MP3Producer 2.61

Overview

Having many audio CDs in your room is awesome for a collection, but it’s quite risky since they could get damaged easily. What you could do to save their contents before this happens is create a backup of them so that you can have them in both physical and digital form. MP3Producer is a tool for this job, which can extract the contents of audio CDs and convert them into various formats, plus tag the automatically by connecting to FreeDB online music database.

Installation

The first thing you’ll have to do when you open the installer is pick the language you’d like to use during installation. Then all you have to do is agree to the Terms of Service and then keep clicking “Next” until you reach the final step and the main installation process has finished (and unless you want to change installation directory and shortcut settings).

No malware or any other additional 3^rd-party software is included in the setup package.

Supported operating systems are Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

Interface

The program’s interface might seem a little confusing at first, but taking a closer look you’ll see that it’s quite easy to use. Its only drawback is that it’s quite outdated and needs a bit of a revamp to become more modern. Below the menu bar are two browse fields from where you choose input and output directory for the conversion tasks. Below that bar are 4 tabs: Track List, ID3 Tag, Filename and MP3/WAV/OGG/WMA Settings, and depending on the current one then the contents of the main area change. At the bottom part there 4 buttons: Open (for opening WAV files to encode), Output (for selecting output directory), FreeDB (for automatic file tagging) and Start (to start the conversion process). Below that part is an area with playback buttons for previewing the selected audio files.

Pros

The program can rip audio CDs at any preferable speed, plus give you the ability to change other settings as well (e.g. read sectors, sector comparison, swap left/right channels, etc.). But the ripping feature is just a part of the program’s functionality; it can also convert (ripped) audio files to another file format. The supported file types you can convert between are MP3, WAV, WMA and OGG.  Depending on the output format you want to convert you have plenty of options; for instance, when converting to MP3 you have many more options available: choose between CBR and VBR, adjust sample rate and channel mode, bitrate and a few others.

If you have problems with tags in your files, MP3Producer can help you with this since it can connect to FreeDB online music database and automatically fill in missing tags of files. A similar feature is available too, but automatically renames files according to their tags.

Cons

No cons, apart from the interface that could be improved.

Alternatives

Some alternatives are CDEx (free), dBpoweramp (paid) and EZ CD Audio Converter (paid).

Conclusion

MP3Producer is a fully-featured, flexible software that can rip audio CDs as well as convert audio files between the most popular formats.