If you’ve ever felt like your mp3 collection was a complete mess or you’ve ever been frustrated with your audio player of choice, then this edition of Cool Freeware is for you. I’ll introduce you to my three favorite freeware programs related to audio.
If you’ve been using Windows Media Player, Itunes, or pretty much any of the “standard” music players to listen to you song collection, I implore you to stop now! Foobar2000, while not perfect, is leagues better than any music player I’ve ever used. The greatest feature of Foobar is that it is ridiculously lightweight. This thing barely puts any load on the CPU and it boots almost immediately. I never realized just how long I was waiting for my music to start playing with Windows Media Player until I used Foobar. Itunes users will probably feel more at home with Foobar in the beginning, though the default settings certainly aren’t the best. Fortunately the program is very customizable. With enough patience and technical know-how, you can even make it look and act almost exactly like Itunes (though I don’t know why you would want to). Even without much tech knowledge you can customize Foobar to fit your needs. Some notable features are the ability to organize music in tabbed play-lists, group songs within lists by artist, and customize the displayed information on almost every part of the program. Foobar also comes equipped with a very nice tag editor and audio converter. My only real gripe with Foobar is how it handles shuffling songs. It essentially creates a random list of songs when it loads and plays straight through it. That’s fine if you never backtrack, but if you want to listen to one song again it will start running through the randomly generated list from that point again, so you’ll hear all the same songs again. Alternatively you can set the song order to “random” instead of “shuffle”, but doing this disables the back button. Also there is no way to shuffle songs in the playback queue. So if you select a chunk of songs and add them to the queue they’ll playback in alphabetical order (or however you have your music organized). It’s a small complaint, and I still think Foobar is the best audio player on the market.
You’re blaring Billie Jean over your car stereo system and you think to yourself, “I know this song is quieter than the rest, I should get ready to turn it down.” But the music is just too damn catchy and the thought quietly slips from your mind. Then suddenly the bitchin’ guitar riff of your favorite metal song nearly explodes your eardrums, “MEEDLY MEEEDLY MEEEEEE!” You scramble to turn the volume down, narrowly avoiding running down a cat in the process. You know it’s happened a million times (just substitute metal with anything else), and don’t you wish there was something you could do about it? Well there is! Mp3 Gain analyzes your mp3 collection to find the perceived volume, then adjusts the dB gain to match whatever level you set. If you’re like me you’ll constantly be changing that number though (should I go 95 dB and risk peaking a few songs or go 89 dB and have to crank up my mp3 player volume!?). Fortunately MP3 Gain doesn’t actually affect the audio data in your files. It merely adds a bit of information to the file to let whatever program is playing it know to make it louder or quieter. So you can be at ease running songs through MP3 Gain a hundred times if you so desire. Once the program has done the initial analysis, adjusting the gain is much faster because the data is embedded right in the song file.
While Foobar has a decent tag editor built in, Mp3tag streamlines the process considerably. Just make sure you change the options to read and write all tag types, or you’ll be awfully confused when your Mp3tag changes don’t show up in Foobar. One cool feature of Mp3tag is the ability to search for albums and fill in information like genre, year, and even album art. Or if you’re like me, you can strip the album art from your collection. Mp3tag isn’t exactly something you’ll need on hand at all times, but it is a good one time use to whip your mp3 meta data into shape.
What? No Audacity?
Question re: Foobar2000. Does it burn CDs? Because I switched almost completely from iTunes to Songbird until it was discovered that Songbird can’t burn CDs (because of copyright issues, I dunno). And that’s big for me, since my tapedeck doesn’t work for an mp3 jack type of thing, so I burn tons and tons of CDs.
There is a plugin that will let you burn CDs, but I haven’t tried it.