Product Reviews

Acoustica's MP3 Music Suite is a loose collection of four applications - MP3 Audio Mixer, MP3 CD Burner, CD/DVD Label Maker and MP3 to WAV Converter - that let you rip, edit and burn MP3s.

The suite has no automated installation, so you have to install each product individually. These offer a range of features, but their interfaces look more like those of early Windows 95 applications than brand new applications.

The choice of tools available is quite strange. While the CD Burner application sounds like a good idea, the free media players iTunes and Windows Media Player

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(see page 40 for a comparison) can burn audio CDs. The free applications are better for ripping audio CDs and organising MP3 files, too. Acoustica's music library is difficult to navigate, as you can view tracks only by artist or by genre. This makes it particularly difficult to find all the tracks from a compilation album.

The CD cover designer has a range of image files and templates and is fairly easy to use. However, if you have a CD or DVD recorder, you probably have a copy of Nero, which has a perfectly serviceable cover designer of its own.

The MP3 to WAV converter is another application that is unlikely to see much use as iTunes and Media Player can do this quite easily should you ever see the need for it.

Finally, the MP3 Audio Mixer lets you import MP3 samples and build your own audio track. This offers little aside from the standard fade, volume and rate controls, and anybody looking to get into serious mixing is advised to look elsewhere.

The main problem with this software is that it does nothing that free or better commercial software can't do. Even at £20 we recommend that you stick with iTunes, Media Player and Nero 6.