Jazz Odyssey

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If you aren’t yet using it, I highly recomend downloading and installing dBpowerAMP.

dBpowerAMP has 4 components: an audio player, a music converter (which serves as both a CD ripper and codec converter), a CD burning utility and a portable player manager.

dBpowerAMP has several key strengths:

• It’s very fast and uses few system resources. It is also free of adware and spyware.
• It supports an incredible array of audio codecs, including WAV, MP3, MP3Pro, Ogg, FLAC, Shorten, AAC, Windows Media, Real and dozens more. It can decode nearly anything for playback, and it encodes most of the aforementioned codecs. A very useful option is included that integrates with the Windows Explorer shell, allowing you to right-click on any audio file and a menu shows you the options for encoding/decoding.
• It works with a wide variety of portable players, including players from Creative Labs, Archos, Phillips, IRiver, Compaq and many more, including Ipods. It also works with Pocket PCs and even has a generic device driver allowing music to be transferred to most portable players by allowing Windows to view it as a hard drive.
• The player itself is full of features, including playlist management, crossfading, gapless playback, music rating, tag editing, a built-in equalizer and more.
• An optional "Power Pack" allows you to "rip to RAM" which GREATLY speeds up the ripping and conversion process.
• The entire application is well supported by a community of users and developers who have created a wide array of skins to make it fun and plug-ins to make it even more useful.

The only piece of the application I don’t use is CD burning as I’m just too familiar with the Nero keyboard shortcuts to make the switch.

If you do a lot with digital music on your PC, this is a must-have piece of software. At $29 to register (which includes free upgrades for life) this is a steal. Get it!