mp3

M4A is the file extension for MPEG-4 Audio, the audio part of your MPEG-4 videos. Apple has used the M4a (small "a") designation for several of the low-loss audio formats it's sold for years at the iTunes Store. To add to the confusion, some have digital rights management encryption, and some don't. To make a long story short, compatibility is the issue, especially for people with large MP3 collections. Maniac Tools' Free M4a to MP3 Converter does what its name indicates: it converts M4a, AAC, 3GP, and MP4 Audio files to MP3s (or WAVs) that are … Read more

WMA stands for Windows Media Audio. It encompasses four codecs and several file types, but all you really need to know is that WMA is the format Windows uses for the audio part of your Windows Media files and for jobs like recording TV sound. These formats are widely compatible -- inside Windows, at least -- and they play on Windows Media Center, Media Player, and compatible apps, whether or not they're part of a video container. But it's different when you want to play a WMA clip on your MP3 player. For that you'll need a … Read more

Apple's iTunes software takes a lot of criticism from CNET readers. It's a gigantic memory hog of a program that attempts to do everything from downloading iBooks (e-books) to synchronizing apps with your iPad. For a piece of software named for its music playback capability, that feature seems to be a diminishing part of iTunes' appeal.

But groan all you want, iTunes is still one of the most popular ways to play music on your computer.

If you're one of the millions who get your daily music fix through Apple's ubiquitous software, here are a few … Read more

We've tried tons of freeware MP3 converters. They tend to fall somewhere in between Easy Enough for Beginners and Feature-Filled for Experts. DVDVideoSoft's Free Audio Converter definitely registers on the "Easy" end of the dial, but it offers enough options to enable you to encode your MP3s in several different formats, including three levels of LAME. A Preset Wizard makes it easy to save your settings for future use. It can access compatible audio files on your hard drive or stored on a CD, but it doesn't rip CD audio.

Free Audio Converter shares a … Read more

To test the latest version of Fre:AC, the free, open-source audio converter, we had to uninstall the previous version since we were already using it to create high-quality MP3s. The BonkEnc Project's Fre:AC (smile when you say that, pilgrim) is the best tool of its type we've yet tried for ripping, converting, and encoding MP3s with the best possible audio quality, including LAME. Fre:AC also converts files between different types of MP3 encoding with minimal loss. Suppose you have a large collection of tunes in an odd (OGG?) format. With Fre:AC, you can convert … Read more

So you're planning to buy "Now That's What I Call Music, Vol. 43." Hey, I'm not here to judge.

I am, however, here to save you three bucks. If you click fast, you can score a free $3 MP3 voucher good for Amazon's MP3 store.

(Don't worry if the voucher comes up showing Oakland County, which is where I live. All you need is an Amazon account that's been set up with a valid credit card, and the voucher should work.)

Just to clarify, that code you'll eventually get is good … Read more

You probably think of your MP3s as songs, and so they are, usually. But they're also data files, and they contain a lot of information; some of it you can edit. Moo0's MP3InfoEditor lets you edit that information, including Artist, Title, Album, Year, and more, including a Comments field. It can read and write data in a huge range of text-encoding formats (the default Character Set is UTF-8; UTF-16 and UTF-16BE are available, too) and apply data to files in batches. With drag-and-drop and a Keep on Top option, it seems ideal for editing large numbers of files … Read more

Any kind of data file can be corrupted, but your MP3s are especially vulnerable to damage and corruption since there's a lot of them, they tend to hang around for years, and all kinds of programs handle them. MP3 Checker is a simple, free tool that scans your MP3s for any kind of corruption, as long as it's data corruption; it can't tell good music from bad, only good files from bad. With drag-and-drop and file quarantining, it's fast, easy to use, and safe.

MP3 Checker is a simple tool with an appropriately simple interface: a … Read more

eMusic is the little music service that could.

The company has been around since just about the dawn of the MP3 era, yet it's rarely mentioned in the same breath as Amazon and iTunes or Rhapsody and Spotify. Heck, it's rarely mentioned at all.

And yet it chugs along, offering one of the better deals on music downloads you'll find anywhere. In fact, if you sign up for a free 14-day trial, the deal just got a little sweeter.

Specifically, when you register for an eMusic subscription, you'll get a $17.50 credit, which is good … Read more