Description: RipShout saves the audio from “shoutcast” internet radio stations directly to your hard drive. It will preserve the song’s IDv3 tag info and organize recorded audio by creating a folder for each artist and saving the individual tracks within it.

This has to be the world’s most straightforward internet radio recorder/”ripper”. All you need to do is get the URL of the internet radio station that you want to record; however, the station has to use the “Shoutcast” protocol, which is the most common on the internet, and RipShout will record the audio stream for you. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: once you find a station you like you can (1) click on the station’s link and open it with RipShout, (2) right click on the shoutcast link and select copy shortcut, then paste it into the box at the bottom of the app, or (3) right click on the Shoutcast link and select “save as” to save the .PLS file to your desktop, which you could then open from within RipShout.
• Don’t have a station in mind? :go to shoutcast.com for an entire directory of these, and a search box to help you find things stations you like.
• Supported stations: RipShout only records MP3 based Shoutcast radio stations, so make sure that you do not choose AAC format stations. Note: some internet radio streams typically give you a choice between 128kbit and lower quality streams; for recording purposes always go with the higher quality.
• Recording: you could either do this silently in the background or you could choose to hear what is being recorded either through RipShout’s own internal player or through WinAmp. This did not work for me, unfortunately (my internal player did not produce any sound, and I do not use WinAmp).
  Read more »

Description: Pepsky Free Audio Converter is a free program that can convert audio files across a wide range of formats, burn audio CDs playable with any CD player, burn audio-file CDs in many formats, and rip CD’s into MP3 or other formats.

What’s notable about this software is (a) the wide range of supported audio file formats that it can read and write (b) the nice collection of functions that it brings together at the same place, and (c) a very nice overall look and feel. Here are more notes on this program:

• Supported audio formats: will convert from and to any of the following formats; MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, AIF, VOC, FLAC, M4A, OGG, AU, FLV, and APE.
• The user experience: is very nice. The interface looks good and the dialogs very intuitive.
• Conversion Performance: provides excellent conversion speed. This is merely my subjective assessment, but I will note that the program is optimized for dual core (Intel/AMD) processors.
• Audio CD creation: it can burn any of the above format audio files into a normal music CD that can be played on any CD player. It can also create a “disk image” file in BIN, APE, SVD formats.
• MP3 CD creation: actually not just MP3s; you can burn audio files of any supported format into CD’s that can be played on some CD players that support these formats.
• CD Ripping: will rip CD tracks into any of the supported audio file formats; surprisingly, however, it does not pull track data from CDDB or an online database, requiring manual data entry of this information (or a later online lookup using another app).
  Read more »

Description: BBox Audio Player (BBoxV2) is a free lightweight audio player/manager that offers a good range of features including CD ripping, audio file tagging management, internet radio, automatic volume normalization, audio library management functions, and others.

This program pulls a very interesting trick: it takes up less than 2 megs in memory for the program itself (apart from libraries/music data loaded into it; more info in the comments section) — yet nonetheless provides enough functionality for most people to use as their primary audio player/manager. Compare this to, say, a program such as iTunes, which consumes 51 megs in memory, Mediamonkey or JRiver Media Jukebox (both of which consume approx. 30 megs).

You might wonder whether it is appropriate to compare BBoxV2 with these programs, and in many ways it is oranges and apples since the scope of these latter programs is so much broader; however, BBoxV2 does provide an impressive array of functions in a nice little package, and in truth if you preferred a slim and compact audio player/manager that is simple yet powerful BBoxV2 delivers (and delivers very well). Here are more notes on this program:

• CD Player and Ripper: rips tracks and pulls tag info from an online database. MP3 format only with a wide range of quality options (CBR/VBR).
• Tagger: the tagging function is surprisingly powerful, and includes the ability to do auto tagging based on an online search, including album artwork. (Allows you to change the search string used, which is very useful).
• Music library functions: includes quick filters (artist/album) as well as (a very useful) keyword search.
• Internet Radio: with 68 pre-defined stations. Although I was not able to determine how to add my own stations to the list, I was able to add shoutcast (.pls) shortcuts to the music library and add/play shoutcast stations that way. (Update: see comments section for how to add stations).
• Smart volume: i.e. normalizes volume for different audio tracks playing in succession, eliminating any sudden variations in volume.
• Supported audio formats (playback): MP3, WMA, Wave, MP1, MP2, MP4, AIFF, OGG, M4A, M4V, M4P, AAC, AC3, APE, TTA, OFR, SPX, FLAC & CDA.
  Read more »

Description: Moby Gratis is an archive of instrumental music clips created by the alternative rock/electronic music maestro Moby. These are available to anyone to download and legally use in their film projects, provided that these are independent, student, non-commercial, or non-profit films.

One day I will make a film, and it will be fantastic (you’ll see!). When that day comes and I am faced with the issue of finding music to use for my scenes I will go to Mobygratis and check out the growing collection of instrumental/electronic/soundtrack music that might fit the mood. If you are working on your own project you should check it out.

You will have to create an account first, afterwhich you can log in and check out multiple pages of links to music. All of the music is instrumental; you will not find tracks from his albums (or at least I didn’t see any). You can preview the clips on the page through a flash player, and request a license on-the-spot if you want to use it. How cool is that?

See video below of Moby talking about Moby Gratis:
Read more »

Description: ToneShop is a small, free program that can create ringtones out of your audio files for any phone that supports a true audio ringtone, including the Apple IPhone. It provides the ability to quickly and easily select a snippet of sound from within your audio files to be used as a ringtone.

I’ve had my eye out for a simple program that can quickly create ringtones out of MP3s for my IPhone when I found this program, which in fact can do this for a very wide range of phones and devices. ToneShip is in fact a frontend GUI for FFMPEG, the encoding engine which the majority of freeware video and audio conversion programs are based. Here are more notes on this one.

• How it works: simply load an audio file, then use the (0.1 second precision) trackbar to identify beginning and end points for your ringtone (note that different phones vary on length of ringtone they will accept, so take that into consideration). You can also enter in the start and finish positions as values manually, and preview the ringtone snippet by pressing the "show" button. Finally, select the desired ringtone file format from the dropdown and press the "convert" button to create your ringtone.
• Phones supported: all phones that use true audio ringtones. Go here for a (non-exhaustive) list.
• Audio file types supported: can input MP3, WAV, WMA, and M4A formats, and produce ringtones in MP3, WAV (uncompressed PCM), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec, .m4a), Nokia TrueTones (AMR-WB, .amr), AMR-NB (.amr)
  Yamaha SMAF (.mmf),ADPCM (4-bit compressed PCM. way), and Apple IPhone (AAC, .m4r).
  Read more »

Description: Mp3ListShellEx is Windows Explorer shell extension that allows you to create playlists or text lists of your MP3s simply by highlighting a folder and selecting an option from the right click context menu.

Some things, such as organizing a large MP3 collection, never seem to end. Mp3ListShellEx is a program that could potentially make your audio library easier to manage, especially if you organize your audio files within a folder structure, by enabling you to create playlists (and track lists) out of folder contents simply by right clicking on the folder. It relieves you from the need to keep launching your media player every time you need to do this simple operation. Here are more notes on this program:

• Formats supported: creates playlists that can be played by media players (M3U, WPL, B4S, PLS), or lists of files in HTM, XML, CSV, or XLS (Excel) formats.
• Recursive processing: from the settings, the program can be configured to either process folders-within-folders recursively or not. Folders-within-folders are included in a single playlist.
• Processing multiple folders: check "seperate list for each folder" in the settings, then select multiple folders and run. A seperate playlist will be created for each folder.
• Sorting: you can select to sort the generated playlist by any column available in the explorer details view (Album, artist, title, track, etc). Unfortunately doesn’t allow for multiple sorting criteria (see wish list below).
• Creation location: you can create playlists inside the folder itself, or set to create inside a pre-determined location (e.g. Desktop, My Documents), or have the program prompt you for a location.
• Wildcards: you can define a wildcard from the settings. By default it’s "*.mp3" but it could be anything you need (e.g. *depeche mode* will filter depeche mode tracks assuming that string is in the file name).
  Read more »

Description: FLV Extract is a free program that can save video and audio files from FLV files in their original formats without decompressing or re-compressing.

If you weren’t aware of it, FLV files are containers that house audio and video files which may be encoded in any number of formats. FLV Extract gives you the ability to unpack the video and audio files without needing to re-encode or re-process.

This little program will be very useful if you (a) are downloading music from music-sharing sites in the FLV format, or (b) need to demux the audio or video from FLV files.

Converting FLVs to MP3s is possible using a number of programs such as Super or Any Audio Converter; however, these will perform re-encoding operations which take time and in most cases require that the user make a number of quality and format decisions. With FLV Extract, however, the extraction happens in a flash and is almost instantaneous, and the files retain the format and quality with which they were encoded. Here are more notes on this program:

• Nothing to install: just unzip and run.
• The UI: a simple dialog with 3 options: extract video, timecodes, and audio. All you need to do is to drop files onto the app for processing.
• Performance: you can drag multiple FLVs onto FLV Extract and they will be processed immediately within the space of a second (or a few seconds at most).
  Read more »

Description: JRiver Media Jukebox is an advanced music manager that has recently turned 100% freeware. It provides most of the tools that you will ever need to play and manage your audio library, including audio format conversion, CD burning and ripping with online tag and album art support, full smartlists support, a tag editor, Ipod and device management, podcast support, sound recording, ad-hoc album art downloading, visualizations, skins, and extendibility through a wide range of freely downloadable plugins (including a pre-installed Last.FM audioscrobbler plugin). It supports most audio file formats.

Yes you might have heard of this program and yes, it is now released as 100% no-strings attached freeware. This program is a perfect replacement of ITunes and if you were looking for a single program that can do it all (or at least do more than 90% of what you might want to do with your audio library), Media Jukebox is it. It also looks and feels pretty darn good to boot. Here are some notes on this program:

More info on this program:

• The User Interface: is one of the nicest aspects of this program. Your audio tracks or albums can be displayed in list view or a very pleasing tiled thumbnail view. One of the more useful features is filtering pane split into 3 sections (genre/artist/ablum) which allows you to check boxes to filter your music, and is very useful when you are trying to fix or manage your library’s ID3 tags.
• The context menu: most operations can be done by selecting multiple tracks (using CTRL or Shift-clicking) then right-clicking to access the function you want (e.g. converting tracks to other formats, managing album art, group tag-editing, sending to a device, etc.) Generally speaking this makes for a very intuitive way of working with your audio library.
• Tag editing: has everything you would expect from a tagging program, including file to properties and vice vera, and various cleanup functions (e.g. underscore to space, etc.) One thing I like is that you can set it such that it automatically updates the database to reflect changes to the tags that are done externally with other programs.
• Normalization: optionally built in on playback. Make sure to perform an audio track analysis on your library which will help this process (right click to library tools/analyze audio, or use advanced tools from the tools menu).
  Read more »

Description: IArtwork is an Itunes add-on that scans your Itunes library for available album art. It can then either downloads all missing album art en-masse and/or allow you to manage individual album instances individually.

Although Itunes is equipped to download album art, it requires you to have an ITunes account and be logged in order to download album art. It also tends to be extremely picky about how the music is tagged if it is to download album art at all. And even if you get the album art downloading to function properly, you still need to manually flip through all of the albums individually to search and download album art, which requires quite a bit of work on the part of the user.

What IArtwork can do, on the other hand, is scan you library for all album artwork, download all missing album art sequentially, and display everything in a list. The user can then go down the list and individually intervene/edit any entry that may have been processed incorrectly and/or attempt to manually locate/identify albums whose album art was not found automatically. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: clicking on the IArtwork shortcut will launch both IArtwork and Itunes. It will present you with a “you have x albums with no artwork message”, and give you the option find/update them.
• En-masse editing: you can scroll down a list of album art and optionally remove the album art or manually intervene/change the available album art. The list allows is a very good way to quickly go over your entire music collection and fix/edit it (see first screenshot above).
• Manual intervention: clicking on an individual entry will open a dialog where you can adjust the search string, flip through the results, and hone in on the correct album art which was not automatically found. Works very well.
• Artwork downloading source: the artwork is downloaded from Amazon.com (update: previously this was unknown to me but the developers were kind enough to email me and let me know).
  Read more »

Description: BurnAware Free Edition is a free CD/DVD burning software with a small footrprint that can write to a wide range of CD/DVD media types including Blu-Ray; write Audio CDs and DVD-Video files. Aside from writing/verifying data CDs it can also create audio CDs from music files and burn data and video DVDs as well as burn ISO disk images. BurnAware free edition s

If you need a simple free program that can perform most of your CD/DVD burning needs check out this program. It combines a nice range of features with a simple interface and is generally light on system resources. Here are the reasons why you would want to use this software:

• Very nice interface: simple and straightforward and generally has a very nice look and feel. Runs in the system tray for quick access.
• Lightweight: very small footptint, less than 8 megs memory usage when running. Does not require .NET Framework as some other freeware CD burners do.
• Formats supported: all CD/DVD media types, including Blue-Ray; write Audio CDs and DVD-Video files. I am assuming this includes double density DVDs as well.
• Writes data CDs/DVDs: verifies written data, supports writing simulation, supports multisession (i.e. adding files to a burned disc later on), can erase re-writable media.
• Disk-image support: burns ISOs and can save your project as ISO; however it does not create ISOs from existing CDs/DVDs.
• Creates audio CDs: from your audio files. Supports MP3, WAV, and WMV audio files.

Here are reasons why this software might NOT be the one for you. Note that while BurnAware lacks the features listed below, adding them would likely have made a lightweight app more complex and/or top heavy. If you are looking the features below check out the free CDBurnerXP or InfraRecorder.
Read more »

Description: InfoTag Magic is a useful shell extension that provides informational tooltips on mouse-over for audio files (MP3, WMA, APE, and Ogg Vorbis), quick tooltip previews for text files (TXT, INI, LOG, BAT, DIZ, BAK, and QUE, tooltip information on the properties of windows shortcuts, and tooltip version information for EXE, DLL, and OCX files.

This is a very straightforward software that provides informational toolips whenever you hover your mouse over certain types of files (see screenshot). Here’s more info on each of the different types of files supported:

• Audio files: supports WP3, WMA, APE, and Ogg Vorbis. The first thing you need to find out is whether your audio player already provides informational tooltips for audio files, and, if so, whether you like the ones you already have. What I have noticed is while InfoTag Magic creates very nice tooltips, in some infrequent instances it omits some info even when that info seems to be available (as far as I can tell). The 2 MP3s in the screenshot both had info in their ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, but the "Air" song did not have the title and artist displayed in the tooltip.
• Text files: (actually TXT, INI, LOG, BAT, DIZ, BAK, and QUE files). This is a really handy tooltip if you’re browsing a bunch of files or notes that you’ve created and would like to be able to quickly peer into files to see whats in them.
• Shortcuts: if you’re like me you not infrequently resort to right-clicking on a shortcut and displaying its properties to find out where it is pointing to and where it starts. With this tooltip, all you have to do is hover over a shortcut to instantly see this info.
• Executables: (EXE, DLL, and OCX). A quick way to see version and other info.
  Read more »

Description: MediaCoder Audio Edition is a free, full-featured audio conversion program that can both read and write to almost all popular audio file formats as well as audio streams in video files. MediaCoder AE contains all the necessary codecs it needs for encoding/decoding audio within the standalone software.

I’ve been looking for an all-around audio conversion solution for some time now after discovering that my previous staple audio converter (Any Audio Converter) inexplicably did not support some common audio formats; namely FLAC, APE, M4A (the ITunes default format) and M4B. MediaCoderAE, on the other hand supports these formats and more; in fact, the strength of this program is the sheer breadth of the supported formats (really everything you might imagine, although ironically not FLV, which Any Audio Converter actually supports).

MediaCoder Audio Edition is based on MediaCoder, a global transcoder (i.e. converter) program that handles both video and audio. What makes this program noteworthy is (a) the range of formats supported, as mentioned above, and (b) the range of available options/functionalities, which is quite ambitious. Here are some of the features offered:

• Audio conversion: can be done on the fly or in batch.
• Volume Gain: you can add audio volume gain for the group of tracks that you are converting (i,e. raise the volume by a certain level). This can be helpful if your source file’s volume is too low.
• Audio normalization: is offered as an option. This will raise/lower volume gain to conform to the average, eliminating any sudden disparity in volume across different tracks.
• Metadata: can be preserved across different formats after conversion; an excellent feature that is sometimes overlooked.
• Demuxing (i.e. extracting audio from video files): another great feature.
• Renaming: MedacoderAE can rename audio files for you using the files’ metadata based on a number of user defined rules. It can also sort files within a folder structrue based on this (e.g. send all tracks from the same album to a folder, similar to a program such as Id3ToFolder). And while this is nice to have I prefer a metadata manager such as Mp3Tag to do this sort of thing personally.
• DSP plugins: MediaCoderAE allows you to use DSP signal processing plugins from WinAMP. It comes pre-loaded with the ’Enhancer’ plugin, which you can optionally enable. (I did not test this myself).
• Input options: can process files, audio tracks from DVDs, or URLs
• Audio Joining/Splitting: seems to be supported, but didn’t work for me (see wish list below).
  Read more »

Description: AlbumArt.org is a site that provides searchable CD and DVD art in large format.

I’ve always used Amazon to download album art, which doesn’t provide large size images, and is on occasion unable to deliver artwork for some titles. My second resource is typically Google image search, which is unpredictable.

This is why I was very pleased to discover AlbumArt.org. It allows you to search for either CD or DVD artwork and instantly produces (mostly) large format results. It also contains album art from international and/or rare realeses. A search for "Radiohead" produced a staggering 468 results, which certainly says something about the breadth of this resource. And as the folks over at the CD Design and Album Cover Art blog indicate, in many cases the size of the images is larger than that provided by the album artwork resources in Itunes.

[Via the CD Design and Album Cover Art blog]
Read more »

Description: Tunestor is an extension for IE and Firefox that allows for downloading MP3s and adding them to your Itunes library in one fell swoop from the browser context menu.

This browser extension aims to condense what would typically involve 4 different steps into a single, simple right-click command. While normally you would need to (1) click to download an audio file, (2) select the location to save the file, (3) start ITunes, and (4) manually add the file to the Itunes Library, with Tunestor you would simply right-click on the mp3 download link in the browser and select “download directly to Itunes”.

What I like about this is the convenience of knowing that I can download something then find it in the music library when I open Itunes, ready to be synched with my Iphone.

Here are some notes on this program:

• Tunestor downloads files to the “My Music” directory by default. While this is probably a good choice, it would be better if it enabled you to change the default download directory in case the user prefers another location. Come to think of it, having the ability to optionally introduce a “save as” dialog to choose the save folder would also be good (albeit it would add a step).
  Read more »

Description: MP3 Check allows you to audit your library of MP3 audio files for songs that do not meet your desired quality and volume criteria. It lets you define a handful of standards to check you audio library against (ID3 tag presence/absence, bit rate, sample rate, and volume) and will scan your folders for MP3s that do not comply with these.

As your music library grows and grows wouldn’t be great if you could use a tool to identify those songs that, say, are low in (bit-rate) quality or whose volume is too low? MP3 Check is such a tool that will use your own standards to audit your library and identify those audio files that do not meet them.

You can set MP3 Check such that it will **optionally** perform the following tests on your collection; note, however, that you can also choose NOT to perform any of the below tests simply by unchecking the box next to it in the main MP3-Check interface.

• MP3s with ID3v1 tags missing
• MP3s with ID3v2 tags missing
• MP3s that are either under a minimum user-defined bit rate or otherwise over a user-defined bit rate.(If, say. you don’t want it to check for a max bit rate simply enter a very large number in the max kbps box)
• MP3s that are under a given sample rate
• Finally (and this one is my favorite), MP3s that are under (or over) a given gain volume.
  Read more »