively figuring her way around software. Thanks everyone. Lynn.

Does anyone know of some easy to use software that will allow me to see what some changes to our exterior will look like before we make those changes? Currently our house has board-and-batten siding. We plan to cover it with stucco and use some synthetic stone trim. I've been debating the amount and placement of that trim. I think it could be simply stunning -- or overdone and gaudy. If I could scan in a photograph of the different facades of the house and out the new siding on them I would be in a better position to decide. So, does such software exist? Is it easy to learn how to use? Rosefolly

Lazypup has the right idea for long term storage - use hard drives. Do not depend on camera memory cards and thumb drives for permanent storage. These eventually go bad with age. Do not trust any that are more than 5 years old. The end life may be 10 years. These cards and drives contain a 'keep-alive battery' and when the battery dies, so does the card. If you have cards that are more than 5 years old, its a good idea to replace these. A solid state memory junction is good for about 10,000 writes and rewrites. That is what kept this technology our of 'hard drives' for so long. Improvements and techniques have come along such that computer makers are beginning to place solid state drives (SSD) into lap tops. However, these are not perfect. A gamer might reach the life limit of a SSD due to his thousands of rewites to the disk. The average used probably will not reach this limit before the computer conks out or a replacement is bought. I had a bunch of photos stored on CDs, but I was warned by a genealoguy instructor to switch because the technology is changing and CDs will go the way of tape and floppy disks - these will be obsoleted in favor of DVDs. In the not too distant future, manufacurers will stop making CD drives and disks. Personally, I prefered CDs over DVDs for photo storage due to the larger spot size and separation compared to a DVD. But this won't matter in the future if no drives exist to read the CDs. As far as I can see, storage of digital photos and genealoggy files are a huge problem for me. Right now, I hobble along by moving these files to a external hard drive and that drive runs only when making backups. The rest of the time, it is off. (A purist would rightly claim this is not safe; Its much better to have a second backup copy on a another drive.) This leads to setting up a RAID array to improve relaibility. I have not done so since I am not well schooled about the features and behavor of RAID arrays. That is something I should learn.

I used Google Sketch (free) to help me design my unfinished basement - it allows for 2D or 3D designing. It also has access to a fairly extensive user library of scaled items such as doors, windows, furniture, office equipment, houses, etc. The library probably has various storage unit designs for you to work with.