Whether for putting your favorite music on your portable devices or smartphone or simply backing up the content of your dearest CDs, you need software; and if you need good results, you need good software. So, start looking on the whole web for something to do the job; there's tons of freeware and tons of shareware so what will you choose? I happened to step today on a very XP-looking software and I was simply curious to see what could it do. Nothing extraordinary, but simply very good-working code, providing almost everything that's needed to help you move around from lossless formats to MP3s for use on smartphones: from audio CD extraction to audio conversions, it seemed like MP3 Producer had them all.

The Looks

I was just telling you about a very XP-look; MP3 Producer is by far the most XP-ish software I have seen in a very, very long time. Forget about skins and coloring: it has plain Win XP nuances and the icons are simply "from there"; very good-looking (not as good as if they were Mac) icons, almost hi-res pictures with classic XP shading and gradients, calm and warm colors and a very light blue background complete the look which integrates perfectly in the OS.

A very nice visual feature is that MP3 Producer sports tabs in the main window, tabs which let you instantly access very important features as ID3 tagging, filename settings and MP3 encoder settings as well. By means of checkboxes and drop down menus, almost all the newbies will be able to find their way into the MP3 Producer: ticking these boxes and choosing from the drop menus is doubtlessly one of the easiest visual ways of organizing a GUI and MP3 Producer has taken this even further by grouping related things together and even circling them with thin lines where needed.

Even more, one thing which almost made me think of the MP3 Producer as an XP-native application: for each settings screen, a large portion of the visually-available space has been dedicated to explaining in brief what each tick and menu does. Thus, you really don't need to know too much about CD-ripping or encoding/decoding: just read carefully the given data and you should be producing great audio in just minutes.

The conversion tool works in a very simple way, both technically and visually. By simply clicking the icon in the right-top corner, you can select the conversion type and all you have to do is browse for the source files and set the output result; after that, MP3 Producer will do the rest.

Finally, all the menus in MP3 Producer are looking quite simple yet very intuitive so it's really made for the non-professionals as well. While still retaining a lot of features to quench the pros' thirst for setting up and tweaking, the MP3 Producer also remains a software fit for the inexperienced or beginner users thus becoming even a more useful tool.

The Works

When it comes to the ripping the contents of an audio CD, things are pretty clear as I guess most of you already know the principles of such an operation. Basically, one of the first things you should think of when using MP3 Producer is what you want to do and then choose the appropriate action from the top-right icon; the popping menu opened by your click will let you instantly choose the appropriate actions.

Whether it's CD to MP3 or CD to OGG and so on, the sequence is almost identical: query the FreeDB in order to get data about the content of the CD and if needed, make the necessary adjustments, then set up the encoder parameters, each individually different for each output filename, obviously. After having set the output folder as well, all you have to do is select the files you want to rip and press Start, then enjoy a cup of coffee as the MP3 Producer will digitize the audio tracks.

MP3 Producer is able to rip the audio CDs to WAV, MP3, OGG and WMA formats while also performing WAV to MP3, OGG and WMA conversions and back to WAV from OGG and WMA only, but this should be more than enough for what needs usually "hit" us in our daily tasks. By having a built-in tag editor supporting both v1 and v2 ID3 tags, MP3 Producer can deliver ready-to-play audio from the start eliminating thus the need to revise the files later. Also, filenaming is made using a very large number of presets which technically give you the opportunity to produce files with whatever naming you could think of.

I have used MP3 Producer for both CD-ripping and audio conversions and the resulting tracks were clean and respected the specs I had provided in the encoding process. This means that MP3 Producer is worth the 25 dollars it sells for; even if you think that there are similar softwares offered for free, take into consideration that a licensed software means also upgrades and support...

The Good

The GUI is pretty good, clean and intuitive, perfect for both beginners, advanced and even pros' use.

The Bad

I guess the price is a bit too high; 25 dollars may not be much money but for some, it is certainly a repelling feature.

The Truth

Truth is that one might really use MP3 Producer quite well and get excellent results out of it. Depends only on whether you choose to buy it or not... :)

Take a look at the screenshots below and see for yourselves what's going on with MP3 Producer: