In this Web Pack we’re complimenting our tutorial in the magazine all about digitising your music and turning your dusty old records and cassettes into newfangled MP3′s. Chances are, that collection of retro tunes you’ve got packed in bin liners now living in the dark reaches of your loft along with the spiders hasn’t succumbed to degradation, so dust them off, read our tutorial and use the freely available tools below we’ve selected here, to digitise, organise and playback all those old favourites from your youth. Lets face it, music was better then, it’s all just shouting these days. Stupid kids. Must dash, I think I can here the meals on wheels van arriving and I haven’t put my teeth in!
Follow these links for our other ‘issue 271 web packs:
Digitise and organise your music!
Protect your PC from Internet threats!
The unsung freeware Heros!
Issue 271 game demo roundup!
Audacity is a mature Open Source music recording and editing suite, offering simple tools for quick editing tasks, plus a host of sophisticated tools for multi-track mixing. It’s perfect for converting your old audio tapes or vinyl into digital files; enabling you to record, edit, clean, and finally exporting them to MP3 files.
Where Windows Media Player is limited to basic playlists and funky visualization effects, for more functionality you should seek out a dedicated music manager like this prime example! Regardless of whether your music collection is split over different folders, local drives, or a network. Once you’ve added your tunes to MusicBee, your collection will become instantly accessible. The application offers some clever features such as playing similar music from your library, and even finding new artists that you may like.
MediaMonkey is a more serious media manager than its name suggests, handling both music and movie collections with equal efficiency. Impressively, MediaMonkey can automatically find and add tags to media, or fix files with incomplete metadata. The complete feature list is impressive and extensive, including CD ripping, disc burning, media playback, playlists, and syncing with portable media players.
Adding more choice to your music manager options is this rather interesting offering. Helium Music Manager has a similar set of functions to MediaMonkey, but with the addition of a separate mobile app for controlling your PC Helium Music Manager with your iOS device. This includes piping your music from your PC through to the device over the internet.
If you find other music managers too overly specced or complex, than Jaangle maybe just right for you, balancing easy-of-use and essential functions for managing music collections. While a tune is playing, Jaangle will dynamically download and display a short artist/band biography and image.
Just like video conversion and optimisation, audio files can be adjusted to in the same fashion to help reduce file size and maintain acceptable quality. Dropping the bitrate marginally will reduce quality by imperceptible levels, but spread this across many audio files, the size reduction will be significant. MP3 Quality Modifier takes into account the possibility of handling multiple files at once so batch file and folder processing is included.
This utility makes short work of extracting and saving audio from videos. We experienced problems it recognising MOVs, but all other formats worked with no issues, including FLVs. The program supports batch processing, so queuing up multiple jobs is no problem for the software. Pinned to the bottom of the interface is a visual timeline for scanning and audio playback. Using markers, just the portion of audio you need saved out can be highlighted.
mp3DirectCut gives you the virtual scissors to apply trimming, and copy and paste editing to MP3 audio files. It’s completely non-destructive, so saved edits retain the original quality. The software includes audio recording and a handful of useful filters to clean up the audio you’ve imported.
The embedded meta data contained in audio files aids the crucial management of large collections. Jukebox software and portable players all rely on this information to group songs and relate them to artists and albums. Using Mp3Tag it’s made much easier to add and edit this meta data on multiple files at once.
Posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2012 at 6:57 am under Web Packs. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
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