An excellent front-end for Lame with a plain, functional, easy to use GUI, I’m impressed.

Lame.exe is already installed, *no need to hunt for it and Lame FE 1 does use the current 3.97 full release* writes ID3 v2 tags for mp3 output and supports drag and drop. There are two modes, simple and expert. The automatic simple mode won’t satisfy most users but the expert mode is so easy to switch to and use, after switching just click on LAME/load LAME settings and make your choices before setting up with the tabbed LAME settings option. The expert mode is definitely one of the easiest I’ve ever used.

I thoroughly recommend Lame FE 1 to anyone who wants to use Lame with minimum hassle, it’s great. =)

I am a Sound forge 9.0 and Nero 8 owner who usually burns wave but enjoy testing free audio s/ware. Especially at the moment as I’m writing an online, user friendly guide to audio ripping/encoding/producing high quality audio cds with freeware.

The quality of some of the free/open source software out there now can really surprise me, Burrrn 1.14 is certainly one of these products. It’s lightweight, easy to use and a very competent burner, the jewel in it’s crown being the range of formats it automatically supports, including Ogg, FLAC and Ape files. *Pricey burning ROMs like mine don’t support that wide a range.* Don’t try burning jukebox style Cds with it tho, you’ll just waste your time as it’s an Audio CD burner. It’s delightfully easy to use, just add files to the burn list then you can drag and drop to the order you want. The length of files are shown on the right of the screen so you can make sure you’re not overrunning.

The only problem I’ve found with it is that it seems to add noise to imported wave *only wave* file recordings on the default settings, it is a beta product. This is easily sorted tho, just uncheck all the boxes in settings/replay-gain to correct the problem with dither. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph Burrn 1.14 is happy to decode and burn a wide range of files but I personally recommend keeping those boxes unchecked, extract purchased Cds to Wave with EAC first and import them into the burner. For previously encoded files I think for best audio quality it’s worth decoding Lame encoded mp3s with Lame 3.97, FLAC files with FLAC etc and import. For miscellaneous mp3s try the decoder in Apollo37zz freeware, it’s excellent and the best audio playing software bar none in my opinion. My review of it is on this site.

Burrrn 1.14 is an excellent performer, I was very impressed and will be including it in my guide. Download it with confidence, you won’t be disappointed.

Wow! This is a gem of a product one hears little about. Apollo 37zz is basically a high quality, audio file player which excels at decoding mp3 files to Wave.

Being something of an audiophile my music collection is mostly comprised of purchased cds extracted to Wave with EAC or CDex to my PC, but like most people I have a number of nefariously acquired, iffy, low quality mp3 files. That’s where the star that is Apollo 37zz shines, dig out your grotty little mp3 files and decode them to Wave with it before burning. Lossy encoding is lossy encoding, it can’t give you the original, pure recording back but it makes a really impressive difference to the sound quality of around 85% of these files.

As a musician *piano, violin, clarinet and saxophone* high audio quality is beyond price to me. I use Soundforge to edit/remaster low quality mp3 files before burning and Apollo 37zz is invaluable to me as it actually creates better quality Wave files from them for processing than Soundforge alone does. It undoubtedly decodes better *lower dither* than the MAD Mpeg decoder at it’s current stage of development, which is useful to know as the developer of Apollo ceased further development last year but it currently remains the best decoder.

My musical preferences are Heavy Dance, *e.g. Quivver, Plump DJs, Meat Katie* Rock *e.g. Nine Inch Nails, Sisters of Mercy, System of a Down* and Classical , so have thoroughly road tested Apollo 37zz with a wide, often complex, variety of music. I consider it to be an essential tool for those who audio quality really matters to, clean up those iffy mp3s and pump up the volume. =)