Your Favourite Audio Software
A couple of threads in this section made me think it may be a good idea for us to post our software reccommendations in here - rippers, burners, converters, edtitors, whatever.
I'll start things off with Audacity and Fairstars Audio Converter.
Might be a little self interest with this one - i lost loads of data and progs recently.
Speaking of which - to whomesoever it may concern, i also lost my emaail contacts. Just so you know.
I struggled with Audacity
But a poster here recomended Acoustica 4.1 Click Here
And it has more features than Audacity - after the 30 day free trial it costs £25 - and the developer in Germany responds quickly
I find the wizard very easy to use - you can record from your hi-fi, split into tracks, make wav files (and others i.e MP3) then make CDs - It has all sorts of extras besides click and crackle filters. And it's easy to import CD tracks as wav files
I would say take a look
I use Audacity for recording and editing, and iTunes for music management. I find them both more than adaquate...
A little off topic, perhaps, since this isn't hi-fi, but here's a useful site for converting and downloading streaming audio and video from the internet into a number of different formats. I find it useful if I want to download clips for use in class (I'm a teacher) and either won't have or don't trust the internet connection in my classroom. It supports a number of formats, but can't deal with Real formats or iPlayer unfortunately. The best part is that you don't have to download any software - it does it all in your browser.
http://www.mediaconverter.org/
This is the list of stuff I use. Mostly free so not sure what the stuff is like you have to pay for, but with all this for free not sure why you'd want to pay for any software.
Ripping software
EAC - Very easy to use and setup with some guides on the net, the better your CD player then the better/faster the RIPs will be. Very good CDDB function to put in TAGS
Recording software
Audacity- Can be a bit tricky to setup but once it is it's simple to use and works well. The noise reduction isn't great though. so I use Steinberg Clean for this
Winamp Streamripper -this is worth a mention as it's great for ripping from online radio stations.
Converting software
EAC conversion
LamedropXP - drag and drop frontend for the Lame encoder for lazy people like me who can't be doing with messing about with the command line commands.
FLAC Frontend -drag and drop FLAC encoder/decoder, very fast and easy to use.
Playback -
WINAMP - why oh why did they break the cuesheet function!!
Foobar - cos it play .cue files where winamp let's you down.
[EDIT] I forgot to include Ableton Live for music production and djing - I love this software.
EAC - Near bit perfect CD copies
Medieval cue splitter - Seperates big flac files into individual tracks based on info contained in a .cue file
MP3Tag - File tagger, works for FLACs too, and other formats
LastFM - Pulls up artist biography/discography of music you play. Good for find ing other music you'd never have heard of otherwise.
Foobar - For being such a quick player from explorer click
Media Monkey - Still getting to grips with it but it's ITunes Plus
????? - that Mac program that allows ITunes to play FLAC (not tried it but that must be good).
Asio4All - Bypasses loads of Microsoft sound ruining processes. Where would XP be without it?
That's the best of my toolkit. Except for the nameless Mac software which I can't use until they port it.
Now a request. Is there any software that acts as a batch normaliser plugin where volume changes are stored in a database leaving the original file untouched. Making the media player refer to this database for playback volume? Would such a thing be compatible with ASIO or Kernel Streaming? It would be so handy. I never know whether to trust software normalisers not to change the file.
up the music:????? - that Mac program that allows ITunes to play FLAC (not tried it but that must be good
Max...?
EAC. For Flac backup.
Foobar2000 + Wasapi + Carucuo (on Vista 32bit). For playing Flac files at a very good quality via Wasapi and the Caracuo skin for one of the best looking skins. (Keeping an eye on Songbird as the playback is bit perfect, although still a way to go yet, oh yes and it's open source)
MP3Tag. Same as above.
*Up The Music* Have you used Replygain in Foobar? you can scan your library as seperate tracks and set replaygain to only apply gain, which according to the foobar wiki does not alter the files, unlike normalisation does.
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It's obvious isn't it: Eye-Tuuunes!!?
Roksan Caspian Pre amp, Caspian Mono Power amp x 2, NAD M51 DAC, B&W 805 Signature, Roksan Radius turntable, Denon-1713UD, MF phono & headphone amps, PS3, Mac/AE/Apple TV