Installation is easy. Click through the dialogue boxes and launch the app. The user has the option of a number of different configurations for initial use, although the default setup will give you a single, integrated interface, not unlike many other media players.

Point the application toward your library of choice, or more than one library. Give it few minutes to scan through your files, and you’re ready to start listening. The basic module only used about 30MB of RAM for just playing music.

You have the choice of different module configurations. Below is an example of two separate equalizer displays; with a compact audio control interface and a file navigator. This is a great application that includes audio editing tools, lyric composer, different visualizations, video components, internet radio options, and yet it remains lightweight and friendly to use. All of this comes with a high degree of potential for customizing each module. And, this is just the basic application. This is the free version with no add-ons or plug-ins installed. If this application hung out at Muscle Beach, it would probably stop dead-lifting its 800-pound barbell just to carry your groceries home for you. It is that good.

For a relative unknown in the universe of media players, JetAudio stands out against the backdrop of form-over-function. This piece of software is all functionality. There’s nothing it can do that isn’t meant to directly enhance your listening experience.

At this site, you can share .pls files to broadcast playlists or access those created by others. While not as convenient as other streaming music services, the ability to integrate this functionality into such a feature-rich and robust music player is a real treat.

Even the lyrics component has its own integrated player controls which allow for scrubbing with a slider, incremental fast-forward and rewind controls all included with a text editor. Furthermore, the visualization system can integrate some of the great titles like G-Force or Aeon from Soundspectrum. The JetAudio free version also comes with a backup manager, called JetShell, for archiving your media files.

The paid version of the application includes a number of additional features that extend both the listening possibilities of the free version and its audio editing capabilities. All-in-all, we have only begun to discover the ways in which JetAudio can bring a more inclusive and flexible user listening experience. Yet, it seems as if we have found our new pet software addiction for at least a little while. JetAudio is a music player for music people. It has heart. It is rich in features and configuration options. It does something few applications of any kind manage to do by presenting the option for the user to re-think what is possible in using an application. Rest assured you have not heard the last from this little digital boom box.

The general user interface is very easy to control. Open a browser to www.filelab.com. Select audio editor, select your file and then begin editing.

This is the user interface within the browser:

Across the top of the interface are 2 main pages the first page is labeled Audio Effects. The 2nd page is labeled as Generate. We will cover the former in that it will be the most used.

Amplify: Decibels are a exponential scale: 0 dB is the lowest a human ear can hear. 10 dB is 10 times as powerful. 10 times more powerful than that is 20 dB. 1000 times as powerful as near silence is 30 dB. As you see minor variations within a decibel range can be significant. FileLabs Audio Editor allows for steps as low as 1dB up to as high as 6 dB.

Fade In/Fade Out: Audio Editor also allows for linear fade in and fade out. This can be very useful for audio tracks that

Normalize: This will take and find the peak of a waveform and bring all of the other audio to a level somewhere in-between the highest peak and the lowest. This is a good tool to use when you wish to bring the sound floor level up. It will amplify the weaker sounds while attenuating the sounds that are too high.

Mute: Mute is pretty self-explanatory it mutes the selected area of the audio file.
Invert: Invert flip the left and right channels within the audio file. You can select an area to invert or it will invert the whole file at once. It will change the polarity of the file on the horizontal axis.

Limiter: This is an audio compression algorithm that takes the peak and locks it into a set decibel range. It is generally used to remove a distortion to the audio signal. It is not evident in use and also on the site which form of limiting is in use, be it either hard clipping or with a fast release.

Auto Correction: Automatically enhances the sound aural characteristics reducing the dynamic range, normalizing and equalizing the audio.

Echo: Repeats the selected sound with the selected effect.

Reverb: Adds echo and multiple reflections of it. Use it in modeling acoustics in a hall, empty apartment,or some other type of room.

Tempo Change: Increases or decreases the tempo. Music will play faster or slower but the pitch is unaffected.

Equalizer: Boosts or cuts specific frequency bands and provides a visual representation of the resulting EQ curve. Use this to boost bass, midrange or treble of an audio file.

The 2nd page of the software application enables you to either generate silence or a signal. The signal can be a bell, chord or 440 Hz, A signal. This can be useful for testing audio devices.

This software is feature rich, fast and surprisingly elegant for a completely free browser based package.

The free audio editing software Audacity can do that, and a lot more. For the purpose of this tutorial I’m going to stick to the basics.

Download Audacity from the developer website.

Start Audacity after installation. You can drag and drop audio files like mp3 or wav into the program interface, or use the File > Open dialog to do that. Files that you drag and drop into the interface appear in the same window, audio files that you load via File > Open appear in their own windows.

To merge two music files that you have added to Audacity do the following: Select one of the tracks with a left-click and press Ctrl-A afterwards to select all of it. You can alternatively select only part of the track. I suggest you use the play button to pinpoint the start and end locations of the track.

With the track in the clipboard left click on the location of the other track where you want to paste your music into. If you just want to merge, click the position at the very end of the track and press Ctrl-V to add the music there. You can select any other position if you prefer that.

Repeat that process until you have have all audio files merged in one track. Close all but this one track before selecting File > Export to save the newly merged audio file. You can save the audio as mp3, wav, flac, ac3 and several other formats.

Is there an easier way to merge multiple mp3 files and save them as a single audio wav file? Let me know in the comments.

Media Cope is a free media converter that supports photo, audio and video conversions and then some. The application uses tabs for the different program options.

free media converter

• Audio / Video Player – it is possible to play audio and video files right into the program’s interface. Supports the most popular file formats and offers several additional features like creating screenshots, changing the ratio or watching a video frame by frame.
• Audio / Video Cutter – Ability to cut audio and video files and save the results in all supported file formats.
• Audio Converter – Convert audio files in batch mode. All popular audio formats including mp3, flac and aac supported.
• Video Converter – Convert videos directly into different formats, popular video formats like avi, mpg, wmv, flv, 3gp and mkv supported
• Photo Cutter – Load a photo into the program interface and draw a rectangle around the area that should be saved as a separate image. Jpg, gif and png supported among other formats.
• Photo Resizer / Converter – Lets the user convert photos in batch mode. The same output formats are available, options to select a specific resolution, custom resolution, and to cut or stretch the photos to make them fit.
• Slide Show – Create a photo slide show, add photos and music, click go to start the slideshow.

Media Cope’s strength is its versatility. It could use advanced quality settings in the video and audio categories, as it is only possible to select a quality level but not the bitrate and other related settings.

The software is a solid free media converter otherwise, download available from the developer’s website, should be compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. Tested on Windows 7 Pro.

Video playback and conversions did not seem to work in the current version of Media Cope, the error Problem playing the file was displayed trying to play the file while video conversions resulted in a 0-byte file.

This is something that the developer’s should fix immediately.

Upon first launch the program will display a directory browser that can be used to select the folders that contain music on all connected hard drives. All discovered files are automatically added to the library based on their ID3 tags. The library itself comes with several subfolders that sort the music collection by genre, rating, composer or artist automatically which makes it very easy to access specific music faster than usual. Specific information from iTunes and Windows Media Player (like ratings) can be imported into MediaMonkey.

The tagging features of MediaMonkey come in handy at this point. Most music collections contain at least a few files that are not tagged properly and MediaMonkey offers the tools to correct these issues automatically. The music manager makes this easy as it will list all files with improper tagging in a Files to Edit folder in the library. These audio files might appear in other folders as well depending on the ID3 tags that are missing (it will be listed in the genre if the genre is set but not in the album folder if the album is not set).

Files to Edit will sort the music with missing ID3 tags into different folders that specify what is missing (e.g. missing genre, unknown album art). A right-click on any folder or one on selected files will provide the option to automatically tag the music based on file information or by searching for the information on the Internet. The Internet option makes use of various Amazon stores to find the information needed to properly tag the audio files.

It is also possible to manually edit the tags for a specific audio file or multiple files to fine tune the tags or edit specific tags that could not be identified by automatic tagging. This in combination with the auto renaming features can turn an unsorted improperly tagged music collection in a properly tagged and named collection in no time.

New music can be added to the software program by adding new locations that should be searched for music, by ripping audio CDs, using the build in file monitor or syncing devices like Apple’s iPod or other mp3 players with the music manager.

Adding new locations will simply repeat the steps outlined above and add any new music that is found in those locations to the MediaMonkey library. MediaMonkey comes with the option to rip audio CDs and use the information offered by FreeDB to tag them automatically. The build in file monitor is only available in the Gold version of MediaMonkey. This handy feature will monitor specific locations on the local computer system and spring into action if it discovers new music which then gets added to the program.

Another option offered is the ability to convert music into different music formats using build in

• the MP3 converter
• AAC/M4A converter
• OGG converter
• WMA converter
• WAV converter
• FLAC converters.

MediaMonkey Gold is not only a tool to properly maintain a music collection. It comes also with all the media playback capabilities – and then some – that one would expect from a all-in-one audio manager.

• Play: Play CDs and digital audio files (popular formats like MP3, AAC/M4A, OGG, WMA*, MPC, APE, FLAC, WAV, etc supported) or use MediaMonkey in combination with Winamp to use Winamp as the player. Music volume can be adjusted automatically and the equalizer and dsp audio effect plugins allow to fine tune the playback.
• Multiple Music Collections: Ability to filter large music collections into smaller collections like Rock, Classic Music and Podcasts which can be customized with their own playback settings.
• Playlists: Playlists can be created by dragging and dropping music, using the auto-playlist option or auto-dj to automatically create mixes.
• Burn: Option to burn music to CD.
• Visualization: Display visualization on the computer screen while playing music.
• Reports and Statistics: Ability to create statistics and reports that can be viewed in the program and exported into xml files.
• Customization and Plugins: MediaMonkey can be customized and extended with plugins and new skins that are offered on the developer’s website.
• Virtual CD: Ability to catalog the CD audio collection to keep tracks of CDs

Users interested in MediaMonkey can download the free version right away from the developer’s website:

Ghacks Giveaway:

We are giving away ten 25 licenses of MediaMonkey Gold to users who reply to this article. Please tell us which feature excites you the most (if any).

Windows7news.com is giving away including the file recovery software Recovery My Files, a Mozy online backup account and other software. Check it out.

Raju from TechPP is also offering MediaMonkey Gold today. Go over there for another chance to win this excellent music manager.

You might think, because of the nature of the task surrounding this tool, that MP3 Diags would be challenging to use. It’s not. In fact it’s quite simple to scan and repair your music collection. In this tutorial you will learn how to install and use MP3 Diags to diagnose and repair your broken MP3s.

NOTE: Martin covered using MP3 Diags for the Windows operating system in his article “Diagnose your MP3 collection with MP3 Diags“. Since there are issues to over come when using this application in the Linux operating system, I decided it was beneficial to cover it once again.

What can it fix?

Some of the problems that MP3 Diags can repair are:

• Adding/fixing track info.
• Correcting song duration times.
• Correcting seek problems.
• Renaming files based on fields.
• Low quality audio.
• Missing VBR header.
• Missing normalization data.
• and much more.

Now before I continue on, I will tell you that MP3 Diags can be resource intensive. If your collection is large you can expect this to take some time. During an initial scan MP3 Diags was running at approximately 2,000 files every 15 minutes. You can do the math from there.

Installing

MP3 Diags should be found in your distributions repositories. If you are using Ubuntu you can either open up Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center, do a search for “mp3 diags” (no quotes) mark the application for installation, and apply the changes.

When the application is installed you will find it in your Sound & Video menu entry.

Usage

When you first start up MP3 Diags a window will appear asking you to create a file which the application can save its configuration data. You can place this file anywhere you have write permission. In that same window you can set up a scan by including the directories you want to scan. In most modern Linux distributions you will find a ~/Music directory. If you’re like me (and you like to keep everything well organized), you can just select that folder and begin the scan.

During the scan expect your machine to become a big sluggish. You might want to start the scan and walk away (to keep yourself from getting a wee frustrated). When the scan is over, the real fun begins.

Scan results

Figure 1

Take a look at Figure 1.  What you are seeing is the results of a first-run scan containing over 2,000 audio files. Near the top (under the tool bar) is a listing of all the possible issues that each file contains. Let’s just look at one file. To show only one file highlight that file and click the “Show One Song At a Time” button (Sixth button from the left on the toolbar). I will select a file, downloaded and converted from Youtube, of Rush’s La Villa Strangiato. Obviously, since this was a download from Youtube, the audio quality is going to be poor. So let’s repair that as much as it is possible.

Figure 2

Once you have your one file selected (see Figure 2) click the first work icon on the left (that’s the first hammer on the left) which is a drop-down. When you first click this you will get a warning that says “although this works on the developers’ machine, it might not work on yours”. Take this as a caution and back up your files before you start working on them.

From the drop-down you will see numerous fixes for your file. However, instead of searching from the drop-down, you can hover your mouse over hammer icons labeled 1-4. Each of these contains a pre-configured set of fixes that allow you a single click to fix numerous, related issues on a file. For my poor audio quality file you can see it suffers from four issues:

• fa – No ID3V2.3.0 tag found
• ea – ID3V2 tag doesn’t have APIC frame.
• ab – Low quality MPEG audio stream.
• an – No normalization undo data found.

When you go to fix these problems you will instantly come across an issue when using MP3 Diags in Linux. MP3 Diags uses the application mp3gain to normalize mp3 files, which is not installed by default. And, to make matters worse, MP3 Diags does not install this dependency for you. So you will have to fire up Synaptic, search for “mp3gain” (no quotes), select the results for installation, and apply the changes.

Once mp3gain is installed you can now normalize with MP3 Diags.

Another issue, specific to Linux, is that if you want to configure MP3 Diags to not erase original files, but instead to move them to another directory, you will need to make sure you change the destination directories in the preferences window. By default all of the temporary directories are set to /tmp which you will have write access to, but if you want to archive that file you do not want it saved in the /tmp directory, because it will be deleted automatically. Different distributions handle this task differently – some clean up /tmp regularly, some upon reboot, some will empty a file in /tmp after it has gone untouched for a pre-determined span of time (usually 30 days). If you want to keep those original files around, you will want to reconfigure MP3 Diags to use a different directory than /tmp.

Final thoughts

After running MP3 Diags on my music collection, I have found that all MP3 files do, in fact, sound better and have far fewer issues. You should definitely give this application a go if you have a collection of MP3s lying around in need of repair.

Probably the most noteworthy is the automatic recognition of music that gets added to the music player. It is possible to scan folders on the local hard drive for music. Album art and additional information are automatically retrieved by Jaangle and displayed in the player. This does include band and artist information which are usually not provided by many music players.

Jaangle can also display song lyrics, tabs, reviews and user comments if available. Extensive tagging options are supported to edit or add tags to songs or albums. This includes the usual information such as band name, genre or album but also lyrics, tabs and comments.

Another interesting feature is the search which offers several advanced search parameters. It is possible to perform a basic search, advanced search (artist, title, album, location), display the latest additions since a specific date, by rating or by lyrics, comments or personal information.

A major drawback of the music player is missing Internet radio support; Something that most players are offering. Samer of Freeware Genius points out that it is also missing mp3 player support, audio podcast subscriptions and CD ripping capabilities. Jaangle can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It is an interesting player for users who do not need the missing functionality.

Winamp by default comes with the option to import the iTunes media library. It does however not include a similar option to import media from Windows Media Player which is why the software program has been created by the developer.

The application can import the Windows Media Player library into Winamp. This includes audio and videos files, all metadata including ratings and play counts.

The software comes with a few options to customize the import of the Windows Media Player library. It is possible to import all media files or only audio or video files. There is also an option to only import audio and video from an existing playlist.

Three additional options are available. It is possible to ignore files that are already in the Winamp Media Library, remove files from the Winamp Media Library that are not in the Windows Media Player Library and to automatically import on Winamp startup.

The program will not make any changes to Windows Media Player no matter which settings are selected in the application.

Windows Media Player Import is available at the developer’s website. It requires Windows 2000 or higher (means it is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7), Winamp 5 or higher and Windows Media Player 9 or higher.

One of the most comfortable computer programs to extract audio from video files is X2X Free Audio Converter. It is possible to load multiple videos into the application and convert them in a batch process. Videos can be loaded from the build in file browser.

Many major video formats are supported by the audio extractor including avi, wmv, mov, mp4 or flv. The audio that gets extracted can be converted into various audio formats including mp3, ogg,wav, aac or wma.

The quality of the audio files can also be configured by the user from economy quality which uses a 64 Kbit to high quality encodings with 256 Kbit. A few advanced options are available that include trimming the video to extract only the audio from a specific part of it. The time it takes to extract the audio from the videos depends on the length and format of the videos.

X2X Free Audio Converter is definitely a pretty basic software program that does exactly what the user expects of it.

Yahoo Downloader is another Firefox extension that has been designed to download videos from portals like Youtube, Yahoo or CNN but also music from sites like Pandora, Last.fm or Imeem. Probably the most interesting feature for many users is the ability to automatically download videos from these websites.

The Firefox add-on places an icon in the Firefox address bar. Some users might not like the location of the icon as it is placed on the left side of the address bar. This can however be easily changed by right-clicking blank space on that toolbar and selecting the customize option. The Yahoo Downloader icon can then be dragged and dropped to another location, toolbar or even removed completely as it is not needed for most of the functionality.

A left-click on the icon will display the window of the download that will list all the videos that have been discovered in open tabs in the Firefox web browser.A click on the download it button will start the download. This can be automated if automatic downloads have been enabled in the options of the Firefox add-on. This setting makes it very comfortable to download youtube videos or videos and music from the other supported audio and video portals.

All videos will be downloaded to a location on the local computer system which can also be changed in the options of the add-on. Yahoo Downloader is a great add-on for users who download many videos or music and want to automate the process as much as possible.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of content channels to choose from the latest movie trailers to the most popular Youtube videos to Ubuntu guides. It is also possible to add feeds that you discover that are not already included in Miro. These feeds will be handled just like any other feed.

It is possible to auto download new posts from the subscribed feeds or to download them manually. Miro offers a built in Torrent client as well which makes it possible to download audio and video torrents to watch them in the interface as well.

Version 2.5 of Miro comes with some serious (that’s what the developers call it) speed and memory usage improvements. It can be downloaded from the nightlies downloads page.

Trout can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. It supports a wide variety of audio formats including mp3, ogg, wma, flac and others. Music can be loaded by dragging and dropping files or folders into the interface or by using the menu toolbar at the top. All audio files that have been loaded into the player are displayed in the playlist area in the lower half. This area contains not only information about the names of the songs but also information about bitrates, sizes, artist and album tags and more.

Songs can be sorted by clicking on one of the columns. It is for example possible to sort by album, artist, playing time or filename. Trout offers a set of features that many expect from today’s music players. This includes support for Internet radio streams, freeDB support for audio CDs, compatibility with most tag formats and tag editing, hotkeys, lyrics, album covers or various play modes. Track announcements are another interesting feature that are great when listening to audiobooks.

The minimized music player needs less than 3 Megabytes of computer memory while playing and therefor ideal for low end computer systems. The free music player Trout is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems from Windows 9x on including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website.

And so…I thought it would be smart to write about the best tools to play certain media types. Understand that these are the best in my opinion. You might hear differently from every other user.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the best audio and video viewing tools available.

Audio

XMMS. Call me a purist but for straight up audio you can not beat XMMS. No you will not be able to manage your iPod with this tool. But for pure music enjoyment, nothing beats it. And if you were a Winamp user you are in luck because it works the same way. There is one hiccup with using XMMS. If you plan on playing MP3 files, like everyone does, you’ll have to uninstall the XMMS installed on your distribution (if one was in fact installed), and make sure you install the player xmms-mp3 instead. Once installed you can enjoy: mp3, acc, ape, flac, icecase/shoutcast, ogg, shn, speex, tta, wav, wavpack, wma. XMMS is also themeable for all you desktop hipters ;-).

Rhythmbox

Of all the music managers, my favorite is Rhythmox. Rhythmbox was inspired by iTunes so, as you can imagine, it integrates well with iPods and other such devices. And although you can not use Rhythmbox with the iTunes store, you can download music from both Magnatune and Jamendo. Rythmbox also supports DAAP sharing which allows you to connect to a centralized server. Rhythmbox uses Gstreamer so it supports a wide range of audio formats.

Banshee

Banshee is another favorite that manages to one-up Rhythmbox by being the first Linux media manager to integrate with the Android-based G1 phone. Banshee offers all of the features of Rhythmbox minus the ability to download music from a “store”. Banshee does, however, include last.fm stream support. The list of audio files Banshee supports is smaller than that of XMMS mp3, acc, ogg, and wav.

Video

Mplayer

Mplayer is not usually the default video player in Linux nor is it the easiest to install or get running. But when you do get it installed and running it works flawlessly. There are some distributions (such as Elive Compiz) that install MPlayer as the default movie player which plays video files and DVDs perfectly.

VLC

VLC is typically the favorite “universal” media player. This little gem really can play it all. And the beauty of VLC is that it’s cross platform, so if you know VLC in Windows or Mac, you will know it in Linux. VLC supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, as well as DVDs, VCDs, and streaming. VLC is not nearly the installation nightmare of most other video players. If your distribution does not default to VLC, you might want to give it a try before you resign yourself to the idea that Linux and video do not make good bedfellows.

XINE

When all else fails, XINE. XINE is one of the more well done, reliable, versatile of the media players. XINE plays CDs, DVDs, VCDs,? and decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3. You can also install support for mov and mp4 media as well as real player files. XINE is that media player I install when my current distro doesn’t play well with VLC or Mplayer.

Final Thoughts

Viewing media files doesn’t have to be difficult, even in the Linux operating system. Although this list isn’t exhaustive, it is the best of the best IMHO. Any of the above players should work well for you.

YouTube isn’t just for watching videos. A lot of times you can find great music in the form of old songs that aren’t available anywhere else online. Or you come across a fascinating audio track and get tempted to use it elsewhere.

Extracting audio from a YouTube video usually requires you to download the video to your hard drive, convert it to another format and then extract the audio track from it. Well, I’ve been doing a little experimenting and discovered that you can extract audio directly without downloading the video from YouTube. The secret of my success: MediaCoder.

As far as transcoders go, Mediacoder is one of the best out there. It requires a bit of a learning curve but it’s capable of a lot of stuff. I’ve been using it almost exclusively whenever I need to convert a video or any media files.

To extract the audio directly from a YouTube video, navigate to the video in question and copy the link in the address bar. Then, open up Mediacoder, click on the Add button and select Add Url. Paste the link of the video in the box that pops up.

Now, you need to adjust the settings of the converted file. On the lower left-hand side of the GUI are the different transcoding parameters. Click on the Audio tab and select the encoder format. For example, if you want an MP3 file, you would select the Lame MP3 encoder. Then, click the Video tab and uncheck the box ‘Enable Video’. This ensures that only the audio is transcoded.

Once your transcoded settings are in place, click the Start button to begin converting your file. It only takes a few minutes or so. After transcoding is finished, play back the transcoded file and check if it’s complete.

I’ve done a lot of testing and this method works for most YouTube videos but not all of them. I think that has something to do with the format used in the original file upload. Still, this is a nice trick to try out whenever you want to quickly extract an audio track from online video.

Have you used Mediacoder to extract audio before? What do you think of this tip? What software do you use to extract audio from a video clip? Let me know in the comments.

That is when so called cue splitters come into play. A cue splitter basically uses the information provided in the cue file to split the large mp3 file into corresponding single tracks. Medieval Cue Splitter is one program that can be used for this task. The free software pretty much does all the work. At best all the user has to do is to load a cue file into the application and press on the Split button to start the process.

The Cue Splitter does provide several advanced options like picking the right naming format for the mp3 files that are created. The default naming convention is (track number) [artist] song title, for instance (01) [Ash] Lose Control.mp3. This can be changed easily in the options to something without brackets and spaces.

Splitting the mp3 into different single songs takes only a few seconds with Medieval Cue Splitter. The software program provides access to all tags which can be edited.

You do need the program Virtualdub, a video file and some sort of audio file. Now start Virtualdub and either open the video using the File > Open Video File dialog or drag and drop it into the program interface. The video can be played right away in the software. You see it twice because the left one is the original video and the right one the processed video. If you only change the audio they will look alike.

Click on Video and make sure Full Processing Mode is activated. Switch to the Audio menu and make sure Direct Stream Copy is active in here. Select the Audio from other file option and pick a audio file on your hard drive. It will be automatically integrated in your video and play in normal speed.

Hit the play button at the bottom to see the video and listen to your audio. It should be in sync. If you are satisfied with the result you can select a compression for the video in the Video > Compression menu and save the video afterwards in File > Save as Avi.

Normally the music will not have the same length as the video and you could sync both by adjusting the frame rate of the video. Click on Video > Frame Rate. Notice the Change so Video and Audio Durations Match ? If you select that option the audio and video will have the same playtime. This means however that the frame rate of the video will either be increased (if the audio is shorter) or decreased (if the audio is longer).

So your video will either play faster or slower depending on your selection. A good tip is to convert the fps to the original fps as well in the same menu. I try to find audio files that roughly have the same length as the video to avoid slow or super fast videos.

I think it’s ok as long as you can validate that the executable has been send by a friend. I would still scan it using an online scanner though. The software supports a lot of different audio and video formats, all the important ones are included like mov, flv, mp4, mpg, avi, swf and wmv.

Audio / Video to Exe (via Instant Fundas) can process multiple files at once and either convert them into a different format or create one executable for each multimedia file that has been added to the interface. The output size is roughly the size of the audio or video file.

I did encounter several errors while testing the application. It seems to have trouble with large files. The conversion of a 1.7 Gigabyte video to the executable format succeeded but I was not able to play it afterwards. Some videos were not playing correctly as well after the conversion.

The only advice that I can give is to try it out for yourself and see if the conversion worked for the audio or video files before you upload them or send them to a friend.

The main purpose of Installed Codecs is to be able to find out which codecs that have been installed lately are interfering with other codecs that have already been installed on the PC. This can be done by sorting the codecs chronologically and disabling those that have been installed lately.

Some understanding of video and audio codecs is helpful as well because it would not make sense to disable audio codecs when analyzing a video playback problem.

Installed Codec does not have to be installed and can be run from any place. It takes a few seconds before the list of all installed codecs is populated. A right-click opens a menu with options to enable and disable codecs, save items and create html reports.

The location of the installed codec is mentioned in the properties as well which makes it easy to delete it instead of just disabling it. Installed Codec is compatible with Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista.

Installed Codec

I did find the free mp3 tagger called Picard shortly after I began my research on the subject. All I had to do was download and install it and add a directory that would contain my mp3 files. Picard would analyze the files and would add them into a category called unclustered files. Pressing the cluster button would try and group the files together sorted by artist and album.

This worked well for all of my files except for one single song which I had to manually drop into the right album. Now that everything was sorted the way I wanted it to be I had to start and edit the mp3 tag information to complete the operation.

This process is semi-automatic. Select an album from the list of clustered albums and press the lookup button. A website opens with search results and it is up to you to select the correct artist and album from the search results. This sounds like lots of work but it is not.

The search works fine and takes only a second to show the results. The information will be added to the Albums section of Picard. The last step would be to drag and drop the clustered album onto the new information in the Albums section. Picard tries to automatically add the correct information to the songs, if that does not work you can drag and drop them into the right place.

It is possible to edit information manually and customize the output. The default structure would be artist name / album. Picard is available for Windows and Linux.

The best feature of Harddisk Ogg is that it sits in the tray once configured and you can start the recording with a single mouse click and end it with another one. The quality of the recorded audio can be configured in detail including bitrate, mono or stereo recording and encoding quality.

Harddisk Ogg offers several normalization modes that amplify the input signal to a constant volume. You need to download and move the lame encoder into the folder of Harddisk Ogg to be able to record mp3 files directly.

I would like to explain why a tool like Harddisk Ogg might be useful now or in the near future. Several countries have already laws in place that make it illegal to copy music from Cd’s if the CD is copy protected. They still allow however to record the songs using audio devices and compare this to the recording of radio with audio tapes.

This is also great if you want to rip audio from music videos that you found on the internet or from youtube videos.