A new version of Winamp has been released which you can download from here (full version). Beside a few improvements and fixes it contains two new important features:
Do you like music? Please say that you do otherwise I will be very upset.
So, you like music… Of course you have a stereo, a computer, a walkman or something to play your music. And better yet, you know already about that special format called MP3 that makes your music files more compact and more portable. Once you discovered MP3 you enjoyed for sure making your own playlists out of your CDs, music collections, gifts from your friends, internet downloads, demos, recordings and so on. With so many sources at your hand for sure your music collections are in various shapes and sizes. Don’t tell me it’s not true because again I’ll be upset that I’m the only one having trouble with my music collections.
Well my friend, I have good news for us. It is called “MP3/Tag Studio” and comes from Magnus Branding. You can download it at http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/.
What can MP3/Tag Studio do for MP3 lovers? Well, a better question would be what MP3/Tag Studio can’t do (and I guess “coffee” would be the right answer). (more…)
Icecast is intended to be a free software way of setting up a Internet or lan radio station. Anyone can set up an Icecast server and begin streaming songs or audio files.
There are a variety of things you can do with it. Many Internet-based radio stations offer real-time streaming audio in Ogg Vorbis format. However, home users may also be happy streaming a static playlist of MP3 files from a server’s hard drive. Networked machines can connect to the server and listen to the current song or audio file. The latest version even streams additional information regarding the name and performer of the current song.
But why just as a big broadcast station?
(more…)
My latest new thing is to download my favorite songs along with the lyrics and create my own personal music albums. My greatest pleasure is to classify my music by certain criteria like author, title, music style, etc. Being my latest passion, I felt the need for a better and improved sound technology, so I downloaded dBpowerAmp Music Converter which was recommended to me by a friend of mine. I can’t tell you my surprise when I realized that dBpowerAmp Music Converter is in fact an Audio Player. This utility converts sounds from one format to another, ex. from audio to MP3, MP4, Windows Media Audio (WMA), etc. It has 2 important qualities: the conversion shows really good speed while it preserves ID tags. Yes it’s true you don’t have to re-write it. But there are also some other interesting things dBpowerAmp is able to do, like fading old tracks out whilst fading in new, just like having a DJ, remove silence between audio tracks, visualizating my music collection database, track preference playback (which means my favorite tracks are played the most!), ID Tag editor - edit artist, track information,etc.
(more…)
BladeEnc is a free program that are able to encode WAV into MP3 files. It is based on mpegEnc and while it hasn’t a nice user-friendly interface it is about three times faster. Main advantages of BladeEnc are quality at high bitrate encodings and speed when used on older PCs. At present time it isn’t actively developed anymore as his author dedicated his audio research to Ogg Vorbis format.
Download BladeEnc MP3 encoder for free here.
MP3Tagger is a freeware program intended for editing tags in multimedia sound files. As you already know, MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) is a music-file format. Every MP3 may contain an ID3 tag. This is actually a piece of information, stored right in that MP3 file. The ID3 tag has several cells you can set. These are the Song title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Comment and several more such as Composer, Original artist, Copyright, URL, Encoder Type, etc. All experienced and conscientious MP3 collectors maintain their ID3 tags and keep them up to date. Though, is very laborious to fill them in manually. Let’s take the classic MP3 player - WinAMP. Of course, you may use it to fill in the tags, but you have to browse through the files - one after another - press Alt+3 and enter all the desired information. But MP3Tagger is here to solve this problem.
(more…)
SHOUTcast is a free solution for live and on demand audio broadcasting across the Internet or any other network.
For listening to SHOUTcast broadcasts a player compatible with streaming MP3 audio is required (such as Winamp for Windows, Audion for Mac and XMMS for Linux).
In order to broadcast you will need a streaming server, Winamp, the SHOUTcast Source Plug-in for Winamp and Fraunhoffer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (available for free inside NetShow Services from Microsoft).
All of the required tools are available for free download here.
Musicmatch Jukebox 10 is a robust audio manager and music player for digital music including CDs, MP3s, WMAs, WAV files. You may customize the view of your music library based on criteria or filters such as composer, featured artist, rating or date last played. The Auto DJ function can be used to automatically create playlists and discover new music. Enjoy the listening at the same volume level using its Volume Leveling.
The Portable Device Manager includes step-by-step wizard to easily transfer music to portable devices. Also, remove duplicates to achieve a maximum use of the disc space on portable device using the new Duplicate Track Finder tool.
You can rip personal audio CDs at speeds of up to 40x and encode the tracks into MP3, WMA, WAV or mp3PRO files. The converted tracks are automatically tagged with available album information and cover art. It even creates MP3s from vinyl records and cassette tapes using Line-in Recording. The Auto Song Detect feature automatically make separate files for each individual track.
Musicmatch Jukebox Plus burns audio, MP3 and data CDs at speeds of up to 48x using drag and drop function. With SmartSplit you can evenly divide an unlimited number of tracks among multiple discs. Choose from a selection of border graphics to create and print full-color custom adhesive CD labels and covers art, up to 150 track titles and including personal text and graphics.
You have the abbility to look up and automatically adds artist, album and song information to all of your tracks from its Super Tagging database. Also, you can export your entire music collection to a spreadsheet or text file and create music pie charts.
Download free version!
LAME is a free MP3 encoder released under GPL (open source) with speed and quality competing with the commercial encoders. Some of the features of the 3.96.1 version are: MPEG1,2 and 2.5 layer III encoding, constant and variable bitrate, psycho acoustic and noise shaping improvements and easy to use presets. The encoding engine can be compiled as a shared library for Linux / UNIX, DLL or ACM codec for Windows. It is available for free download but requires the ability to use a C compiler. However many commercial and free software for cd to mp3 ripping or wav to mp3 encoding offer support or use LAME.
Free download of the LAME source code!
The programmers from Winamp have released a new version of their famous mp3 player. They skipped from version 3 directly to version 5 which is the continuation of the 2.x line. Some of the features of the new Winamp are:
Winamp Pro (priced at $14.95) can convert music CDs into MP3 format files which can be played with all MP3 capable hardware and software players. Also, the pro version can be used to burn own music compilations.
Free download winamp!