Friday Freebie

Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. It's usually not a maxim worth getting too hung up on when dealing with freebies, though; after all you only get what you pay for.

But here at the Friday Freebie, you can cast your preconceptions about free stuff aside and enjoy the multitude of different costless gems we tirelessly mine from the caverns of the internet week in, week out.

The first then this week is something we haven't had before on the PSP: a site offering a collection of free XMB themes. The site in question, MyXMB, has Apple themes, Vista themes, Vampire themes, Halo themes, LocoRoco themes, underwater themes, iPhone themes and plenty more, all of which are free to download and use.

There are instructions on the site about how to use each one but if you get stuck don't worry as we'll be covering how to get custom themes up and working on the PSP in a forthcoming 'How To' feature.

Now to something that we haven't had before for DS – a scratching program. Okay, so this one is a little bit of a cop-out seeing as we have had DS homebrew music applications on the Friday Freebie before, but DScratch is a unique-sounding application from an altogether original concept for a homebrew collection.

Bannered 'The Protein Project', the goal the coders have set themselves is to create a set of creative audio/visual toys specifically for portable devices. The grand plan is to release several 'modules' that you can run together and manipulate simultaneously to create live sound.

DScratch is the first of these and it allows you to scratch, rewind, mute and apply effects to any .wav file or recorded audio sample on your DS (via the touchscreen, naturally). What's more, the app enables you to send MIDI info wirelessly to other electronic music software that runs on a PC, such as VJing. Check the video to see it in action:

It all sounds terribly ambitious and very inventive. The pre-teta-alpha demo v071016 of DScratch is available to try for free now. Lastly this week, something a bit more familiar – free mobile games. Mobile Playground has an enormous collection of free Java games for a broad selection of handsets. The titles aren't all shovelware variations on sudoku and Jewel Quest either, with some higher grade titles included, such as a port of Doom and some 3D titles for the old N-Gage. All are free to download and there are a variety of options available for transferring games to different handsets.

Right, that's your lot for this week. Remember, our Freebie Archive is full to bursting with stuff you might have missed over the last year and is well worth a look for newcomers to the Friday regular. Click 'Track It!' to make sure you catch next week's batch.