Easy CD-DA Extractor is an excellent tool for ripping your CDs to a multitude of music formats without the underlying concern about how digital rights management (DRM) might affect your ability to play your files on any given device.  It is also ideal for converting audio files from one format to another.  Although not elegant, this is my favorite tool for creating / expanding my digital music library. - Cost: $28.00
AudioGrabber has many of the features that Easy CD-DA Extractor has, although the interface is not as easy to understand.  However, one thing that makes this application shine is its ability to digitize analog audio from records and tapes, and split them into their own separate files.

This tool is absolutely FREE but seems to be "untouched" by the author for quite some time.
If you've purchased music online, you're probably familiar with the pitfalls of Digital Rights Management (DRM).  It's that built-in "feature" that disallows you from doing what you want with the tracks you've purchased.  They've built in "protection" that prevents you from moving them to another device (try using an iTunes track on another player), for instance.

With MuvAudio 2.0, you can get rid of these annoyances by re-encoding your purchased tracks to a non-encrypted MP3 file that is playable just about anywhere.

If this is what you need to get done, this tool is well worth the $18.99 price.
Audacity has the ability to capture analog audio just as AudioGrabber does, but has the added functionality of being able to edit that audio from within the application.  You can use it to change the pitch, remove static, hiss and hum, adjust volume for "normalization", select certain portions of a song and loop them, etc.

I use this application for recording WAV files while capturing audio directly from analog sources (primarily my turntable).

This tool is also FREE.
This is one of the 'coolest' players that I have come across so far.  Some of the features are:Browse your covers to play an album.
  • Connect to the Internet to get covers and album info
  • Enjoy Database Shuffle (also known as Autocue)
  • Use Replay Gain to listen all songs at one volume level
  • Adjust frequencies with the equalizer
  • Winamp DSP plugins can be attached
  • Directly connects to Last.fm (no plugin needed)
  • Native ASIO support for Audiophile
  • Configurable Party Mode to disable functions
  • Supports "Touch Screen" devices as well

Although a bit pricey at the current price of $42.00, this is a very fun player to use.
MediaMonkey is a very flexible player that includes features such as:
  • Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface
  • Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata
  • Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down
  • Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume
  • Record CDs into OGG, MP3, FLAC and WMA files
  • Convert MP3s, OGG, FLAC and WMA files into other formats with the Audio Converter
  • Create playlists and music mixes quickly and easily to suit any occasion
  • Synchronize with iPods / MP3 players effortlessly and convert tracks on-the-fly

Cost:           Standard Version: FREE                Gold Version: $19.95
MP3 Tag Assistant Pro is a great utility to manage MP3 tag files and has the following features:
  • Support MP3 and WMA file formats, ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag types, WMA metadata, with up to 35 tag fields, including Original (Original Artist, Original Album, Original Text Writer) Commercial (Publisher Name, Copyright Message), URLs, WinAmp tags, multi-line comment and lyrics tags.
  • Unicode and ANSI characters in tags and filenames. You can use symbols of your national alphabet in WMA/MP3 tags (diacritic symbols, umlauts, hieroglyphs, etc).
  • Album web database wizard (freedb.org), comparison with existing tags.
  • Integrated web search for lyrics.
  • Auto correction of strings, symbols, and upper-lower case.
  • One-click tag removal, renumbering and tag swaps.
  • Batch tag editing, file renaming, other batch operations.
  • Change filenames based of their tagged information.
  • Change tags based of filename’s path.
  • Filters by tag format (ID3v1 and ID3v2) and file extensions (MP3 and WMA).
  • Preset and custom templates to generate filenames, tags and playlists. You can use for custom templates all supported tags (e.g. “‹Orig. Artist› - ‹Title›.mp3”).
  • Generation and editing of PLS/M3U playlists.
  • Quickly create PLS/M3U playlist from the folders.
  • Generation of CSV, TXT, XML filelists.
  • One-click sorting and filtering, manual sorting mode.
  • Add comments and lyrics to tags.
  • ID3v1 <> ID3v2 tags synchronization.
  • Copy tag to tag, move and swap tags.
  • Copy folder names and filenames to tags.
  • Format a tag "Track #".
  • Multi-format the tags. You can add a new text to several tags at once.
  • Automatic and manual change the case of tags and filenames.
  • Advanced features for copying your music files. You can use templates (with tags information) at copying.
  • Integration with WinAmp 2.x/5.x media player and a in-built player.

Cost:  $29.95

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