Jack! The Knife

Jack! The Knife is a complex software application which enables you to rip audio CDs, listen to them, as well as play music from the hard drive or convert particular formats.

The installation process is fast and uneventful, while the interface is a bit cluttered. This means that beginners might find it a bit difficult to discover all the options available. In addition to that, it encloses a menu bar, several shortcut buttons, boxes, drop-down menus, and playback controls, such as play, pause, stop, next and previous.

It supports many of the popular audio formats, including WAV, MP3, OGG, APE, FLAC, WV and WMA. Aside from that, you can easily customize ID3 and APE tags, with details such as track number, artist, title, album, genre, composer, publisher and URL.

It is possible to view information about uploaded songs. To be more precise, you can find out the format, bit rate, sample rate, encoder, number of frames and size.

The extraction process can be completed with the help of a wizard, and you can look for cover images and other titles from this artist on FreeDB.org, as well as lyrics with a helping hand from Google.

The conversion process is available to and from all supported formats, to a custom location on the hard disk, while you can access an equalizer, open an external audio player and change the skin.

It does not hamper your computer’s performance, and includes comprehensive and quite well-organized Help contents. To conclude, Jack! The Knife is a useful piece of software, with many options to tinker with and a good response time. Nevertheless, the interface could use a little more work.