Creevity Mp3 Cover Downloader is a free software for Windows that makes it dead easy to add covers to mp3 files. The program scans the My Music folder on startup and displays covers for the first mp3 file found in it. It is possible to browse for another folder in case the music collection is stored elsewhere.

Information about the active song are displayed at the top along with controls to play it and switch to another one stored in the folder. Mp3 Cover Downloader downloads six covers automatically from the Internet and displays them in its interface. A click on any of the covers and the selection of Apply adds the cover to the mp3 file.

A prompt like the one shown on the screenshot below is displayed if a cover is already present in the mp3 file.

A click on load other covers loads additional covers from the web. This is handy if the six covers listed are not matching the mp3 file.

Left and right arrows on the keyboard, and left and right icons in the header are used to switch between mp3 files stored in the active folder.

Mp3 Cover Downloader is a fast responsive program to add or change mp3 album covers. It unfortunately misses a feature to add a cover to all mp3 files of a folder which means that it takes longer than it should to add the same cover to all mp3 files of a folder.

Mp3 Cover Downloader is available at the developer website over at Creevity. It tested without problems on a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional test system. Developers state that the application is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows from Windows XP on.

Mp3 Packer is a tool that has been specifically designed for the purpose of reducing the size of mp3 files. It can be used to process any number of mp3 files since it can process all files in a directory and even its subdirectories at once. The size reduction will not affect the quality of the mp3 files, a pure lossless size reduction so to speak.

Various output settings are available that have an impact on the newly generated files. It is possible to specify a minimum bitrate, select the output type (vbr or cbr), strip non-mp3 data from the start or end of the file, append text to the filenames, alternate broken frame behavior or super-squeeze files.

The mp3 packer will process all audio files in the selected directory and display information about the size gain at the end.

Another interesting option of Mp3 Packer is the ability to create profiles. This can be useful to make sure that the mp3 files will always be packed using the exact same settings. MP3 Packer is a portable application which means it can be run without installation.

ID3 Kill is a free Windows software that can recursively scan through directories and perform file operations on audio files.

Usage is pretty straightforward. You point it at a directory and check a few boxes to configure the options. It is possible to include subdirectories in the scan. The main options are to remove ID3v1 and / or ID3v2 tags from all encountered audio files.

Other options include to clean m3u and pls playlists, to ignore file attributes or to display a message after the run is finished.

Update: ID3 Kill has been discontinued. You can download the last version if ID3Kill directly from our servers: ID3 Kill

The interface does look a bit overladen at first. It is driven by four tabs at the top that let you transfer filenames to tags, tags to filenames, multi tag files and query the online CDDDB database for tags. The tag to filename option is very handy if the files are already properly tagged but the filenames are not in the format that you want them to be. Five Replacement shortcuts exist that can be applied, not only in this menu though. The five entries are artist, album, number, title and year. It is therefor possible to create a filename that would contain the track number, artist and title.

Other mandatory options are to replace spaces with _ and to change the capitalization of the filenames in a number of ways. Multiple files can be selected at once but it normally does not make sense to select more than one album. Toe Tag is directory driven which means that only the files of one directory are displayed at a time. If you want to change tags or filenames of your music collection you are in for some manual labor.

The biggest missing function in my opinion is a way to automatically pull information from an online database and apply it to all of the selected mp3 files. Since this is a very early version this feature might be implemented in a later version.

Other important features are already available. Covers can be added to the files, the volume can be normalized which is a very nice feature. The tags are saved in ID3 format.