If you are planning to use your PC to listen to music, connecting it with an amplifier and hi-fi speakers, you are going to need some applications that will let you handle your collection — from converting audio between various formats, to creating compilations, etc. First of all you need to make sure you get the best possible sound quality. It’s been a long time since I use my PC for music, what follows comes from first hand experience. If you also edit audio (cut, paste, apply effects, etc., you may like to check this post on the best free sound editors).
To give you some idea about my criteria, let me say that I prefer a rather balanced sound, sweet, smooth and clear, with a full body, including all the middle area, natural (not heavy) bass, mild (not harsh) treble.
The Source of Sound
If you use Winamp as your main audio source, you will enjoy a very large collection of plugins extending significantly the functionality of the player. Regarding sound quality itself, you must try a Kernel Streaming Plugin that will let you bypass the OS native mixing system and achieve hi end (bit to bit exact) sound, without any need of extra drivers. Note that this bypass may prove only of a theoretical value with differences not being really audible.
AIMP is a player with a similar layout and great sound quality (wasapi or asio). Check also XMPlay, a convenient hi end free audio player. Yet, I have not found so far a player with the convenience, flexibility and power of Winamp.
Another player you may like to try, is Foobar2000, a great player, featuring a (smaller) library of important components (plugins), such as the Wasapi plugin for hi-end sound.
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.
Managing Your Music
* Playlist File Remover is a Winamp plugin that lets you use a shortcut key to remove a song from a playlist right as you listen to it — even to delete it completely (send it to the recycle bin). There is no easier way to create a playlist. (You don’t need this plugin if you use AIMP.)
Free AmoK Playlist Copy is indispensable, if you need to copy to the same folder from various folders all the audio files that make up your playlist. This excellent freeware will not do only that, it will also beautify your collection by renaming these files and creating a new playlist.
Playlist Creator enables you to create playlists, add all desired files, insert existing playlists to your current playlist, save in m3u and pls formats. Winamp’s playlist editor is easier to use, but you will need Playlist Creator to retouch a playlist without using Winamp — e.g. when you have Winamp dedicated to some other task. AIMP also lets you load several playlists.
You may have a playlist of several hours of music. If you need to burn all of this, you have to divide the list into several smaller playlists, each of them corresponding to its own CD. M3Util will help you do just that, and, if you broke your playlists after a drive change or a renaming, you need ListFix, a free program that will repair your playlists.
When the time comes to burn your playlist, you can use ImgBurn. ImgBurn is a great application, unfortunately lacking the mixing/fading features of Nero. If you use Nero, you will need the free Nero APE plugin to burn Monkey’s Audio (APE) audio files.
To add tags to MP3s, download MP3Tag (it will also edit the tags in files of other formats besides MP3s). MP3Tag can add tags automatically using online libraries.
When you need to find and delete duplicate MP3 files, use Duplicate Cleaner.
Audio Editing
To record or edit an audio file (cut parts, add fade out or fade in effects, etc), you can use Audacity and WavePad.
You will find online a lot of music files in lossless quality encoding, such as flac, wav or ape formats. If you have a really large collection of music and you need to convert your files to mp3, you can use the Efficient WMA MP3 Converter, a convenient enough application, that will let you convert to VBR high quality mp3 format. I suggest that you set 192 as the minimum rate, and let it go up to 320, in order to have nice audio quality, without sacrificing much of your disk space. The difference between a flac, wav or ape, lossless, encoding with a 320 MP3 encoding, resembles the difference between CD and Vinyl records, while, in terms of space, the resulting MP3 files will be about one third or less of the Flac or Ape files. Check also this post on the best bitrate to encode mp3 files.
