MP3 Toolkit 1.6.5

MP3 Toolkit offers you six full-featured MP3-related utilities in one single package. With this set of tools you can convert your MP3 tracks into WAV, FLAC, AC3, WMA, or Ogg files, merge and cut your favorite songs, tag them, and even record any audio coming through your sound card and save it as a new MP3 file.

Structured around a main menu from where you can select any of the six tools provided, MP3 Toolkit offers a wide range of functions and a nice set of full-featured apps. Actually, you will notice right away that all six tools can be considered full apps in their own right – they might well be offered separately as stand-alone programs. Whenever you close any of these tools you’ll be brought back to the main menu, except for the tag editor, which will close the application entirely when you exit the program. This minor yet annoying flaw, together with the lack of uniformity in the design of various “options” (which forces you to learn how to navigate six different interfaces), is what has stopped me from giving full marks to this app.

Functionality-wise, though, there’s nothing to complain about. The MP3 converter supports batch re-encoding of any number of files among any of the audio formats supported. Far from being limited to MP3 transcoding, you can convert any combination of WAV, WMA, FLAC, Ogg, AAC, AC3, AMR, and MPG files among themselves. The bit and sample rates can be configured to meet your preferences. The CD to MP3 Ripper will allow you to extract the tracks from an audio CD and convert them into MP3 files on the fly – no WAV-to-MP3 further conversion is therefore necessary.

The MP3 Tag Editor is probably the tool with the widest functionality of all six. It allows you to write your own MP3 tags (or edit existing ones) either individually or in bulk. It supports both ID3v1.1 and ID3v2.x tags, lyrics and pictures included. You can rename a large amount of MP3 files or write specific tags for them using templates that you can create. You can also clean filenames, synchronize tags between tracks, correct their case, remove all non-ID3 tags, and even export tags as a TXT file.

MP3 Merger, however, requires no specific skills. All you have to do is select the files to merge or combine by dragging and dropping them onto the program’s interface, select the bit and sample rates and the audio channels of the resulting file, and choose an output path. Equally straightforward is MP3 Cutter. Here you are provided with a waveform graph where you can easily select the start and end points while listening to the audio file. (A zoom in and out function would allow for higher accuracy.) And finally, the MP3 Recorder. You can also select your preferred bit and sample rates and the number of channels you want to use (mono or stereo), and click on the “Start Recording” button to make a new MP3 file with any sound that happens to be coming through your computer at that time. It is that simple.

As seen, MP3 Toolkit offers you a wide array of functions and features to create, edit, and manage your MP3 files. Distributed in six different tools with different interface layouts and levels of complexity, this interesting app will certainly cover most (if not all) of your MP3-related requirements.