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.
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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).
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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).
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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).
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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).
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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]
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Rating: 4.5

Version tested: 0.9.2

Description: ITunes Art Importer is a plugin for Itunes that downloads album art from Amazon.com and saves it within the music files ID3 tag. It adds an additional layer of user control over the process of finding album art beyond that provided by ITunes.

While ITunes provides a fairly decent ability to mass-retrieve album artwork for a music library, it suffers from problems in that (a) ITunes will not retrieve album art for tracks that do not contain album info or are not tagged exactly the way it expects, and (b) ITunes requires the user to have an ITunes account and be logged in in order for the album art function to work (simple to set up but requires a valid credit card).

ITunes Art Importer can provide a very practical (and powerful) tool to get the album art for your music collection. It can be used to auto-import album art for an entire music collection (or part of one), but for those tracks for which auto importing will not succeed, ITunes Art Importer is versatile enough to be used effectively on a per-case basis to get album art imported for all of your tracks.

• Auto Importing: ITunes Art Importer can scan an entire library (or part of one) and automatically import the album art for tracks. When in doubt, it can be set to automatically use a ’best guess’, and can be instructed to either leave all tracks that already have images alone or re-process them. In my experience, auto-importing by best guess works brilliantly.
• User assisted album art downloading: for those tracks that auto importing doesn’t identify, you can manually override the automatic search by typing an alternative search string in the search box. This will typically generate a list of possible entries to visually browse through and work from, and is an extremely handy way to quickly take care of all those tracks in your library that don’t auto import their album art.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 0.9.0 Alpha 14

Description: MusicBrainz Picard is a free MP3 file tagger that can identify track information by comparing an audio track’s “unique digital thumbprint” to the information in the MusicBrainz database. It is based on a tagging concept that is organized around album or release information for groups of tracks (and will identify individual tracks within that framework).

Imagine that you have a ripped album where the tracks are named “track1, track2, etc”, with no tags or metadata whatever. Imagine further that you do not even know the album or artist information, and do not recognize the songs. In this case it is not possible to use metadata management apps such as Mp3Tag or The Godfather or a similar program to identify the audio files; MusicBrainz Picard, however, is based on completely different technology and most likely will be able to get the information and apply a full profile of tags to your files. To test this I renamed some tracks so that the names contained no information and stripped all the tags, and, sure enough, Picard was able to identify and tag them. Here are some notes on this software:

• The technology: MusicBrainz Picard creates a patented “unique digital thumbprint” for audio files that it processes and compares it to the MusicBrainz database in order to identify it. This database is completely user generated and maintained (you can get your own account and contribute information); as of May 2007 contained information about 306,369 artists, 483,324 albums, and 5.7 million tracks.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.04

Description: Flookey is a free audio player that learns which music you like through observing your listening behavior and looking at your music library’s metadata. It then uses this information to suggest songs from your library that match your listening preferences, to create dynamic playlists, and to provide an intelligent way of navigating your audio library.

Now that everyone has gigabytes upon gigabytes of mp3s and audio files, a new crop of tools and recommendation engines have come up in order to either (a) hone in on the music that we actually want to listen to in the midst of all the redundant gigabytes of sound, and/or (b) generate playlists of compatible tracks that will not play Beethoven’s Ninth or your self-hypnosis audio scripts right after that lone KMFDM track that you like. Flookey is one such program, as is “The Filter“; others I can think of (although admittedly geared towards music discovery rather than dynamic playlists) are the desktop components of Last.FM and Slacker.

How this program works: The process starts once Flookey is done scanning your audio library and as soon as you use it to play any track. Flookey will immediately generate a listing of “compatible” tracks based on the your audio’s metadata, which in the beginning will not be very ’educated’ but will become more refined as you go along. Flookey will observe a number of things, including which tracks in the list you click on (which will be reinforced) and which tracks you ignore (will be de-emphasizes), as well the tracks you play in their entirety and the ones you skip over (I think). Note that it will not necessarily limit its selections to songs of similar genre when it decides which tracks to serve/associate with each other.

Here are some notes on this program:

• On the fly recommendations: for each song that you play, Flookey will display recommendations in the “Suggestions” section. Each song you play will render a different set of recommendations.
• Intelligent Navigation: this works as follows; selecting one or more songs (whether in the history, now playing, or recommendations pages) and clicking the ’boost’ button will immediately prompt more ’like’ or ’related’ songs to float upwards on the recommendations pane.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.1

[Note: this review was submitted by reader “Littleloupi“ - The Freewaregenius]

Description: : The Filter is a small ’widget’-style application that works alongside your media player (currently Windows Media Player and iTunes) that works as a music recommendation engine. It can pick up on the mood specified within user inputs such as a number of user-specified songs, artists or music genres, in order to automatically build ’smart’ playlists at the click of a button. The software can also fill your MP3 player and recommend new music for you.

Have you ever been listening to your iTunes library on shuffle, one moment chilling out to Feist and then having the atmosphere aurally destroyed by Metallica’s “Hit The Lights”? It happens to all of us, but thankfully “The Filter” can save the day by creating instant thematical playlists at the click of a button.

The recommendations algorythm is based on scanning your music library and cross-referencing it with the AllMusic Guide music database as well as your own music playing history. The more complete your music tag information the better it will be able to do this. It will need to scan your library and synchronise your information with an online database, at least initially. You will also need to create an account with the “The Filter” website.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.0.4

Description: MoreTunes monitors your media player and downloads a range of relevant information relating to the track being played, including track and album details, album art, lyrics, and Amazon user reviews. Other tools includes a tag manager for on-the-fly tag editing and the ability to suggest tracks similar to the one being played.

Launch moreTunes concurrently with your media player in order to access its functions. Here are some notes on this program.

• Media players supported: Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, Media Monkey, and QCD.
• The user interface: Moretunes has a nice, economical tabbed interface; if you just flip through the tabs, however, you might actually miss a whole bunch of functions that are accessible by clicking the “Menu ->” button on the main “Album” tab. Modify the preferences to make Moretunes reduce to the system tray when closed.
• Track & Album info: The main Album tab will display all the albums by the artist being played, with the albums containing that particular track highlighted in pink. It will also list all of the song titles on the album and highlight the current track.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.3 beta

Description: Audioshell is a shell extention that allows you to view and edit your audio file tag information directly within Windows Explorer.

Audioshell will (a) display audio file tag info upon mousing-over audio files, (b) add new tabs to the right-click ‘properties’ dialog for audio files, allowing you to perform information and album-art edits on the fly, and (c) will add additional audio related columns that can be displayed in the Windows Explorer ‘details’ view.

Note that you can perform edits on multiple files at once with Audioshell straight from Windows Explorer. You can, for example, select multiple files that you would like to tag as ‘rock’ genre and from the ‘properties’ dialog simply check the ‘genre’ field and enter your new info. All of the files selected will now have the new genre information even when the information in the other fields was unchanged. Audioshell also allows to add album art into multiple audio files (much like ImageToMp3), so that it will be available for display in mp3 players (see screenshot above). Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 2.5.4.978

Description: MediaMonkey is an advanced music manager comprising a music player, cd ripper, audio converter, ID3 Tag editor, and playlist generator. It also supports external MP3 players, including the Ipod.

If you’ve been looking for a free program that can be a kind of one-stop-shop of audio, doing everything that you might possibly want to do with your library of audio files (and doing it well) - MediaMonkey just might be that program.

Here are some of the reasons why this program is so cool:

• Audio format conversions. Supported formats are MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, and FLAC.
• Rips and burns music CD’s.
• Powerful Tag editing functionality: as good as it gets, with support for importing ID3 tags and album art from external resources like Amazon and Freedb. Auto tagging tracks and saving album art from Amazon is just beautiful!
• Organization: allows you to automatically change your music library’s folder structure based on your audio files’ tag information. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.3

Description: ImageToMp3 is a small program that can save album artwork within your individual MP3s, making the images available for display when the tracks are played in media player software or hardware mp3 players like the Ipod.

This program is as simple as you’d want it to be; select the audio files, load up the artwork and let it do its work. If you do not have the artwork and do not know where to get it, I suggest you try either Amazon.com or Google image search. With Amazon, you can click the ’see larger image’ link to display the artwork in its largest size, then save that to your hard drive. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  2.2

Description: Id3ToFolder is a powerful program that enables you to change or rebuild the folder structure of your mp3 collection based on their tag information.

Your digital music collection has grown and grown over the years. Let’s say that initially you were putting all folders in the same place, adopting the naming convention “artistname - albumname”, and now after all this time you are wishing you organized them differently. Or conversley, let’s say that you were using a ripping software that was creating a foldername for each artist, with all the folders for the different albums placed inside, and now you would like your music organized some other way. Or let’s say that all of your music has somehow ended up in one big folder, with no organization whatsover, and you’re wishing there was a way to organize all of it into folders without having to do it manually. Read more »