Diet MP3

good
key review info
application features
  • Diet (compress) MP3 files and Audio CDs.
  • (5 more, see all...)

Space, the final frontier.

I'm not going to speak about Star Trek: not even about some technology which was cool in the series and nowadays is a common thing that we all use, and definitely not about the future. This rather short article will tell you about how you can expand the frontiers of the physical digital space you administer.

Almost every person (of course, me too) who has ever decided to buy a larger HDD, sometimes twice the size of the one they owned at that specific time, have said at least to themselves: "Now I have so much spare space it will have to pass a loooong tiiime to have it full" and soon, relying on this so-called insurance, found themselves in the same situation, even a bit panicked, because so big of a HDD was already full and the new data had no room. You have to admit you've experienced this at least once in your life...

Well, the little software I am preparing for you right now will help you regain a bit of the space you have filled with your favorite MP3 collection. In other words, it will further compact your mp3 songs and thus save you room for other data or even more (compacted) mp3s.

The Looks

With simple and with really efficient design, Diet MP3 is based on a Windows Explorer-type GUI and therefore, anyone who ever saw a Win PC, will easily get used to its workings. The difference is that apart from the index/tree view in the left side and the detailed view in the right, Diet MP3 sports another pane which acts as a "playlist": the tracks which appear in this third pane are going to be re-compressed.

Just below, you can both see and edit the local path for output compressed files and where usually the Win Explorer places the Status Bar, the Diet MP3 displays the current compression settings so you can check them easily at any moment. Diet MP3 is full of very intuitive icons really nicely-designed. Except 2 which have a lousy quality and I guess they were just forgotten: the Output and Start Diet that are pixelated and look really bad. Apart from that, the rest of the icons are stylish and very intuitive, high-def images which look pretty good in XP.

As the main window of Diet MP3 can be maximized to the full screen size, you will obtain a "version" of the Windows Explorer but with some new features. No matter how inexperienced you might be, you'll find working with Diet MP3 quite easy. Once you have the content of a specific folder displayed in details, you can just drag and drop files in the "processing area" and start working. Easy indeed!

The Works

As I have said before, Diet MP3 will further compact and compress your existing mp3 files so I guess that the final purpose of freeing up some space on your hard drive is very obvious. If at first I thought that Diet MP3 has a new, even magical way to re-encode the already encoded mp3-format, after testing and re-testing and then analyzing the resulting tracks, I must say I grew a bit disappointed: it's nothing on compression but in lowering a bit the quality. The resulting tracks are at 96 Kbps at their best, therefore, I can definitely say one can save up some space if willing to give up a bit (or better said, more bits) of quality.

It runs at an average speed, not faster yet not slower than a usual professional audio editing software when even batch processing. Well, if just for this operation, buying a pro-rated expensive software is rather insane, so Diet MP3 could be a good choice. Nevertheless, one might also consider running this mp3 resampling with other (even freeware) softwares, since this is about all that this one does.

Options allow many combinations between the various destinations and therefore, qualities of resulting mp3s. One can opt as for intended player between MP3 Portable Player, Other MP3 Device, Cell Phone, Pocket PC and Palm PDA; for quality there are the CD, Telephone, Tape and FM Radio. The format is MP3 only and you can also choose between stereo and mono mode.

The Good

A very simple way to reduce the size of your mp3 collection, if you're not that much interested in maintaining the highest quality of your music. Easy to use and well-looking.

The Bad

I disliked one single thing: it does not warn about reducing the quality of your songs therefore misleading a bit the user.

The Truth

If you're desperate about free space or just want to compact some fav songs for your portable mp3 player or even cell phone, then Diet MP3 is a very convenient way to lower a bit the quality of these tracks.

Below you have some screenshots so you can see better how Diet MP3 is really like:

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user interface 3
features 3
ease of use 4
pricing / value 3


final rating 3
Editor's review
good
 
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