The interface is divided into two main levels. The left sidebar offers a folder browser with some filtering options at the bottom. It is for example possible to filter for specific audio formats or file names. The confusion can be attributed to the right main window. This window is divided into a main tab with buttons to rename, tag, edit, organize, retrieve online information and play. The two lower menus change depending on the main tab that is selected by the user.

The rename tab for example contains buttons to scan, open or save playlists, open the rename options, execute scripts and handle changes (like undo or ignoring files. More confusing than that are main options like the organize or online tabs where the choice in the second menu level changes the third menu.

Here are some of the highlights of the music manager:

• Batch rename of files using Tag/Filename/Folder name/Audio file information.
• Batch Tag update.
• Manual / single file editor.
• Album/filename rename & update using freedb.org or www.allmusic.com, Amazon, and custom sites
• Powerful library.
• Encode/decode your files with LAME,Ogg Vorbis or mpcenc. (trans code with out losing tag information from one format to the other)
• Restructure the files on your hard disk ( copy,move or even create shortcuts ) in new user defined location based on Tag field information.
• mp3, ogg, mpc, ape, flac, aac, apl, wv, mp4, ofr, spx file support

The Godfather is available at the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems and can be downloaded as a stable or beta version.

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I needed a software program to merge mp3 to be able to have enough music for all the photos that would be displayed in the DVD slideshow.

Merge Mp3 is a free and portable software program for the Windows operating system that can do exactly that. Mp3 can be dragged and dropped into the application’s interface or selected through the file browser. It is also possible to specify folders or playlists to add and merge their mp3.

The order of the mp3 can be changed in the interface in case it needs to be. Basic controls for playing the added mp3 files are available. As are options to add ID3 tags for the new merged mp3. The biggest benefit of Merge Mp3 is its simplicity. It takes less than a minute to select the mp3 and join them. There are additional options where merging mp3 might make sense. This includes merging all chapters of an audiobook or the tracks of a ripped CD.

Merge Mp3 is compatible with Windows and available from the developer’s website.

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• Adding / fixing track info, including album art; information can be retrieved from several sources: Internet, clipboard, file name, local files, and (obviously) keyboard
• Correcting files that show incorrect song duration
• Correcting files in which the player cannot seek correctly
• Converting characters for non-English names
• Adding composer name to the artist field, for players that don’t handle the composer field
• Renaming files based on their fields
• Changing word case for track info

MP3 Diag makes it easy to identify and fix issues with mp3 files. It can also be used to make changes to the mp3 files. Issues that can be detected by the software program are for example:

• broken tags / headers / audio
• duplicate tags / headers
• incorrect placement of tags / headers (ID3V2, ID3V1, LAME, Xing, …)
• low quality audio
• missing VBR header
• missing track info / cover art
• broken track info / cover art
• missing normalization data
• character encoding issues (for languages other than English)

The user needs to select one or multiple folders that contain mp3 files at the beginning. The program will automatically scan and analyze all mp3 files and display its findings in the main program interface. Each mp3 file is handled separately. It is possible to fix issues individually which could take a while depending on the size of the mp3 collection and the amount of errors found or to create a custom list that is fixing multiple errors (if they exist) at the same time.

Mp3 Diag comes with a tag editor that can query online databases like MusicBrainz or Discogs for information about selected songs or albums. Other nice to have features are a file renamer, sorting options, mp3 backups before making changes and extensive options.

Mp3 Diag is an excellent tool to scan and fix a mp3 collection. The open source tool is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux computer systems.

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You find a good mixture of established artists in the list including songs by Bif Naked, Underoath or Warren G but the majority of songs comes from artists that most visitors probably never heard of. This does not necessarily mean that this is bad music. It is actually a good way of discovering new artists that are not that in the focus of mass media.

The downloaded songs have been encoded with 192 Kbit and it is likely that all songs are encoded in this bitrate. Music can be sorted by letter or genre which helps to find the right music genre or artist.

There is no word yet on the duration of this promotion. Thanks goes to jagslive for sending us the tip.

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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.

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While this is not a problem on modern computer systems where hard drives with Terabytes of data become the norm. It could however play a role with mobile devices like cell phones or mp3 players. These have seen a storage increase in the last two years as well but it is still not uncommon to see cell phones or mp3 players with a few Gigabytes of storage or even less.

It might make sense to reduce the quality of the music to be able to store more of it on the devices. It is obviously up to the individual user to find an acceptable quality setting. One application that can modify the quality of music.

The software is pretty easy to use. It takes only a few clicks to modify the quality. The user can drag and drop music into the interface. Various information such as the name, size or bitrate are displayed automatically. The last step before the conversion is to select a preset which ranges from high quality over portable and compromise to low quality with the option to add custom presets to the application.

A preset is made up of a sample frequency, bitrate mode, rate and modus. Conversion takes only a few seconds per song and can remove the original if that is wanted by the user. The results page will list the size differences between the original and the conversion. MP3 Quality Modifier can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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The search works by entering an artist, band, song or album title in the search form. Tonzr will search its database for matches and display them on search result pages. Only four ringtones are displayed per page which is the greatest weakness of the search engine. Each ringtone can be played directly on the search results page. It will play for 30 seconds and stop afterwards.

Tonzr provides the means to send the free ringtone to the cell phone in various ways including sending an sms containing the download link pointing to the mp3 ringtone, sending it as an mms or downloading the ringtone to the computer to transfer it from there to the cell phone.

The easiest way for most users will probably be to download ringtones to the computer first and transfer them to their cell phone from there. Currently the SMS and MMS options are only working with selected US carriers. Everyone else has to use the pc download option to download ringtones anyway at this moment in time.

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iWOW exists for Windows, OS X and iPods. On OS X, only an iTunes plug-in is available. On Windows, either an iTunes plug-in or system-wide software are available. The system-wide software can obviously be used to improve sound in all applications, such as games. On an iPod, a hardware-based adapter is available which plugs into the iPod to improve its sound. I haven’t tested the iTunes version.

The software or iPod adapter are unfortunately not free. The iTunes plug-in costs $40, the system-wide software costs $50 and the adapter costs $80. This sounds expensive but it sometimes included in bundles and discounts, MacUpdate for example offered it in their bundle.

SRS Labs, the makers of iWOW, claims to create ‘an expansive sound stage’ and to ‘restore audio cues that are buried in the original source material’. I personally don’t understand what that means, but have heard the sound quality it produces… even on my laptop speakers!

The software, at least on the Mac, is very easy to install. All one must do is run it. It is then installed in iTunes.

The question is whether or not it is worth $40. 51 reviews on MacUpdate give it 4/5 on average.

A few features like ‘auto-detect’ are missing in version 3, but were present in version 2. SRS Labs promise that this will be offered in an update in a few weeks.

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Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. The adverts are only a minor annoyance; I find there is about 2 minutes of them per hour of music. A premium service is also available, where adverts can be removed for a cost.

The service requires a desktop client to play the music. Their client is currently only available on OS X and Windows. Using this software, users can search for music, compile playlists and listen to online radio. The music is streamed as an Ogg Vorbis at 160kbps, so it is very high quality! It also scrobbles the music to last.fm.

The advertising is tolerable. Generally, they last about 30-45 seconds and either advertise Spotify Premium or, currently, the Disasters Emergency Committee in the UK. Premium (ad-free) Spotify costs either 99p a day or £10 a month.

I am beginning to reconsider if I still have the need to download music. Most songs are available free on Spotify, with the exception of some of the newest releases on certain labels. My only problem with Spotify is that it isn’t portable, so I can’t use it on my iPod etc.

Spotify has a bigger collection of music than the ‘full tracks’ available on last.fm.

It is currently only invitation only, but I will give the first 4 people to ask an invite each. Just leave a comment asking for one.

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ID3 Mass Tagger can add or edit id3 and id3v2 tags in multiple music files on a computer system. It currently supports the ID3 v1.1, Lyrics 3 v2.0 and ID3v2 formats which limits it somewhat to music formats that support these as well.

The developer’s homepage contains a few usage examples and downloads for Windows, Linux, Dos and FreeBSD including the source code of the application. Not all parameters are explained on the homepage though. The Readme document that is included in the download explains them all and should be read after unpacking the files to the local computer.

Some basic usage examples are the following:

Strip all id3v1 tags from all mp3 files in a folder.

id3 -d *.mp3

Copy id3v2 tags to id3v1 tags in all files

id3 -2 -1 -u "*.mp3"

Removes embedded images and padding from all mp3 recursively starting at /mydocuments

id3 -2 -rAPIC -s 0 -R "*.mp3" "/my documents"

ID3 Mass Tagger is a powerful command line music tagger. It works best in conjunction with batch files or shortcuts but can also be used separately. Could be useful for someone who is editing lots of music files on a regular basis.

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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.

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Fortunately that is not difficult. And even more fotunate, here are the instructions.

The first thing you need to is close out all applications that might want to make use of an mp3 file. This could include Ryhthmbox, Amarok, Banshee, or xmms. Now open a terminal window because you are going to be issuing some commands in a moment. Once the terminal window is open you will first need to su to root. With root privileges it is time to get down to business.

The first set of commands to run will install the necessary repositories for yum to use. First issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Once that command completes issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rmpfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Now it’s time to install the actual plugins for support. Issue the command:

yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree

Now your system will allow mp3 playback in the major players. But there is still no xmms. To install xmms with mp3 support issue the following command:

yum install xmms xmms-mp3

Once this is finished your machine is all ready for full-blown mp3 playback in just about every type of application.

Final Thoughts

Yes it’s true it would be nice if the major Linux distributions could ship with mp3 support built in. But that is not the case due to licensing. Fortunately getting this working is as simple as a few commands.

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You need to open a command line or write a batch file to use TidyMP3. Entering tidymp3 without parameters will display a help file with instructions on how to use the software. The basic command looks like this: tidymp3 [path] [options]. To clean all mp3 in c:\mp3 you would simply issue the command tidymp3 c:\mp3. Important switches are /b for creating a backup and /s for including subfolders.

Here is the complete list of command line parameters:

/V Verbose mode: shows detailed information
/B Save backup of the original to filename.bak
/T Save all trash (tags & stuff) to filename.trash
/F Disable frame-reconstructor (see below)
/C Compatibility mode (use tempfile, see below)
/S Recurse subfolders
/P Preserve ID3v1 tags only, removes all other non-mp3 data
/D Preserve file creation/modification time

As you can see it is possible to preserve tags and file creation & modification dates. TidyMP3 will also automatically run a frame reconstructor on the mp3 files to fix problems caused by some ID3v1 tagging tools who overwrite data of the file instead of appending the tags to it.

The tool has not been updated for some time and it has some limitations which have to be addressed. The most important is to use it only on mp3 files with 44100 Hz or higher.

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Mp3tag has always been my favorite, since it not only allows tag editing, but is capable of handling bul operations and pulling album info from the web. If you find an old-old CD, or a compilation CD you did, it might not contain tags. With Mp3tag you can eaisly add the same album name to all the files at once, or (if it’s an original CD track list) you can pull the data from the web, 2 clicks and all tags are added.

There are also loads of power options, like the ability to convert tags to filenames, with the parameters you need, creating file names with rules and so on. You can use the auto numbering tool to add the track numbers quickly, case conversion tool to convert all the names and titles to the format you like. Basically Mp3tag is an ID3 tagging “suite”, with all the tools you need to organize your music collection. Let us know if you have a different personal favorite!

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The user has to pick a root folder of the mp3 collection at start of the application. That root folder remains as long as it is not changed in the options to another folder. RandoMP3 can be closed after Winamp starts playing the mp3 album.

The root folder has to be rescanned when new mp3 albums have been copied into it. The second application is Charger which can fill a removable device with a specific amount of Megabytes of music. Alternatively it can fill the device until it reports to be full. This program is only directly available in the program folder that RandoMP3 gets installed into.

Charger supports multiple profiles which are useful if multiple users want to work with the software or if multiple devices are in use. The software remembers songs that already have been copied which ensures that no songs will be copied again if new songs that have not been copied yet are available in the mp3 collection.

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Only one line of code is needed to join multiple mp3 files: copy /b *.mp3 c:\new.mp3. That’s all there is needed. The /b parameter ensures that the files are copied in binary format. *.mp3 defines the source directory of the files. You can easily add a drive and folder structure in front. The wildcard * defines that all mp3 will be joined alphanumerically by the command. It is possible to limit the files by adding letters or numbers to the command, e.g. m*.mp3 to join all mp3 starting with the letter m.

The last part c:\mp3 defines the target directory for the newly created file as well as its name. A possibility to join files with different filenames is also available. Simply use the command copy /b file1.mp3 + aaa.mp3 + r3f.mp3 c:\new.mp3 for this. You may use wildcards as well for the process.

Several applications like Audacity can also be used to merge music files. Mp3 Direct Cut is another one for the purpose.

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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.

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Muxtape provided a great way to upload mp3 songs to their website creating a mixtape like song collection on the website. It had some limits like a maximum song size of 10 Megabytes and only one mixtape per account but what made it great was the ability to share the mixtape with friends.

The music collection was publicly accessible which was probably the main reason the RIAA stepped in although I cannot find a difference between listening to music on a website and listening to music on Radio or Youtube.

If you open Muxtape right now you notice only one sentence and no way to access any of the services of the website: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

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Each music community offers a large amount of music tracks that can be played online in an embedded player. Some music tracks can be downloaded directly because the user who uploaded the track allowed that option. Other songs on the other hand can only be played in the embedded player.

There are however a few options to download those songs from eSnips as well. The first software that I try out for any kind of streaming service is Orbit Downloader and it’s grab++ link grabber.

Orbit Downloader seems to have problems downloading songs from eSnips currently. I was not able to download the full songs, only 50K of the song which is obviously not enough.

The second option is a web downloader that converts the eSnips page where the music is embedded to the download url of the song. That works surprisingly well. One of the few scripts that can do that is the called eSnips Download.

Just enter the url of the website where the song is currently playing and hit the Get Download Link button to receive the url to the song. Another click downloads that song directly to the computer.

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One of the best, or at least one with lots of options to choose from, is Media Converter. The music and video converter supports a wide range of file types like flv, avi, mp3 or pdf that can be uploaded and converted online. That’s only part of their service though. Instead of uploading files to Media Converter to convert them online it is possible to point the service to a supported website and convert the media files found on that site directly.

This has the advantage that the source file does not have to be downloaded or uploaded. Only the final product has to be downloaded to the local computer. The media can be converted in the process. Pointing Media Converter to a Youtube video makes it possible to convert the video to mp3, ogg or one of the supported video formats before downloading the converted product.

Another interesting feature of Media Converter is the ability to convert video or music from protocols like rstp, mms or http. All those services are free of charge. Premium users get access to a handful of additional video portals, a larger file size limit, unlimited conversions per day, a higher priority and quality of recording.

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