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No, MusicIP Mixer is not an organizer. It analyzes the songs on your pc and creates playlists for you. Certainly there are people who have all songs in perfect order sorted by albums, artists, genre and what not. When these people want to listen to music they always know what exact song they want right now. If you are one of them F7 button is all you need.

As for me, all my songs are randomly placed in different folders, not sorted by any criteria and what is most terrible I am too lazy to create playlists for every mood (I have lots of moods and never know what I would like to listent to next time). MusicIP Mixer does the job for me. I click a song I feel like to hear and the tool creates a playlist for me based on its previous analysis of my music library. There are two advantages of the tool for me (and people like me): first, it saves my time creating a playlist for me. Second, it includes the songs that I have already forgotten about in the playlist and I have the chance to listen to all the songs available from my pc, not only those that I remember about. It’s kind of random choice but all the songs in the playlist have something in common.

I have stumbled upon MusicBrainz lately. The site turned out to be worth spreading the word about. It seems that guys are creating the largest music metadatabase, created and maintained by users.

Every song has music metadata that includes artist name, release title and the list of tracks. And most people like to have this info to create music collections or just to see what is being played.

When you convert audio files with Total Audio Converter it searches Free DB database to get metadata for your songs. MusicBrainz tries to create an even larger database using free users’ hands. This means that any person can add some info or edit the existing one. All the info collected by users is given to public via free tools (though they urge you to donate them at least $10:). So if you failed to find metadata of some song there is a chance that you will find it in Music Brainz.

There are hundreds of guides like How To Buy A TV that describe all the things people should know buying certain things. We decided to create one for users who purchase software on-line.

1. Make sure the tool can do exactly what you need. If you can’t find the necessary option in the description read Features list. In case you still wonder whether the tool fits your needs, email support team and ask them. Doing that you will also find out how the company treats its customers. Beware buying the tool ‘expecting’ that it will do what you need. You will never get a refund on the basis “I thought it can do it, but it can’t”.
Continue reading “Five Things To Pay Attention To Buying Software Online”

Today there are dozens of different audio formats. The reason of that I think lies in the attempt to create a better compression scheme. And they achieved amazing results in that. For example, mp3 can squash your song to 1/11 of the original size, still retaining considerable quality. The advantage of mp3 format is also its widespread acceptance. Most audio players including iPods support it.

To compete against mp3 Microsoft introduced WMA. This can also compress audio files with a loss in quality that many people will not distinguish. It’s the second widespread audio format today (thanks to Microsoft’s aggressive promotion).
Continue reading “Quick Overview of Audio Formats: couldn’t there be just one?”

Internet gave us a chance to completely hide our identity. You may speak out in numerous forums and nobody will know who you are. But only timid persons like that. Most people prefer to show who they are using avatars – small pictures near the user info. These pictures can be of all possible kinds: from animals to pretty faces of sexy models. And there are some very brave ones use their own photos:)
Continue reading “5 easy steps to create a great avatar from a photo”

So you bought CoolUtils Pro Bundle and got around 49 useful programs for such a small price. Let’s see what can CoolUtils tools do for you if you like music. How can CoolUtils tools help you in that?

First, you definitely need an audio converter. Today audio tracks can be of dozens of different formats and not all of them are supported by your iPod or other mp3 player. Just get Total Audio Converter do the job. It supports almost all popular audio formats and can convert them to MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA, FLAC, CDA, ACC, APE, MPP. Note that Total Audio Converter has a built-in CD ripper. That means that you may rip tracks from CD’s and upload them to your iPod in the neccessary format.

As most of CoolUtils products you do not have to launch TAC to convert your files. Just select the file on your desktop and make right button mouse click. In the popup menu you will see options like Play, Rename, Delete. Choose Convert To.

We all have folders with hundreds of audio files. And few people have all them in decent order (not me!). To have a full list of song that I have in each folder I use Print Maestro. That unique tool prints out a list of my songs with Artist, Title, Album, Comment tags or BitRate, Sample Rate, Channels, Duration tags. Here is how it looks like:

Nice and easy. PrintMaestro can also print a folder tree with size information or any other report.

Note that these tools are a small part of CoolUtils Pro bundle. Apart from music lovers’ tools you will get almost 30 other programs to manage your everyday tasks. The list is here. The more CoolUtils tools –  the more enjoyable your pc life is;)

Free time? What’s that? Modern technology is supposed to save us time but lots of it takes ages to learn, so where’s the time saving in that? CoolUtils believes technology should be easy to use – for everyone! If your boss gave you two hours to convert a pdf to html just get our Total PDF Converter and do the job in 5 minutes! So what can you do with the remaining 115 minutes? We’ve got a few ideas for you!

Sleeping in
Ever woken up in the morning with the vague feeling that you have overslept? Now you can snooze on for at least an hour before you’re officially late for work

Cooking
Festive food is much more than brussel sprouts and Christmas pudding. This year take some time to cook something that YOU like:

Continue reading “How do you spend your free time in the run up to the holidays?”

The world is changing. New technologies come and old ones have to die. The gramophone records were substituted by tapes. Many of us still remember the first “portable” audio player – a cassette-tape-playing two-speaker monster. Then a revolutionary Sony Walkman came. When the first CD-based player was introduced, the era of tapes came to the end. Who would care about tapes if new CD’s were of better quality, and you could fit more music on them.

People like to have music to accompany them. And people do not like big heavy things to carry about. So the players were becoming thinner and lighter. This has led to the era of digital music and first mp3 players were bought. Today, about one half of American teenagers, own at least one portable audio. About 10% of all adults aged 35-54  own an mp3 player as well.

Is it time to throw away your old CD collection? Most people who buy iPods eventually forget about their bulky CDs and go to iTunes to get songs they want. Well, there are people that like to overpay. Not my friend Rob. Rob wouldn’t pay twice for music. Once Rob decided to get an iPod instead of his old walkman. But Rob didn’t forget about his CD’s and made most out of them. He ripped the tracks to his laptop and converted them to mp3 format. So now he enjoys his favorite albums on his new stylish iPod.

And to my mind he is absolutely right. Why overpay for your songs? Most people used to listen to CD’s before they bought iPods and other mp3 players. And most people dodn’t stop liking the albums they used to like at the moment of iPod purchase. But we all are told to go to iTunes and pay for the tracks if we have iPods. Certainly we will do that for the new albums but not for those we already have. Someone might think it’s too complicated to rip CD’s, convert tacks to another format and all that stuff. Not at all! All you have to do is to get a CD ripper and a CD converter. For example, Total Audio Converter will both rip your CD and convert the tracks to mp3. Just insert the CD and make a couple of clicks.

P.S. There is a way to get Total Audio Converter for $2.67.

We have recently made a poll with a question: what would you like to improve about Total Audio Converter? Half of all our users answered that we should give TAC for free. But we do not and will not. Are we so greedy for money?

What’s the point of all that ‘software must be free’ fuss? Some people believe that software is intangible and making another copy costs nothing. So the manufacturer can not and must not sell software for money. Well I wish it were so! If that really cost us nothing! And what about money for developing, updating, supporting, promotion or just traffic? We do the work we love but we still want to eat sometimes:)

Sure, there is free software. But the situation is complicated. When the program is offered for free that often means that you will be asked to pay either for support or for updates. Or you will enjoy adware while using the tool. It’s just another way to sell software.

What is more dangerous is all types of viruses, trojans and other scam that will upload to your pc with the free utility. To get rid of them may cost ten times more than a paid license. As the proverb says we are not so rich to get free software.

I will not speak about different cracks. That’s just theft. It is up to your conscience to use it or not.

Free software – do you really want it? Isn’t it safer to pay $19.90 and enjoy the legal product with decent support and free upgrades?

P.S. Still there are free ways to get music for iPods:)