Steinberg My MP3 2.0 review

Thanks to the advent of digital music formats like MP3 and RealAudio, converting a tune into a small portable file is both quick and easy.

MP3, for instance, allows a whole CD to be compressed into little more than 60Mb of data yet sacrifices very little sound quality. If you store all your music in the MP3 format, a single CD can hold around 11 albums. For this reason, Internet users worldwide have long been reaping the benefits of MP3.

My MP3 allows you to create MP3s yourself, either directly from CDs by a process called 'ripping', or by converting existing audio files. It also acts as a jukebox for playback and general management of your music.

My MP3 forgoes the standard Windows interface of drop-down menus, in favour of a fancy selection of buttons and icons. It's daunting at first, but a good read of the excellent manual soon makes everything clear. Should the layout not be to your liking, a range of new 'skins' at Steinberg's Web site allow you to customise its look to your personal taste.

And you can make more than just MP3 files. If you like, you can save music in the Windows standard .wav format or even AIFF for Macintosh sound files. RealAudio is very popular on the web, and is supported too, as is Microsoft's WMA. The ability to convert files between any of these formats is handy, even if it does take time on a low-spec PC.

The inclusion of a six-band equaliser and effects section is great for cleaning up your grungier recordings. You can also save your best equaliser and effects settings and apply them to music while recording the results straight to a CD using the built-in CD-burning software.

Playlists allow you to arrange your songs into their respective genres and keep them organised. Once you have an ample selection of music crammed onto your hard disk, My MP3 allows you to quickly create custom playlists, searching for tunes by artist name, genre, MP3 encoding quality and date. You can also use the playlist generator to put together as many hours of the specified music as your portable player can handle. A few clicks of the mouse and the software will transfer the files too. Good stuff.

Despite an initially steep learning curve, My MP3 becomes easy to use. You've just got to learn its way. When you have it's a great piece of software that allows you to do just about anything you might want to do with music, short of making your own.