Description: Album Art Downloader XUI is a free program that can download and save album art into your music folders. It is designed to scan your albums for missing album art and perform simultaneous multiple searches in batch. It also offers shell integration for quick album art lookups on the folder level.

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.
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Description: OpenPandora is an open source local client the delivers the Pandora online music service right to your desktop. It allows you to interact with Pandora from the main program dialog or from the tray icon.

If you’ve been abducted by aliens for the past decade and are not familiar with it, Pandora is a music recommendation engine and internet radio service based on the Music Genome Project (more on this here). In essence it allows you to build your own radio station(s); all you have to do is provide an "inspiration", so to speak, by specifying an artist or even a song that you would like your radio station to be similar or related to. You can then "refine" your radio station by rating the tracks that Pandora serves you, giving them a thumbs up, a thumbs down, or being neutral and not giving a rating them.

I will mention that this review coincides with the release of the official Pandora desktop client. I had to make a decision on whether to review "Pandora Desktop" or OpenPandora; I’m, probably swimming against the tide but I and chose to review this one (the reasons for this are mentioned below). Here are more notes on this program:

• The interface: looks exactly like the Pandora website (and Pandora desktop), and at that it looks great. It also provides a user experience identical to that of the Pandora website, so much so as to suggest that the code must have been available to third party developers as I cannot imagine this is simply a recreation.
• Pandora in the system tray: OpenPandora puts many Pandora controls into the system tray, such as rating, pausing, and skipping songs. It also can popup a balloon notification whenever there’s a song change and will display song info if you mouse over the icon. I’ve also seen screenshots that seemed to depict the song artwork being displayed near the system icon on the program home page, but couldn’t find this option in the version I looked at.
• Submitting song info to other services: specifically Last.fm, Windows Messenger, Xfire, and Skype. Last.fm integration in particular is a very interesting (and brilliant) idea in my opinion. OpenPandora will log into your Last.fm account and submit the song that you were listening to according to the following criteria (from the website) "after the track is completed and it was at least 2 minutes long; and if the track was skipped or uncompleted due to station change or marked as "I don’t
  like it" and played at least 2 minutes". Unfortunately you cannot customize or change these criteria, and I will assume that they make sense even as I do not fully understand the thinking behind this same.
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Description: VolumeTouch gives quick control over your PC’s volume by using a combination of hotkeys and the mouse or arrow keys.

The first thing I will say about this program is that, aside from performing a very useful function, it scores high marks in terms of the user experience it provides. Once you start experimenting with the combination of hotkey/mouse controls for volume you will find that these are very intuitive and well conceived.

The program also uses a system tray icon to display volume levels as a bar gauge or a percentage numeric, which also turned out to be a much more useful that I would have initially thought. More notes on this program:

• How it works: you can either control the volume with the mouse scroll wheel, through your mouse’s vertical or horizontal movements (but you’ll have to pick one method). Once you specify which method you like in the settings, you can press the default hotkey (CTRL+Shift) and move the scroll wheel up and down (or the mouse up and down, or left and right) in order to control the volume. If you prefer you can use the UP/DOWN arrow keys instead, and CTRL+Shift+0 will mute/unmute.
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Description: RipShout saves the audio from “shoutcast” internet radio stations directly to your hard drive. It will preserve the song’s IDv3 tag info and organize recorded audio by creating a folder for each artist and saving the individual tracks within it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How it works: simply load an audio file, then use the (0.1 second precision) trackbar to identify beginning and end points for your ringtone (note that different phones vary on length of ringtone they will accept, so take that into consideration). You can also enter in the start and finish positions as values manually, and preview the ringtone snippet by pressing the "show" button. Finally, select the desired ringtone file format from the dropdown and press the "convert" button to create your ringtone.
• Phones supported: all phones that use true audio ringtones. Go here for a (non-exhaustive) list.
• Audio file types supported: can input MP3, WAV, WMA, and M4A formats, and produce ringtones in MP3, WAV (uncompressed PCM), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec, .m4a), Nokia TrueTones (AMR-WB, .amr), AMR-NB (.amr)
  Yamaha SMAF (.mmf),ADPCM (4-bit compressed PCM. way), and Apple IPhone (AAC, .m4r).
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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: FLV Extract is a free program that can save video and audio files from FLV files in their original formats without decompressing or re-compressing.

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

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

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

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