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)

An alternative to standalone tuners are software tuners, that make use of computing devices to offer additional information and tuning assistance to the user.

Audio Tuner is a program for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, and several mobile phone operating systems, to tune instruments including guitars, banjos, bass guitars, pianos and violins.

audio tuner

The requirements for the PC version are either a microphone connected to the PC, or an option to directly connect the instrument to the computer system. The mobile phone versions do not have any requirements.

Three steps need to be completed to tune an instrument. First, the instrument has to be selected from the list of available ones. Second, the note or string to be tuned has be selected. This displays a target in the pitch graph.

And finally, the note or string has to be played in front of the microphone, if that option has been selected. The pitch then needs to be adjusted until it is in line with the selected target.

The pitch analysis will display information about the notes or strings that are played, in addition to the information on the graph. It will tell the user if the pitch is to high or to low, which makes the tuning easier to complete.

There are three additional options. It is possible to listen to the target note, use high resolution for fine tuning, and show a specific frequency range.

Mobile versions are available for Windows Mobile or Pocket PC, Java mobile – e.g. Nokia, Sony, BlackBerry mobile, Google Android as well as iPhone and iPod Touch.

Musicians who would like to try Audio Tuner can download the PC or mobile version from the developer’s website.

The program is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system and requires iTunes to be running in the background to function at all.

It will automatically pick up the songs that are played in iTunes offering additional controls in its interface. These controls include rating songs, toggling shuffle and displaying lyrics that are pulled from the Internet.

Those features alone would probably convince only a few computer users to give the application a try. But what about global keyboard shortcuts, automated library maintenance and optimization, synchronization of playlists with USB mp3 players, playlist export, conversion of iTunes tracks into other supported music formats, copying of tracks to other locations, import of media files into the iTunes library or notification popups that show information about the track that has just been loaded?

The iTuner application offers many interesting features that are either not provided by iTunes natively or only accessible through several clicks in the iTunes software.

The program uses on the downside lots of computer resources while running (120 Megabytes on our Windows 7 test system). Windows users who want to test the program can download it from its Codeplex website.

Subsonic is a Java application which, as we all know, has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. To setup the service users need to install the computer program and check the Subsonic Music Streamer service to configure it further. Subsonic will automatically start its service which can be accessed by pointing the web browser to http://localhost:80/. Some users might run into troubles using that port which can be changed in the configuration.

The username and password admin will allow the user to add music to the program and change configuration settings. Subsonic does not come with a file browser which means that it is necessary to paste the path(s) to the music folder(s) manually into the interface.

The music is added automatically then which takes only a second to complete. Subsonic displays all band names in a left sidebar making it very easy to access the music collection. Songs can be played in the interface directly or in an external mp3 player which is configurable in the options.

Information about music including mp3 tags and album art are displayed directly on screen with links pointing to various popular sites like Last.fm, Wikipedia, Amazon and Google to look up additional information.

The admin can change many aspects of the application in the options. This starts with welcome and login messages, continues with user management and permission settings and ends with the ability to add podcasts and Internet radio.

Subsonic has to run on the local computer system before others can access it on a computer network or over the Internet. The number of users able to access it at once depends highly on the computer hardware and network speed.

While experienced users access websites like Shoutcast inexperienced users might like the idea of an all-in-one application that starts playing music instantly and makes the selection of music stations easier than ever. The music player will list more than 12000 Internet radio stations in its interface which can be listened to with the click of the mouse button. All stations are listed by name, country, genre and language with the option to sort by any of the parameters.

The search will probably be the function to find radio stations as it is faster and more convenient than scrolling through the massive list of stations. The developers should think about filters that allow users to narrow down the results in the list automatically.

The only other feature worth mentioning is the record button which can be used to record the current stream to the local computer. Recordings will automatically be split by track and an option exists to skip already recorded tracks. The functionality is however not as advanced as that of specialized tools like Streamripper or Stationripper.

A portable and installer version of Radiosure is available at the developer’s homepage. The program is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows XP

This is beneficial for users who feel irritated by the sound volume after some time of playing and those that want to reduce it to fall faster into sleep. The portable application will control the system volume of the operating system meaning it is compatible with all applications that are running on it.

The user can define the total duration of the process, the time the volume duration should begin and the target volume in the end. The duration can range from 5 minutes to 120 minutes while the sound volume can be set between 0 and 100%.

The application will display a graph detailing the sound volume progression over the entire time. Sweet Dreams can furthermore perform one of the following actions after reaching the total duration: shutdown, switch off monitor, standby or hibernate.

English users should not be worried by the German homepage of the developer as the application itself has been completely translated into English.

The first method is a search that can be used to find exact matches for artists, songs, albums and so on. Youtube has one of the largest collections of music videos and it usually is pretty easy to find the music that you are looking for. Music that has been discovered can be added to playlists which can be saved after a free account registration at the official website. This is a great way of creating lots of playlists that cover all the songs and genres that the user likes.

The second option that is offered by Muziic is pre-generated playlists that can be accessed from the sidebar of the music player. Those playlists are sorted by genre. About 30 or so genres are available which do contain one or multiple playlists that can be selected for playback.

The video going along with the song can be displayed in the music player if that is something that the user wants to view as well while listening to the song. Besides the playlists that are offered users can import so called channels that have been created by other Muziic users into the application. Channels are also categorized in genres making it easy to pick a suitable one.

The music player is quite interesting as it uses a concept similar to cloud computing to provide access to a large collection of music to users. Users benefit from this by being able to search and access that large database and by saving disk space as virtually no local disk space is required. The only possible drawbacks are the quality of the songs which are definitely not high (but acceptable) quality and the chance that songs vanish if the videos get deleted on Youtube.

Last.fm Downloader (via Life Rocks) is a free portable software program for the Windows operating system that can connect to any last.fm radio station to record the music that is played there. The software is absolutely fool proof as it provides only a few buttons and configuration options.

The url of the radio station has to be pasted into the application which is the only thing needed to start the recordings. Settings make it possible to change the download location of the music files, to define a maximum size limit or download file count limit, to start an external application if a limit is reached and whether to download cover art and make use of a deep folder layout while downloading.

The last.fm software will download three different songs at a time from the radio stream and save them to the local computer. Several songs are shown that are next to be downloaded from last.fm.

The downloaded songs will be named artist – title.mp3 by default and \Artist\Album\Artist – Title.mp3 if the deep folder structure has been selected.

An alternative to Last.fm Downloader is Last Sharp.

The free Internet radio recorder provides access to four modules in the main interface. The Stations module can be used to find Internet Radio stations. The user can search by music genre or keyword and display the top 500 or random Internet radio stations.

The Rip and Listen buttons can be used to start the recording of the Internet radio station or to listen to it in the embedded player module on the same page.

The Ripper module will display the selected Internet radio station with the option to start the recording. One interesting feature of Musicy os the ability to add multiple Internet radio stations to the ripper which can all be recorded at the same time if the network connection of the computer provides enough bandwidth to do so.

The free Internet radio recorder will display the bitrate, the downloaded Megabytes and the time the computer was connected to each Internet radio station. The total bandwidth that is currently used for the recordings and the size of all downloads is shown in the module’s status bar.

Musicy will automatically save the song using the name of the artist and title if the Internet radio station is streaming those information.

Musicy Download

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.

AIMP is a music player that might not be mentioned that often. The main reason why that is the case is surely the Russian website that is keeping lots of users at bay. Some might spot the player on download portals like Softpedia and those are usually the ones who stick with it after installing and testing the player.

AIMP comes with an impressive design and functionality that leaves most music players behind. It is low on resource usage, provides an impressive sound, great design, an audio converter, CD ripper and Internet radio ripper among other things.

The official website contains a few plugins and skins that can be added to the player but one feature that the player excels in is the compatibility to many Winamp plugins.

One of the winners of a Ghacks t-shirt mentioned a few Winamp plugins that were keeping him from changing to AIMP. A quick research revealed that it was possible to add the plugins to AIMP as well. He mentioned the following three plugins: Minilyrics, DFX and Ozone.

The principle is basically the same for all plugins:

• Download the plugin to the computer.
• Try to extract it using a packer. If that is not working install it. All three plugins could be installed without having Winamp installed. Some might require Winamp though.
• Go to the directory where the files have been extracted / installed into.
• It is usually enough to copy the plugin dll files to the AIMP2/plugins directory. In the case of DFX it is the dsp_dfx.dll, for Ozone it is dsp_iZOzoneFree.dll while Minilyrics requires two: gen_MiniLyrics.dll and MiniLyrics.dll

A rule of thumb. If in doubt copy all files into the directory. AIMP will tell you if something is missing upon activation of the plugin. This is how you do that:

A click on the top left icon will display a menu. Choosing plugins from that menu will open the AIMP Plugin Manager which displays all loaded (meaning active) and unloaded plugins.

New plugins that have been placed in the plugins folder can be activated by selecting them with a left click and clicking on Load afterwards. You will see a message window if something is not right. If the wrong dll has been moved into the plugin directory no plugin will be shown under the Unloaded Plugins tab.

Some plugins, like the DSP ones, require activating in the options of AIMP. A click on the same icon that brought you into the Plugin Manager will also bring you in the DSP Manager. There you can select the Winamp DSP Plugin that has been previously loaded into AIMP.

Not all plugins will work but many will. It is just a matter of trying.