Nero Move it review

With digital cameras, music downloads, video clips and suchlike littered around most people's hard drives, there's a market for programs that help you sort out all that clutter.

Nero's Move it is one such tool, and also boasts the ability to sort out your portable devices. But its main selling point is conversion of your media files (which it can also play back) as and when required. This isn't a unique feature, but the way Nero goes about it is both intuitive and genuinely useful.

The program opens with a relatively blank (but customisable) screen showing your detected devices - be they hard drives, flash discs, media players or websites - down both sides. The software takes a little time to search and catalogue all the files on these, but once this is done, should you wish to move files between one and another, you just open the necessary devices, highlight the respective files, and click on the transfer arrow.

This is especially useful when you connect something like an MP3 player, iPod, mobile phone, PDA or Sony PSP. There's extensive device support, so there's a good chance that any modern portable unit will be compatible. Move it quickly detects the hardware and will automatically convert any files you drag across into an appropriate file format for it, without you having to worry. No fiddling with settings, no messing around with filenames - it just does the conversion, quickly and with little fuss. You can have several devices on the go at the same time, should you so choose.

If you want to choose files to add to a device, but don't have it attached, Move it will hold the files in place until it is. Then, when you hook it back up, it starts the conversion and transfer work. A neat touch. We found things a little clunkier with online services such as YouTube: here, inevitably, some setup work is involved.

The biggest downside is that the price is more than negligible for something you might not even have realised you needed. But if you struggle to keep on top of your media every day, it could prove to be money very well spent.