Product Reviews

If you have an MP3 player or you download music, you need software to organise and play your collection. There's no shortage of choice: Windows' built-in Media Player 10 does the job extremely well, as does Apple's iTunes and many other free players. Anything that costs £20 needs to be pretty special to compete.

Mp3 maker centurion covers all the functions we'd expect. Music collections are sorted by artist, album, year or genre, and tracks can be played from the library, arranged into playlists, burnt to CD and converted to other formats. There's the usual collection of visualisations

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and a range of mostly pointless audio effects. Web radio is built in, but most of the 2,500 stations offered were inactive when we tried them.

It has plenty of less common features, too. Music Editor is a sub-program for editing stereo files. Musicians might appreciate this, although the free Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) offers a similar set of tools. A new Auto DJ mode analyses the tempo of tracks and adjusts their playback speed for seamless DJ-style mixing. It's impressively accurate, but it's a shame there are no manual DJ controls.

Best of the new features is extended format support: the software can play and create AAC files as used by iTunes and iPods. It can also play DRM-protected WMA tracks as long as the track is licensed to your PC, but it can't play protected AAC files bought from Apple's iTunes Store.

Mp3 maker centurion has advantages over Windows Media Player and iTunes, but it's not as easy to use. The search function is clunky, it couldn't read all our MP3s' ID3 tags and odd bits of German text appeared onscreen. Unless you desperately need AAC and WMA playback in the same place, stick with the freebies.