If you are lucky the site that you have downloaded the music from is offering it in other formats as well. If not, your best bet is to convert the audio format into a supported one.

I have reviewed more than a dozen audio converters in the past. From Helium Audio Converter over Mobile Media Converter and Media Cope to Quick Media Converter and specialized tools such as Flac to Mp3.

FlicFlac is a free portable audio converter for Windows that supports several popular music formats including mp3, wav, ape, flac and ogg. It lacks support for other popular audio formats like aac on the other hand.

All you need to do to convert audio files is to drag and drop them into the drop area in the application window or click on the area to open a file browser.

Before you do that you may want to change the output format, Flac is selected by default, to another format. A click on the new format makes it the default output format for the conversion. You may also want to click on the settings button to make changes to the audio quality of the output or to integrate the audio converter into the shell to make it accessible in Windows Explorer. The latter allows you to convert audio files right from within the file manager.

Users can furthermore select to delete the input audio files after successful conversions. FlicFlac is definitely not the most complete audio converter but not all users need a program that supports all known audio files or offers editing options.

Portability and ease of use, those two are the biggest strengths of FlicFlac. Windows users can download the latest version of the audio converter from the developer website.

Many users like to keep FLAC files on their desktop computer and mp3 files of the same songs on their portable mp3 player or mobile phone. But how can you convert FLAC to mp3? Lets find out.

There are a lot of tools out there that promise free conversions but do not keep up to the promise. Some convert only 50% of the files while others nag you into buying the full version before they let you convert flac files to mp3.

A free solution is Koyotesoft’s Free Mp3 Wma Converter which supports the FLAC format among others. You need to pay attention to the program’s setup though as it tries to install additional programs that you may not need. This includes a CD Ripper or a trial version of a shareware program. Additionally, it tries to install the Dealio toolbar and change the default search engine to Yahoo. All of those options can be disabled during installation.

You can drag and drop Flac files to the program interface or use the plus icon to add songs from the local hard drive.

Make sure mp3 is selected as the output format. You can change the default quality setting of 128 Kbps up to 320 Kbps there as well. A click on convert converts the FLAC files to mp3.

Please note that you can select a different output format, supported are for instance ogg or wav as well (but not aac). The program uses Lame to encode the music into different formats. A click on the settings button opens the options window with many different settings.

You can add as many FLAC files as you want from the local hard drive, and all of them will be batch converted once you hit the convert button. File names will be retained, only the file extension changes to the selected format.

You can download the program from the developer homepage.

The audio analyzer Audiochecker can verify the origin of APE, FLAC, SHN, WAV and LPAC audio files and determine if the music is indeed in lossless format or a fake. Version 2 of the audio software is currently available as a beta download. The program is portable and can be executed directly after unpacking its contents to the computer.

Directories, files or tracks from audio CDs can be selected for the audio analysis and verification. Audio Checker can crawl subdirectories if the user enables the option in the program’s settings.

The speed of the audio analysis depends mainly on the computer’s processor. It usually takes several minutes to verify one music album.

Audio Checker displays the results during the scan. Each analysed audio file is highlighted in green or red. A green audio file passed the test while a red one failed it. Percentages are shown that define how close to the original the audio files are.

The developer of audio checker is constantly improving the audio analyzer. Latest plans are the addition of the wavpack format. Audio Checker is multi-lingual and compatible to most versions and editions of the Windows operating system.

Update: The program has been discontinued.

The first step is to find an Internet radio station. The Shoutcast directory should provide something for every music taste on the planet. A simple click on Tune In should load the stream in AIMP2 if it is configured to play the playlist files of Internet radio. Since we have to configure one setting in the music player’s option anyway I show you how to make AIMP2 the default player for the playlist files first. Once that is done we are going to configure the options to save Internet radio in a proper format and select a directory on the hard drive.

Pressing [CTRL P] after starting AIMP2 will open the player’s options. Selecting the Associations entry under System will bring up the various compatible file types the player can play. If AIMP2 is your default player you can simple click on the Enable All button to associate all file types with AIMP2. The important file type for Internet radio is .pls which you find at the bottom.

AIMP2 should now start playing the Internet radio whenever you click on a link that leads to an Internet radio playlist. Now head over to the Streaming menu under Player.

You have to pick a folder where the music from the Internet radio station will be saved in. A directory of the data will automatically be added in the root directory. The second option is about the format of the recorded music. The default is wave which takes up lots of space on the hard drive. A better option would be to select mp3 as the format. Either 192 or 256 Kbit should be good choices. Other choices are ogg or flac.

Now that the settings have been made it is time to start the recording. The recording option is only available in the main client and not in the minimal client. You can start the recording by clicking on Radio Cap on the left side of the player. A blinking text indicates that the player is recoding the music.

Users who would like to record more than one station at a time might want to take a look at Streamripper instead.

If you do not have a software that supports plugins you could use the excellent freeware Burrn which supports many formats which are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets as well as embedded cuesheets for ape, wv and flac files. It reads the tags automatically and adds them to the burning process. Burrrn is really easy to use, it supports drag and drop and direct editing of song title and artist.

You will have to choose a burner the first time it starts. Once this is done the main window opens and you may add new songs to the CD by dragging songs or cue sheets to the main window.  If you want a certain order for your files you have to drag them one at a time. Last but not least it offers a way to adjust the replaygain for all songs before the songs are burned to the audio cd.