Best free mp3 utilities, trimmers, playlist editors
AMAZON MP3 Desktop Gadget is small and nice, and it will let you open the home page of Amazon to listen to MP3s. Just write the name of the artist and press enter to get a list of songs and albums.
VLC Untied is a free program that lets you select one or more files or folders in Windows Explorer and load them to VLC media player instantly using a keyboard shortcut, even removing completely any files that may be already loaded and playing.
MP3packer is a small, efficient and free utility that can modify an MP3 file without quality loss. It can turn VBR files into CBR for use with players which don’t support VBR.
VbrFix can repair this special tag at the beginning of MP3 files that informs the player on how to treat the file. It can also be used to remove unrecognized data from the mp3 and spot other problems. I use this program again and again, and every time works fine, saves me a lot of trouble. VbrFix is a reliable and useful application, if you use VBR mp3 files that report wrong duration.
MP3Gain analyzes and adjusts mp3 files to bring them all to similar loudness without any quality loss. This way, you don’t have to keep reaching for the volume on your mp3 player every time it switches to a new song, and you can record your cd anthology without editing separately each and every file.
Merge MP3 merges several mp3 files into a single track.
mpTrim can trim MP3s removing silent or unwanted parts. It can also adjust the volume of MP3s. Volume change can be manual or automatic (volume normalization). It can fade-in/out MP3s (to fix abrupt beginning/ending), clean-up MP3s and recover wasted disk space.
AHK MP3 Playlist Files Copy or Move Utility will copy or move the files of a playlist to a new folder or CD. The program allows you to select a Winamp or similar playlist, and then point to any directory you wish the files to be copied or moved to. This does not move the playlist or alter the playlist in any way. It simply copies the files to a different location.
Mp3 Tag Edit is a free and powerful program that reads and writes all mp3 tags. It can also clear all tags of mp3 files automatically in one or many folders; Restore from backup the tag data; Copy of edited mp3 files with advanced renaming options; Rename of edited mp3 files with advanced options, and more.
MP3 Recursive Playlist Generator will create an m3u audio playlist in a folder of your choice, and, if you want, into all of its subfolders recursively. The program will give you also the option to download album art and to select what audio formats you want included in your playlists. Note that the program does not support non-latin characters or the creation of m3u8 playlists.
MP3val will let you validate and fix mp3 audio files. It can be useful for finding corrupted files (e.g. incompletely downloaded, truncated, containing garbage). MP3val is also able to fix most of these problems.
mp3Extractor extracts one or several (adjacent or not, but not overlapping) portions from an audio file and write them to new (optionally tagged) audio files. It can also be used to trim and split audio files. The portions to be extracted or trimmed are determined by listening to the input file and dropping markers.
MP3 Diags will identify issues with your MP3 files, such as broken tags / headers / audio * duplicate tags / headers * incorrect placement of tags / headers (ID3V2, ID3V1, LAME, Xing, …) * low quality audio * missing VBR header * missing track info / cover art * broken track info / cover art * missing normalization data * character encoding issues (for languages other than English).
Mp3Splt will help you split mp3 and ogg files by marking cut points or by detecting silence. If you want to split an album, you can select split points and filenames manually or you can get them automatically from CDDB (internet or a local file) or from .cue files. Mp3Splt supports automatic silence split, that can be used also to adjust cddb/cue splitpoints. You can extract tracks from Mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap files. For mp3 files, both ID3v1 & ID3v2 tags are supported. I found Mp3Splt easy enough and certainly very efficient. Sound quality is not affected, since it does not re-encode the parts of the large file.
Shuangs Audio Joiner lets you join two or more audio files into one. It will even combine WAV, MP3 and WMA of various types and qualities into a single file.
m3Util was written to facilitate carving up large Winamp playlist files (.M3U) into a number of smaller .M3U files. M3Util will also let you carve the files up into groups that could be easily burned to multiple data CDRs or CDRWs.
Mp3 Knife is a simple tool for extracting mp3 clips from a larger Mp3 file.The extracted clips will be stored in mp3 format only.
Exact Audio Copy will try to read your CD perfectly. Exact Audio Copy is also able to write MP3 files in variable bit rate. I use EAC all the time, and never thought of changing it.
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You may also like to check these posts on the best bitrate to encode MP3 files, on the best free audio converters, even specialized, for optimal sound quality, and on The best free sound editors.