Your audio library likely comes from a hodge-podge of sources; tracks that you ripped from CDs using different programs and settings over the years, tracks that you downloaded from sites and file sharing services, and tracks that you bought from services such as iTunes, etc. This means that unless you have put in a lot of time and energy fixing tags, normalizing volume, and generally doing maintenance on your audio files your audio library probably has a lot of issues that need to be remedied (including many problems that you were never aware of). This is where MP3 Diags steps is to discover, diagnose, and fix any problems or other issues that your audio library may have.

Problems? What Problems?
The most visible problem are of course tagging and missing normalization data, but there are other, more technical issues that you may not be aware of. MP3 Diags, to quote its website, “is a one stop solution that identifies more than 50 different issues in MP3 files and provides the means to fix many of them”. These (again from the website) include broken tags/headers/audio, duplicate tags/headers, incorrect placement of tags/headers, low quality audio, missing VBR header, missing (or broken) track info/cover art, missing normalization data, and character encoding issues (for languages other than English).

What I like about this program
Is that it doesn’t just diagnose, it includes the tools to fix. However, here’s a specific list of things I like about this MP3 Diags

1. Full fledged Tag editor: which is really very cool. I like that you can copy from one “cell” in its Excel-like grid, then paste into multiple places.
2. MusicBrainz (and Discogs) integration: it includes a full fledged tag editor that can pull data from Musicbrainz and Discogs. (Musicbrainz is a community based digital thumbprinting database that can identify and tag audio files with no tag or filename information).
3. Volume normalization: uses external app Mp3Gain to process and normalize albums, in order to ensure that played tracks from different albums or different source don’t exhibit volumes that are too loud or too low on transition. To enable Mp3Gain download the zipped version of that program nd extract in the MP3 Diags directory.
4. Tooltips: while most of the issues that MP3Diags are technical and in many cases not easily understandable, the program will let you hover over the different columns and get an instant explanation. This makes the program so much more accessible and easier to use for novices and experts alike.
5. Maintains backups of changed files

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• A “fix everything” button: as it is there are a number of “action” buttons, and each will perform a certain group of fixes (which are editable in the settings). However, I found myself clicking on these on after the other in order to get all the issues taken care of.
• Search box: although there are many kinds of filters available for sorting through files, it is not possible to filter by typing in a string of text, which I found very strange.
• Column sort: issues found are laid out in a grid, and it was strange to discover that I couldn’t click on column heads in order to sort by these.
• Context menu integration for the tag editor: i.e. the ability to right click on a folder or selected audio files and open these in the tag editor. This is one thing that Mp3Tag does which I love, and I wish this program would do it as well.

The verdict: I’ve seen a handful of programs that scan your audio library to identify quality issues, but MP3Diag is without a doubt in a league of its own. If you’ve every wished there was a single program that can help you identify problems in your audio library and allow you to fix then you’ve found it.

Some caveats though: this program is still in beta so be mindful of that if you encounter any bugs (I didn’t). Also note that what constitutes low quality is user defined in the settings, so change that according to your preference.

My experience with this program is that it works great; however, I often found myself a little … incredulous (may be the word) … that problems were found with audio files that I didn’t think had anything wrong with them (such as containing invalid streams for example). In cases like these, you could either use the auto backup and apply the fix or simply decide to move on. In my case I did the former without adverse effects, and I actually have a high degree of trust that the program “knows what its doing”. Highly recommended.

Version Tested: 0.99.06.042

Compatibility: Windows, Linux.

Go to the program home page for more info; download link can be found here (installer and portable versions available; approx 6.36 megs).

Applying the correct tags and cover art to your audio library may feel like a never ending quest or even an impossible one; fortunately, however, there are sophisticated tools such as MetatOgger to help with the task. I’d previously written about Mp3Tag, an excellent audio tagging and renaming app, but MetatOgger it notable because it has a couple of interesting functions that Mp3Tag does not, including acoustic fingerprinting and audio tag lookups via its own downloadable database.

This software has a lot of potential, but also needs to iron out some significant kinks. Here’s a list of some of the features that MetatOgger has that I like the most, as well as a list of those I do NOT like so much.

My favorite MetatOgger features (also known as the PROS section):

• Acoustic fingerprinting: is your recourse for audio files that has no information whatsoever (or simply for identifying missing info). Acoustic fingerprinting is a process whereby the software “listens” to the audio and compares its digital fingerprint with the huge Musicbrainz community database. MetatOgger can query this database on demand to instantly populate missing audio tags without user intervention.
• Column-header filters: you can easily not notice that you can perform this really useful function (see image to the right). Would have liked the ability to filter by rules though, Excel-style, such as “all entries that begin with x”.
• Tag from Database: this will prompt the downloading of a massive database which apparently comprises millions of titles. You can then simply do a search, find the album you want, and use the tags found in the database on your local files.
• Lyrics: simply check the songs you want and choose “get lyrics from lyricwiki.org” and voila – your songs will incorporate lyrics inside their audio tags. Useful for media players that offer a lyrics display with playback option.
• Cover art lookups: use the cover art search box to find cover art online. The program gives you a choice between storing the image data in the tag in the file itself, or otherwise to store it in the folder (if in doubt, go with the former). Note that you will need to manually identify the most suitable match from the list of results (the screenshot above shows cover art lookups).
• Allows saving workspaces: which is to say you can decide on which columns you would like to work with and their width on-screen and save that configuration. This turns out to be indespensible.
• Support for a wide range of audio files: including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, MP3, Musepack, Windows Media, WavPack and Monkey’s Audio
• Preview changes: this is standard practice for apps of this sort, but I will mention anyway that the program allows you to fiddle around with your audio library to your heart’s content, and will only save the changes once you are good and ready and click “save”; until then everything is virtual and un-doable.

My not-so-favorite features (also know as the CONS section):

• The user experience: is not as friendly as it could have been, and may cause some degree of frustration before getting used to. It always takes me too many clicks to check/uncheck the files that I want to work with because it involves using too many right click commands.The various interventions, moreover, could definitely have been made more intuitive.
• It can be slow: navigating is somewhat slow, and saving changes can be slower than you’d at first expect.
• No search box: despite the coolness of column-header filtering, I was surprised that there was no overall filter/search box.
• Cover art: will at times not produce results that are nonetheless easily found in, say, a Google images search. The good news is that you can download these separately and point to them from within MetatOgger.
• No context menu entry: one of the things I like about Mp3Tag is that it adds a context menu entry whereby I can quickly right click on a bunch of audio files and load them into that app to edit their tags. I am wishing that MetatOgger had an equivalent.

The verdict: a very powerful tool that can be immensely useful. I especially like the “acoustic fingerprinting” option and to be quite honest would prefer to access the Musicbrainz database from this program that using Musicbrainz’ own “Picard” app (the latter being rather atypical in its interface and design).

If you are using Mp3Tag or another similar program and are happy with the way it works and feels and it is performing well for you then, you might get a sense that MetatOgger is somewhat clunky or that its not as smooth and intuitive as it could be. However, if you want the added functionality (acoustic fingerprinting, database lookups, lyrics lookups) then MetatOgger is certainly a very nice software to have, and that is why I am giving this one my highest “Freewaregenius Pick” award.

Version Tested: 3.9.1.0

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, Seven. Requires MS .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Check out the MetatOgger page (in French, but click here for a Google English translation). The download link is in the blue box, (approx 5 megs).

When it comes to great freeware audio players it seems we are spoilt for choice. ATunes is another program that offers a wide range of functions. Here is what sets this program apart to make it interesting:

• It looks and feels great: and by this I mean a kind of appealing simplicity of design and an intuitive user experience.You can do everything by right clicking on individual or multiple tracks.
• Last.fm integration: in practical terms this means that (a) ATunes can connect with your Last.fm account if you have one – not a requirement – and scrobble the tracks you listen to, (b) can recommend related music in real time for each track or artist in your playlist (with the option to click and listen on the Last.fm site), (c) it will automatically display information on the playing artist as well as download and display song lyrics, and (d) can tag genres for files in your library according to the Last.fm database. See the image to the right for Last.fm info.
• Last.fm and album art: album art pulled from Last.fm is automatically saved inside the tag for that audio file (you can optionally switch this off, but I am loving it believe me). This essentially means that you can fix your album art (for most of your tracks, not all) simply by playing your music library. How cool is that? You can also right click and save the pulled lyrics into the audio file tag as well.

ATunes offers a collection of cool functions in one place but lacks some features offered by other freeware music managers. I will start by listing the functions that it supports:

• Audio formats supported: mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4, ra, and rm.
• CD Ripping: does this very well, including grabbing tag info from Amazon.
• Internet Radio: provides a good collection of built in internet radio stations, and you can easily add your own.
• Views: you can view your library by artist, album, genre, or folder structure. This is simple and all the better for it. You cannot browse your collection by album art. Supports a tabbed interface where you can work on multiple playlists simultaneously in each tab.
• Search: has both an advanced search dialog (from the ’Tools’ menu) and a filter box that can act on any view in order to hone on on what you might be looking for.
• Audio podcast support: subscribe to audio podcasts and download them locally on your hard disk. No video podcast support.
• Tag editing: you can edit tags by right clicking a single audio file or a selection of audio files. It’s tag editing ability is functional but not advanced; it does not offer any mass editing functions (e.g. tags from filename or vice versa, case functions or find/replace, etc.) To get this level of sophistication you will need another app such as the excellent (and free) Mp3Tag.
• Smart Playlists: collects (and displays) stats on user behavior and can generate playlists based on that. Also allows for user-specified favorites tracks, artists, or albums (see image to the right).
• Volume normalization: to eliminate volume differences across tracks. Also supports an equalizer with a number of available presets.
• Support for audio devices: I haven’t any personally, but will quote the site "connect your portable player or anything that could be mounted as a file system, and view in ATunes, copy to repository, synchronize, etc."
• Memory use: a whopping 79 megs, definitely more than usual for this sort of program (e.g. ITunes at 60 megs, Mediamonkey and JRiver Media Jukebox both use up 30 megs). I’m hoping they get this optimized in future versions.

Features that ATunes does not offer:

• Audio conversion: not supported. But there are many good freeware options that can provdie this, e,g Pepsky Free Audio Converter, which can also burn audio CD’s.
• Audio CD burning: not supported. Use Pepsky (mentioned above) for this if your CD burning program doesn’t offer it.
• Audio recording: no line-in recording. Use the free Mp3MyMp3 instead.

The verdict: this program is a good all-around music player with some solid features. What I like about it is the Last.fm integration (info, recommendations, genre tagging, and automatic album art downloads), which makes me feel like I can connect my otherwise isolated music library with the rest of humanity (so to speak). Overall a very solid program that is worth installing.

Version Tested: 1.9.0

Compatibility: Windows, Mac, Linux. Requires Java 6 Runtime Edition.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 19.3 megs).

While many freeware audio players and mp3-tag editors incorporate the ability to download album art (e.g MediaMonkey, Mp3Tag, BBoxV2, JRiver Media Jukebox, just to name a few that were previously featured on Freewaregenius) – very frequently the downloading of album art has to be done on a per-case basis, making it a somewhat involved operation to go through a music library that can consist of hundreds of albums and be several gigabytes in size.

This is where a program like Album Art Downloader can prove invaluable, in that it is designed to scan your music library’s folder structure and identify all albums with missing artwork, then allow you to perform all the searches in sequence until all missing artwork issues are resolved. More info on this program:

• Assumptions: this program assumes that your library is (a) structured by folder corresponding to each album, and (b) that the artwork is stored inside the folder with an appropriate name such as "folder.jpg" or "cover.jpg". It will not consider album artwork saved within audio file tags (such as used by Itunes, for example).
• How to scan your entire library: go to file then file browser and point the program to the root folder of your music library; the program will scan for folders for "folder.jpg" files in your folders and, if not found, will flag these as missing album art (see screenshot to the right).
• Searching for artwork: if this is done following a library scan the program will open a number of search dialogs and perform a number of searches simultaneously. The so-called "queue manager" dialog will appear, will list the search queue, and will give you the opportunity to set the number of simultaneous searches that the program should perform.
• Shell integration: if you install this (it is an option in the installer), you will be able to right click on a folder and perform a quick lookup. Very cool (see screenshot to the right)
• Ad-hoc searching: you can perform an ad-hoc search without specifying the album folder, and the program will save the artwork in "My Pictures’Album Art’artist name".
• Deciding on the artwork: each performed search will result in a great many results in various sizes. It is up to the user to decide on an appropriate album art image (and size) and click on the little "save" icon next to it to save it.
• Artwork sources: to find the artwork the program searches a very impressive number of supported online resources, making for the very best odds I’ve ever seen that you will find the artwork for the album you are looking for even if it is obscure. (The list includes Amazon, Discogs, Google Images, and about 10 others, including local files on the hard drive). These can be enabled or disabled at will simply by checking/unchecking a checkbox next to the name.
• Organizing results: you can choose to view results grouped by size of the found images or by source.

Wish list:

• Storing artwork within the audio files’ tags: this program will not solve your problem if you need to store the artwork inside the audio file tags themselves (say, in order to be available inside your portable audio player such as the Ipod). It would be great if the author would incorporate this functionality in a future version. Note: if you have an Ipod and/or use ITunes you can look into IArtwork and ITunes Art Importer for mass album artwork downloading with ITunes.

The verdict: not only this program look fantastic, but the design by which the author made it possible to both perform a great number of searches, on the one hand, and allow the user to decide on the artwork to use, on the other hand, is very well implemented indeed and works really well. Artwork searches performed through right clicking a folder are also a great design feature. Overall an excellent, well designed program that works extremely well.

Version Tested: 0.19.0.0

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista. Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

Go to the program page download the latest version (approx 930K).

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.
• Audio conversion: any of the supported formats above can be re-encoded into MP3.
• Music organizer: BBox can re-organize your music collection into a hierarchical directory structure automatically if you want it to.
• Other features: comes pre-loaded with some fantastic visualizations, an equalizer, crossfader for song transitions, spectrum analyzer, export to M3U, etc.

What BBox does not offer

• Audio conversion restricted to MP3 format (honestly, what is the percentage of users that would want other formats?). For more conversion formats, check out Pepsky Free Audio Converter.
• No audio CD burning (use CDBurnerXP or Pepsky Free Audio Converter if you want this).
• No Podcasting support. (Use Juice or Doppler if you want this functionality).
• No smartlists or rule-based creation of playlists.
• No auto monitoring of folders and syncing with the music library.
• No uploading audio files to portable audio devices (for Ipods, use Floola)

The verdict: BBoxV2 manages to hold its own alongside some fantastic audio players/managers that are out there (aside from the ones mentioned above, I might also mention Quintessential Media Player, AIMP2, Foobar2000, etc). It manages to combine a very low resource utilization with a very full (and powerful) set of functions that in many cases preclude the need for a larger, more resource intensive audio player. Its also very well designed, with a very intuitive layout. (You can also easily find other freeware programs that provide some of the functions it does not provide if you need to). BBoxV2 is definitely a winner.

Version Tested: 2.0.0.440

Compatibility: Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP; [UPDATE] now works on Vista!

Download link here (approx 4.94 megs); also visit the program page for more information.

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).
• List options: if generating lists of audio files in HTM, XML, CSV, or XLS formats, you can customize exactly which columns to include and their order from the settings (see screenshot to the right).

Wish list: I am not sure if this program is still in development, but here’s my wish list all the same.

• Process audio files, not just folders: strangely, the version I tested would not allow me to CTRL-select a bunch of MP3s and create a playlist out of them. Instead it would require me to move them into a folder first and then process that folder.
• Multiple successive sorting criteria: to set it to, for example, first sort by album name, then by track number. Currently you can only select a single criteria.

The verdict: overall a very nice tool, though not perfect. I couldn’t help but get the sense that it could be greatly improved by implementing a couple of simple, easy modifications (see wish list above). As it is, however, it is quite a useful tool that does what it sets out to do quite well.

Compatibility: WinAll. requires Visual C and Visual Basic run-time files (Windows 2K/Me/XP already have them). Some users may also need to install “Microsoft Windows Common Controls” – COMCTL32.OCX. There are links to all of these on the program page.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 83K).

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).
• Audio format conversion: can natively encode into MP3. Flac, APE, Musepac, Ogg Vorbis, WMV, and WAV, or alternatively you can download and use other encoders from the site. Strangely, it uses WMV as default when first installed.
• CD burning: with the option of converting your audio into a desired format before burning them to disk. Can create audio CDs and DVDs. You can simply drag and drop files into a dropzone, and in fact you can use it to burn any kind of files and folders to CD/DVD, not just music files.
• Smartlists: the program supports a number of pre-set smartlists (e.g. top 100 played, top rated, albums without cover art, etc.) These are easily created through an intuitive and simple interface. You can add as many contingent rules as you want and work with them using an intuitive interface.
• Album art support: one thing I never could quite figure out is why so many freeware music suites lack cover art support. Not the case here; select multiple tracks and the program can download all the different covers for all sequentially (from Amazon) in one go. The program has two modes for downloading album art, a stringent and more liberal one that has a larger margin of error. You can also remove, copy, and paste cover art at will. It will not, unfortunately, allow you to manipulate search strings yourself for tracks for which it cannot find cover art. Cover art can be saved on your hard drive, in the audio file itself, or both.
• Audio recording: records line-in, Microphone and CD audio inputs. You can use this to convert, say, cassettes to MP3s or even to re-record DRM protected files. It can also split tracks automatically based on gaps in the signal. (Note: I did not try this one myself).
• Device support: Ipod, Sony PSP, and all PlaysForSure devices and phones. It will most likely support your device; try it.
• Plugins: this program has been around for a long time, and there is a wealth of plugins, skins, and visualizations that can be added covering all
• Search box: makes finding the music you want a breeze.
• Visualization Studio: allows you to create your own custom visualizations. Did not try this one myself.
• Other functions: Podcast support (subscribe to podcast RSS’s), custom label and cover printing, EQ, DSP and audio effects, can connect to the Amazon DRM-free music store (which you can also disable), Windows shell integration, etc.
• Resource utilization: approx 30 megs in memory (compare to approx 60 megs for ITunes and it’s ’helper’ processes). Mediamonkey takes up 38 megs.
• But is it free?: yes; it was recently changed from being shareware. The makers of Media Jukebox are hoping that you will like it so much you will buy its cousin, JRiver Media Center, which handles images and videos as well as audio.

Wish list

• Folder-watching/auto importing: i.e. watching a folder or folders for changes or new audio file additions and automatically reflecting those in the database. There is actually an auto importing plugin that will do this but I was not able to download and install it.
• Allowing the user to enter the search strings when searching for album art.

Media Jukebox vs. Mediamonkey: I prefer Media Jukebox’s look and feel to that of Mediamonkey. I like its interface better and the fact that it comes with pretty much everything you need (e.g. album art support, Ipod support, LastFM support and pre-installed encoders; Mediamonkey forces you to install the LAME mp3 encoder manually).

Media Jukebox also offers a more complete set of tools (e.g. sound recording, advanced smartlists — which in Mediamonkey is only supported in the paid version) and I prefer its filtering panel to Mediamonkey’s explorer style left pane. Although both are mature programs that have been around for a very long time and can be extendible through all sorts of plugins, Mediamonkey has a larger community following and more third party additions, and can also use WinAmp plugins. Finally, Mediamokey is scriptable while Media Jukebox isn’t, which some advanced users might want.

The verdict: a fantastic, mature, comprehensive program that is a joy to use, and is my favorite all-around Audio Management application. Highly recommended.

Version Tested: 12.0.29

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 12 megs).

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).
• Resource utilization: the task manager has this process as using a whopping 96 megs of memory, which is simply way too much. I’m not sure how this can be the case; my guess is that it is simply inefficient in its memory use because it is still in beta. Regardless, you can simply use this software once, fix your collection, and not use it again until you need to (i.e. it doesn’t need to be always present, consuming resources).

The verdict: this is a perfect plugin for quickly managing album art in Itunes. It is similar to another one previously reviewed on Freewaregenius (Itunes Art Importer), but this latter one is no longer in development, and IArtwork is much more straightforward and simpler to use. Moreover, IArtwork has a clear edge in that it processes your entire music library at once, rather than forcing you to process each album seperately. If you have an Ipod or Iphone and would like to fix your album artwork, IArtwork might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Version Tested: 1.0 beta

Compatibility: Windows Vista or Windows XP with .NET Framework 2.0; Itunes v7.4 or higher.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 42K).

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).

More notes on this program:

• The user interface: while it appeared somewhat cluttered at first glance, I quickly got used to the interface and got to somewhat appreciate the attempt to streamline all the different functions/options/settings into a single screen. Note that there are 3 interface configurations to choose from: simple, normal, and expert.
• List of supported codecs: (really worth mentioning) LAME MP3, OggEnc, Nero AAC Encoder, FAAC, Enhanced 3GGP, AAC+ Encode, Helix MP3 Encoder, MusePack Encoder, Speex Encoder, FFmpeg, SVN-trunk, WavPack Encoder, FLAC Encoder/Decoder, Monkey’s Audio Codec, TTA Encoder, OptimFrog Encoder, MPEG-4 Lossless Encoder. 64-bit versions available for many of these.
• Optimized for core dual core processors.

Wish list:

• Joining/splitting functions need to be fixed: I was not able to perform splitting or joining successfully. It didn’t seem that there was any way to select multiple tracks to join (I tried CTRL and Shift click without success). When I tried splitting a 100 meg audio file into chunks of 20 megs it produced a lot of files that were 5K and 6K and so forth. I am guessing that these functions are not working properly in this early version and will be fixed in a future release. It would also be cool if it were possible to optionally split/join tracks without encoding.
• FLV support: with so many music sharing sites using this format, converting FLV audio files to MP3 ought to be supported by a program such as this (or use Any Audio Converter for this).

The verdict: overall a great program and a powerful all-round audio conversion tool. I for one am very happy about the release of an audio edition of MediaCoder as I prefer seperating audio and video conversions (or at least I am still waiting for the perfect unversal media transcoder to come along). If you need a comprehensive audio converter look no further than MediaCoder Audio Edition; it will both input and output more formats than any other freeware audio converter that I know of.

Version Tested: 0.6.1.40000

Compatibility: Windows XP/2003/2000 (recommended); Windows XP/2003 x64 Edition (experimental with 64-bit native); Windows Vista (experimental); Windows 98/ME (most features work)

Go to program page to download the latest version (approx 42K).

AlbumArt.org

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]

Go to AlbumArt.org.

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.

Rating: 4.5

Version tested: 0.9.2

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.
• The user interface (things I like): what’s worth mentioning here is that ITunes Art Importer is (a) very straightforward and easy to use, and (b) can quickly connect you to the Amazon web page of any of the musical selections simply by clicking on the displayed thumbnail, which is a very handy feature when, say, you want to go to the webpage to sure that your track is in that particular album.
• The user interface (things I didn’t like): the interface can be somewhat confusing when you are processing a lot of tracks simultaneously without auto-importing best guess, in that the user is asked to select the most appropriate artwork for a track, but once that happens the program strangely seems to save the artwork in all of the unidentified tracks indiscriminately. This has been my experience and I’m not sure if I might have been using the program incorrectly. (The solution for me was to simply set auto importing to best guess for processing the entire library, then go back to those it didn’t get on its own and fix them individually).

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• Requires ITunes: the option to run this app independently from Itunes would be nice.
• Album art sources: currently using Amazon.com, but it would be great if they included the option to retrieve info from the Amazons of other countries (France, UK, Germany, Japan, etc.)
• Bugs: the program is still not at version 1.0, and I’ve occasionally encountered errors. There’s one track in particular that would always crash the app whenever I tried to tag it.
• The .NET requirement: forced me to install Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 even when I already had 2.0 installed. It would be nice if 2.0 was sufficient.

The verdict: I’ve used a number of programs to download album art, including MP3Tag and Mediamonkey (and of course ITunes itself), and I find ITunes Art Importer to be one of the best solutions for quick and easy album art importing. The program is not perfect but I am certain that, going forward it will get better and the few bugs it has will be fixed. If you use ITunes I highly recommend this one.

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, and ITunes ver. 4.5 or higher.

Go to to the program page  to get the latest version (approx. 317K).

Rating

Version tested: 0.9.0 Alpha 14

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.
• The interface: consists of 2 panels and is mostly simple and straightforward. Once you add a folder or tracks, Picard will display all tracks (recursively including those in subfolders) in one big list. The bottom panel will display the metadata and artwork for the selected track including the original metadata as well as the results of any online database scan for that track of.
• How it works: Clicking ’cluster’ on the toolbar will instantly create subfolders that contain all the tracks that belong together in albums, such that the left panel is divided to tracks in clusters (i.e. albums) and “unmatched files”. The right panel will display information downloaded from the online database. Highlighting any entry in the left panel and selecting “scan” will result in a comparison with online data. Once you have had a chance to look over the new data you can right click “save” on the right hand panel to save info to disk. Discrepancies between existing and downloaded metadata are noted by an asterisk next to the downloaded album title as well as a small square green icon, making it easy to troubleshoot large library scans at a glance.
• Album art: is the one area where MusicBrainz Picard falters, as album art does not seem to be provided (or perhaps will be supported in a future release?). Curiously, clicking on the blank album art thumbnail will produce an Amazon search for the album and display the album art in a browser window.
• Supported formats: MP3, (ID3), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex (Vorbis comment),Musepack, WavPack (APEv2 tag), MP4, Windows Media Audio.

The verdict: this is simply a fantastic program that will help you find accurate information for all of your music, and will most likely (finally) fix those tracks in your library whose tag information you had all but given up on. The information in the MusicBrainz data base is not always 100% correct but comes close, and some of your tracks will simply not be identified (these you can actually add to the database yourself). Also keep in mind that this software is in Alpha as of this writing (although after continual use over 48 hours I have yet to encounter a bug).

I might also add that if you are processing large libraries of files where the metadata is available and correct (say for renaming purposes) then you are better off using Mp3Tag. For album art retrieval you would also use Mp3Tag or MediaMonkey, which I found to be the most effective for this task.

Compatibility: WinAll, Linux (there are a number of programs that access the MusicBrainz database for Mac; see the MusicBrainz site for more info).

Go to the Picard page on Fileforum to get the latest version (approx 6.51 megs). Also visit the Musicbrainz home page.

Version tested: 1.04

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.
• Bookmarking: bookmarking a song is a fast and easy way to retrieve a song (and by extension the musical “space” around it) especially if that song is not necessarily visible in any of the panes at that particular moment. A bookmarked song is also sometimes referred to as a “Keytrack”.
• Searching/keyword boosting: similar to all of the above (and not ’search’ in the typical sense). Typing in ’Radiohead’, for example, pushed most of my Radiohead as well as other tracks Flookey deemed related to these upwards in the suggestion pane.
• User intervention: at any point you can manually block a song, signalling that it does not belong in the list of recommendations, or otherwise unblock it.

Flookey compared to others recommendation engines: Flookey’s approach is to look at your metadata (i.e. tags) and your behavior in order to create and reinforce or weaken links between your audio files. In contrast, programs such as The Filter and Last.FM make external reference to databases of community behavior (i.e. people who liked these songs also liked or bought these others) as well as having a behavior monitoring component. Personally, my guess is that the products that reference community behavior are probably more effective at identifying links; however, after using Flookey I must say that it seems to do a fairly respectable job.

While this software is very cool and can well provide an interesting and novel way to explore your music collection, the drawback is that for most of us who use a heavyweight media player such as iTunes of Media Monkey to manage our music using yet another media player may be somewhat inconvenient. I couldn’t help but think that it would have been a good idea if Flookey were available as a plugin that works with a number of major Media Players (in the same vein as ’The Filter’ or Last.FM).

Having said this, Flookey does not have to be your main media player and can simply be used when needed as a fun little media player that, incidentally, has a very nice user interface and design. Results and recommendation can thence be easily exported to M3U playlists amd can be played anywhere.

Compatibility: WinAll. Mac version coming soon.

Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 3.18megs). Also visit the program home page.

Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.1

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

: 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.

The Filter software is very easy to use; to build a playlist all you need to do is select a few songs that typify your mood (1-3 songs works best) and then hit the ’F’ button to generate a 15 song playlist of similar music. The playlists promise to help you ’rediscover your music collection’, as it includes many songs that you would not choose yourself.

More notes on this software:

• Media players supported: iTunes, Windows Media Player.
• The user interface: Minimal black in style, easy to create a playlist, to fill your iPod/MP3 player you will need to pull up a large menu which appears slightly confusing at first.
• Track and album info: The Filter can display album artwork and artist biographies/reviews which it pulls from the AMG website.
• Track recommendations: When you play a track the software pops up a useful window which contains artist information and also recommendations of songs, albums and artists that you can buy from either iTunes or Windows Media Player. I’ve found these recommendations to be stronger than the recommendations offered by companies such as iLike and have discovered new bands such as “The Decemberists” and the excellent “New Pornographers” through them.
• Playlists: The playlists this software creates are very good, perfect for when the shuffle button won’t do and you are too tired to create a custom playlist. The software recognises about 90% of the music in my library, which is quite good considering I listen to a lot of new music.
• iPod Filling: Arguably the most useful part of the software. The Filter can create instant playlists that can refresh and update an iPod or USB based MP3 player whenever it is connected to your computer. This is perfect for creating playlists that you need to update daily – like a ’commute to work’ playlist.

Overall: this is a very useful application that can save you a lot of time and can help you rediscover the songs in your music library that you had completely forgotten about. The iPod filling aspect of the software is a godsend, especially for people like me who have a small iPod Nano and a very large iTunes library. Unfortunately the software seems to be quite system intensive so I usually create a batch of playlists for the day and then close it, which is a shame because the artist information and recommendations are very good.

Compatibility: Windows XP, VISTA, Macintosh OS X 10.4, Nokia Series 60. ITunes or Windows Media Player required.

Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 700K initial installer that will in turn download another 5.32 megs). Also visit the program home page.

Rating

Version tested: 2.0.4

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.
• Album art: is downloaded and displayed on its own tab. What’s cool is that when Moretunes  is in mini mode (press F2) a draggable thumbnail of the album art is displayed onscreen, which is really a great way to view album art on your desktop when playing tracks (see screenshot). There is an option to save album art, but it merely saves it into a folder; it would have been great if Moretunes  saved the album art into the mp3 itself (as ImageToMp3 does). Note that the images are downloaded off the web, and not read locally.
• Similar tunes: click this option and MoreTunes will display a number of albums in the ’Albums’ tab that are similar in style to the song that is playing. I am guessing that this is information is the “customers who bought this also bought” information from Amazon. Somewhat rudimentary compared to such sophisticated services as Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker, but interesting nonetheless.
• Tag manager: the tag manager shows the mp3’s current tag info alongside the proposed tags that it downloaded. For ad-hoc tag changes it works great, but if you want to manage the tag info for a large music library it is no substitute for a sophisticated tag manager such as Mp3Tag. Note that you can scan a playlist and quickly flip through all the tracks in the ’ID3 Manager’ tab in order to edit the tags for all tracks in the playlist.
• Lyrics: this option opens a web page in your browser with the lyrics for the song that is playing; works most of the time; at times, however, it may display information on the song or artists instead of the actual lyrics.
• Biography: automatically searches for artist’s biography on biography.com and Wikipedia.

The Verdict: what I really like about the program is the floating desktop Album art and the ’similar tunes’ option; the other functions, to me, are merely an added bonus. And considering that MoreTunes on my machine took about 7 megs of memory (not a lot, but not quite lightweight) I think I am sufficiently happy with this program to keep using it. Check it out for yourself.

Compatibility: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP; no info on VISTA.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.23 megs).

Version tested: 1.3 beta

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).

Audioshell supports a truly impressive range of audio formats: mp3 (all ID3 tag versions), wma, asf and wmv (including DRM protected files), Apple iTunes and iPod aac (m4a, m4b and m4p) and mp4 files,ogg, flac (vorbis comment tags), mpc, mp+ (APE/APEv2 tags), monkey’s audio (APE/APEv2 tags), wav pack (APE/APEv2 tags) , optim frog (APE/APEv2 tags) , wav (ID3v2 tag in ‘tag ‘ RIFF chunk).

This is a well designed and well implemented program. Even if you use a powerful app like Mp3Tag or MediaMonkey to manage the tag information of your music library, you will find it frequently very useful to be able to view and fix tag information on the fly. I recommend it.

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, or higher.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version.

Version tested: 2.5.4.978

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.
• Dynamic Playlists: you can easily create these, e.g. “all tracks from the ‘Electronic’ genre from 2004 to 2006″. Unfortunately, advanced dynamic playlists based on multiple criteria are only availabe in the paid ‘Gold’ version of the program.
• Search: makes it possible to find the music you are looking for in a snap.
• It offers versatile scripting support. In fact there are hundreds of downloadable scripts and skins that a community of enthusiasts have created that enable MediaMonkey to do pretty much anything you could think of.
• Also offers compatibility with Winamp 2 plugins.
• Synchronization with MP3 players, including the Ipod is seamless. The paid version allows for automatic file conversion when syncing music with hardware players (this sounds nice but I can certainly live without it).
• It is a music player not an audio player. As far as I am concerned this is a huge PLUS, as this would have been over-reach, and I already have my favorite freeware video players which I am extremely happy with (VLC media player and GOM Player).
• The program also features a motley collection of cool little features, such as controlling the player by mouse gestures, support for skins, a right-click ‘find more from the same’ command that delivers tracks from the same artist, album, genre, etc.
• MediaMonkey seems to me to be less resource intensive than some other shareware ‘Music Management’ software that I have used (specifically Media Center and Musicmatch).

Here are some of the reasons why it is not as cool as it could be:

• The iTunes like interface is functional but not very exciting.
• No support for browsing by album art. This is surprising as many shareware music managers have this. Note that I DID find a script that adds this functionality to MediaMonkey here (works great); it required a bit of manual fiddling with the registry to run properly, though.
• No support for some protected file formats such as WMA v10 and protected AAC files (a non-issue to me, but some might want to know this).
• Forces you to manually install LAME MP3 encoder if you want to still be able to encode and convert to MP3 after 30 days of installation. This is a nuisance, but doable fairly easily (click here for instructions).

Differences between free and paid versions: The two most important features that the paid version provides are (1) real-time audio library scanning, which keeps your library updated without you telling MediaMonkey to re-scan your folders, and (2) advanced dynamic playlist generation for multiple criteria (e.g. I want a playlist for all ‘Rock’ genre tracks rated 4 and above where the year is between 2005 and 2006). Other differences include the need to manually install the MP3 encoder I mentioned above, plus a few others which to me aren’t that significant.

For all of MediaMonkey’s functions you could find strong 100% freeware titles that can do each one of them seperately. You could have the Music Management and dynamic playlists portion with the excellent MusikCube, ID3 Tagging and Amazon/CDDB resources are offered with Mp3Tag, and encoding and converting is offered by many programs, e.g. BonkEnc. MediaMonkey offers all of these functions at the same place, does a really good job at each one of them, and syncs with external MP3 players and the Ipod (as of this writing MusikCube does not have Ipod support).

Additionally, one of the real strengths of MediaMonkey is the community that has grown around it of people who absolutely love it (and create all sorts of scripts and plugins for it). If you’re an Ipod owner and do not want to use iTunes you could do worse than use MediaMonkey. I recommend it higly.

Go to the download page for the latest version. The program home page.

Version tested:  1.3

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.

Now if there only were an easy way to do this for 70+ gigs of music and not have to do it for every 10-12 tracks at a time that would be cool.

Notes:
- You can use this program to remove images from MP3s as well
- This program does not need to be installed.

Another nifty mp3 utility from Benware.org. Very useful. 

Go to the developer’s download page for the latest version.

Version tested:  2.2

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.

For all of the above scenarios, Id3ToFolder is a practical and powerful solution that can reorganize huge libraries efficiently in one fell swoop. You have to be sure that your files contain correct tagging information though, as this is what Id3ToFolder works with. I recommend you use Mp3Tag or some other tagging software to fix your tags, if needed, before you use Id3ToFolder. (N.b. Mp3Tag can work with all of your music at once; it will recursively scan your music from the main folder location all the way down). You only need to have the tagging info that you will use in your folder structures (i.e. if you are not going to use genres in your structures, you don’t need to worry about whether these are defined or not in your tags).

Id3ToFolder allows you to define the following folder structures:

• Main folder: Artist. Subfolder: Album or Year.
• Main folder: Album. No Subfolder.
• Main folder: Genre. Subfolder: Album or Year.
• Main folder: Year. Subfolder: Album or Year.

For the album folders, Id3ToFolder will let you define your desired naming convention as any combination of the artist, album, and year variables (see screenshot). As for the audio files themselves, renaming them is optional, but Id3ToFolder can do it for you as well. If you are going to rename the mp3’s Id3ToFolder offers the usual combination of options (artist, album, title, track#, genre, year, bitrate and even comment).

I personally would recommend to keep the folder structure as simple as possible, but if you want a structure with more than 2 layers, you can always re-run Id3ToFolder for each one of your first level folders. Let’s say, for example, that you created six main ‘genre’ folders as your first level in your folder structure, but now you would like to create a more complicated artist/album structures within each one of the six folders, you can do that easily by running Id3ToFolder six times within each one of your main folders.

I recently used Id3ToFolder to help a coworker rebuild his folder structure after a lot of files ended up in the same place; it did a beautiful job and it did it quickly. Overall a highly recommended program.

Go to the developer’s download page for the latest version (scroll to about the middle for the download link).

Version tested:  2.36

Mp3Tag is a comprehensive audio-file tag management solution. I’ve been using this software for more than 2 years, during which time I have also tried and used other similar shareware and commerical programs, and I can honsestly say that Mp3Tag is the clear choice for this type of software. And its 100% free.

What I really like about Mp3Tag is that it can be launched through the context menu; right click on a folder with MP3’s and it will list all the audio files within the folder as well as any sub folders recursively. This enables you to work with a large number of files at once, but just those that you want to work with.

Mp3Tag provides all the basic tag and filename editing features that you would expect plus more. Some of the more useful fucntions: tag-to-filename, filename-to-tag, field find-and-replace, tags from text file, autonumbering for track field, playlist creation, importing (and exporting) cover art to/from file, and obtaining tag info from web resources (freedb, Amazon, and Discogs).

For this last one (getting file info online), I found that doing a search on Amazon and Discogs from within Mp3Tag worked pretty well, and it was easy to obtain and implement the information that I needed. I didn’t seem to have much luck with Freedb, however (perhaps it is designed to ‘read’ and obtain info by referencing an actual physical cd? Not sure).

A really nice feature for working with a large number of files is the filtering box towards the bottom of the screen. It allows you to filter your view by the field of your choice (say, all files of a certain genre, or all files by a certain artist, etc.), so that you can work with only the files that you need.

Mp3Tag supports ID3v1-ID3v2.4 and APEv2 tags and a plethora of audio formats, including aac, flac, ape, mp3, itunes formats (mp4, m4a, m4b), mp3, ogg, ofr, ofs, spx, tta, wma, and wv.

This program is a winner; I highly recommend it.

Go to download page for latest version. The program home page.