Converter Plus

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on January 24, 2013

If you wanted to load the "Green Acres" theme song to your MP3 player, how would you do it? You could search for an MP3, but we suggest you make your own with Converter Plus, a versatile audio and video converter that, among other accomplishments, can convert video files into MP3s. That sounds sort of un-special, we know, but it's a lot less common than you'd think. And besides it's just one of Converter Plus's capabilities, which include not just converting audio and video files from one format to another, but also downloading video for watching later, streaming Internet TV and radio (with lots of free stations) and even games. Converter Plus also searches for music and can find the latest tunes for you. Recent upgrades include improved audio conversions and Windows 8 compatibility.

Converter Plus opened with a tabbed, white-on-gray interface that makes subtle but effective use of color for touches like icons, social media links, and media player controls. We entered an album name in the Music Search tool, and Converter Plus displayed a list of a dozen or so MP3s we could download. The Discovery sub-tab offers links to a variety of music resources, including news, sharing, and streaming. Converting videos to either an audio or video file is as simple as clicking either Convert to Video or Convert to Audio. We could enter metadata, start and stop time, and bit rate as well as one of seven popular audio formats. The Video Converter is similarly versatile. All our converted files played normally.

We were already pretty happy with Converter Plus at this point, and we hadn't gotten to the Video tab's Video Search and YouTube Downloader tools, the Convert tab's simple wizard-based process, the file manager and playlist creator in the My Files tab, or the TV, Radio and Games tabs. That's a lot, but the program's layout handles it all in style, even the Watch TV tab. Don't like the look? Just re-skin the interface. Anything else? Chat, and languages, and online support. Converter Plus certainly made it easy for us to satisfy our craving for '60s sitcom themes!