An Overview of Audio Converter

Why do we need audio converter?

Look into the music industry, you will be confused or may be dazzled by the abundant types of audio formats. Why there are so many different audio formats? Well, it’s the demand of individual needs as well as industrial desires. (Download free trial audio converters)

If you were recording professional or musician, you would prefer Non-compressed formats, Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) for Macs and WAV for Windows or Vista. Alternatively, there are lossless data compression formats, Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Lossless Audio (LA) codec, Monkey's Audio (APE) codec, and many more to come.

If you were music lovers, just like everybody else, lossy data compression audio format is for you. This family of format has fairly small file size and yet offers satisfying sound quality. You may have Dolby Digital (A/52, AC3), MPEG audio codec layer-3 (MP3), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Vorbis audio codec and Windows Media Audio (WMA), and many more.

Latter on, the music and audio industry dislike people copying and sharing the contents; even the consumers have paid for it and use it only for personal use. The industry then invented a kind of technology called Digital Right Management. This DRM measure can lock up the audio content you buy with very strict limits of use.

The bad thing is, there is no one universal audio player or media platform can support all of these formats. Some formats are for Macs, some for Windows. Some formats are for iTunes and iPod, some for Zune. And so on.

So what would you do if you face the situations above? Right, you must want to find out a way of converting between audio formats. So no matter what kind of audio format is your audio file and what kind of audio format you need to have next, just run the audio converter and do the conversion and get what you need.

To put it simple, audio formats are like foreign currencies and an audio converter is like a currency exchange agent. You put in Japanese yuan and get US dollars. Or you put in Canadian dollars and get pounds.

 

What can audio converter do?

There are three classes of audio converters, namely, DRM audio converter, un-protected audio converter, and all-in-one audio converter. However, they may have cross area of functions.

DRM audio converter can

• Convert protected audio files to unprotected files
• Convert unprotected audio files to popular audio formats

Un-protected audio converter can

• Convert between popular unprotected audio formats
• Convert rarely-used audio formats to popular audio formats

All-in-one audio converter can

• Convert DRM protected audio files to unprotected audio files
• Convert unprotected audio formats to popular formats
• Extract audio tracks from video files and convert to popular audio formats
• Edit audio files
• Burn audio CD or mp3 CD

However, different audio converter may have various features. Some audio converters may support only a few popular audio formats. Some audio converters may require media players to play back or burn the audio files. In this case, make sure that the audio file is supported by your media players.

What makes an excellent audio converter?

Although the features of audio converters can vary some how, there is common criterion that can be applied to determine the excellence of an audio converter:

• Converting Speed

Converting speed matters the most for people who have a huge quantity of songs in their music libraries waited to be converted.

• Sound Quality

Fast and nice. Sound quality comes as the second most important thing in doing audio conversion. Who would appreciate the audio that is floppy and noisy, any way?

• Ease of Use

Most music and audio book lovers have only average acknowledge about audio and computer, so it’s a virtue to make it easy to use the audio converter. Easy audio converters shall have user-friendly interface and clear navigation, and only a few steps to complete the converting.

• Supported formats

The fact that too many audio formats has caused severe inconvenience demands audio converters to have versatile capabilities with various types of audio formats, especially with the input formats. For output formats, the bottom line is to support popular audio formats, like mp3, wma, ogg and wav.

• Stability

Unstable performance might probably cause program crash and the abortion of the whole converting process, which maybe batch conversion of hundreds of songs, or result inferior audio files with bad sound quality.

• Preserving ID3 Tag and Album Info

Mp3 ID3 tag commonly contains the Artist name, Song title, Year and Genre of the current audio file. And album info contains alum name, and album art, if available. All this information is critical for managing music library. So make sure the audio converter can preserve ID3 tag and album info, or least ID3 tag, into the converted audio files.

• Additional Features

Additional features like batch conversion, auto-find audio files, edit ID3 tag, and restructure output folder, etc. provide better user experiences. However, too many features would confuse users.

• Support Service

Promised and efficient technical support service is finally expected to attribute extra points to an excellent audio converter.

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