If your music collection comes from multiple sources like mine does, downloads, rips and online purchases for instance, then it may be a collection of different music formats and probably a few files that are not playing correctly or have incorrect tags.
Tools like MediaMonkey or Mp3 Diag offer the tools to convert and correct music files.
Helium Audio Converter is a free program for Windows that can do pretty much the same. The program has been primarily been designed to convert music files. The convert supports the following music formats: AAC, FLAC, M4A, M4B, MP3, MP4, MPC, Ogg Vorbis, Wave, WAVPack, WMA.
It needs to be noted that all listed formats are supported both as input and output formats, making the program very versatile in this regard. Available tags are converted as well.
The configuration should take less than a minute. It begins with the selection of folders or music files from a connected storage device. All songs are then displayed in the program interface.
Conversion options at the bottom of the screen define the output folder and the output format. A click on Encoder options opens encoder specific options like the bitrate and normalization options if mp3 is the selected output format.
It is optionally possible to analyze the converted files after the conversion. This uses the program’s built-in music analyzer. The analyzer is only available if the output format is FLAC or MP3.
The Analyse button at the top of the program window checks all music files in the list without conversion. A log is generated and displayed in the end that highlights erroneous music files in red. There is unfortunately no option to repair the files, if possible, or information on what’s wrong with the files.
Helium Audio Converter is despite those issues a solid program that can supports a wide variety of popular music formats. For now, it is very useful as a converter, and not so much for analyzing music files due to the shortcomings of that procedure.
Windows users can download the latest program version from the developer website. (via)
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I prefer to do the work myself… I use Cowon Jetaudio to convert to wav, normalize.exe to normalize, the Lame to re encode to mp3
The interface looks familiar. Reminds me of NCH Switch Audio File Converter.
I’ll definitely give it a try. Although I use Format Factory to do all my audio-video conversion.
That seems interesting. It doesn’t look like it has as many features as xrecode, but I’ll still give it a try. I wonder if it supports multi-core parallel encoding or support for the Nero AAC encoder. I also wish that it offered a portable version.
Helium Audio Converter does not Monkey’s Audio (APE) and this makes useless for me.