Software Essentials for a Rookie Music Lover

14th March 2010, Kolkata

Do you like listening to music?

Do you have an insane amount of songs on your PC?

Do you fret over the bitrate of songs you have?

Do you boast about your music collection?

Do you own a ridiculously expensive headphone?

Do you feel like an idiot most of the time when you are awake or dreaming?

Are You an Asshole?

If you answered yes to the above questions, you can safely conclude that you really are an asshole.

Another thing you can conclude is that you really like listening to music. Also, You can safely conclude that you like to build up your music collection.

I like to do so too.

But, I don’t just like to build a music collection. I like to have it sorted and standardized too. A little excessive perhaps, but pays off in long run when I am able to find songs easily, listen in high quality, shuffle through them rapidly and see their complete details if I want.

I thought I would share some software’s used by me which keep my music collection in shape, let me listen to my music in high quality and let me change a songs attributes to my liking.

1. Winamp: It needs no introduction. Winamp is an essential component of listening to a worthwhile music collection. You can do many things with it. But it is preferable if you just remain limited to adding folders of songs to media library, searching through it to find your song and listening to it. You can enhance your convenience by enabling & customizing global hotkeys in this.

2. Super: Ever felt irritated about that .wma song which refuses to play on your ipod or your phone? Then this is the perfect software for you. Convert pesky file formats into mp3 formats easily for free. And guess what, this software has the capability of converting any format into any format. Let me repeat that “any format into any format”. This includes video or audio. Convert mp4 to avi, mp4 to mp3, avi to flv etc etc etc. And if you want to extract audio from a video file, just disable video in output. Perfect software for converting. Just don’t try it for religious purposes…..

3. MP3 Gain: Does your music collection give you ear damage when songs change? Do you strain to hear the song you like because its volume is just too damn low? Then this is the perfect software for you. It changes the average volume of your song without changing the quality. It can do batch conversions, so set the decibel level to a volume of your choice and put your collection through the rigor. I am sure you will like the reuslts

4. Razor Lame: Is your music collection becoming too unwieldy for your mobile device? Do you want to conserve your disk space while retaining the quality of your songs? Then use this software to control the bit rate of your songs & change fixed bitrate songs to variable bit rate.

5. Media Monkey: Perfect software for editing your meta tags & album art. It has a unique option of auto tag, which allows you to get meta tags & album art directly from amazon without editing them manually.

6. Audacity: Do you want to remove the way too lengthy introduction music. Do you want to edit the audio file to remove the part you like the most. Or do you want to record your cassette to mp3 using quality you specify. Then audacity is the software for you. It is a complete software for recording and editing your music files.

7. Izotope Ozone for Winamp: Simply speaking ozone makes your music sound better. It makes the music fuller & richer. It allows you to edit the output of winamp much beyond what winamp’s equalizer can do for you

PS: Coke Studio: Awesome songs, free downloads, what else do you need to know

PPS: Thanks to Lifehacker who helped me reach some of these softwares for my needs