News :: 15MR: Direct MP3 Joiner

Welcome all to another episode of 15MR! Today’s subject is Direct MP3 Joiner—an application with essentially one quick purpose; combining MP3s into one file. This will come in use for myself if works as advertised; I have all my comedy CDs archived on my drives but when I play them I want to hear them as one block, and not jumbled by shuffle. We’ll see how it turns out.

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Direct MP3 Joiner is an easy and fast audio tool to combine, merge or join MP3 files. With Direct MP3 Joiner you can join multiple music MP3 files to one larger MP3 file in a second. You can fast merge, combine and join MP3 audio files without recompressing and without reducing quality.

MP3 Joiner works with audio files directly and the joined MP3 song will appear in a second after start. With MP3 Merger you can join your chapters in the one big audiobook or combine non-stop audio CD from many separate music tracks.

Direct MP3 Joiner has incredible feature that allows you to insert silence between your audio MP3 tracks that will be merged.

Quick Pros

• Very fast
• Simple to use
• Drag and drop support
• Not bad support for different bitrate files
• Seamless as long as original files were done right

Quick Cons

• ‘Save To’ folder selection could be a little more powerful
• Might have been nice to have automatic naming based on Artist – Album if all are close or the same
• ‘Start Splitter’ – Nice, but must buy that too

Expand

Well, not too much to expand on. This application is at professional grade level. Smooth interface, easy and fast to use and produces clean files. Only minor glitch is if you combine different bitrate files you will not have an accurate ‘Time Left’ bar in your players and skipping to a specific point will produce a different location shifted; This is not a problem of Direct MP3 Joiner however, it is the nature of MP3s and moreso how MP3 players read the file so it isn’t so much as their fault. While it might have been nice to have reencoding in the application, it definately isn’t a requirement; We all know that reencoding can degrade the sound anyways.

One quip is the ‘Start Splitter’ button and menu item. Click on it. Oh, you haven’t bought it? Lets take you to the buy page for it. Would be nice if we could designate our own splitter after the first time we click on it and go ‘Oh, heh. Another $19.95…’ but no options for it. My other quip is that it has auto-ID3TAG stuff. Why not an auto-naming based on the Artist – Album combination if most if not all match? Also would be a nice little addition to allow setting the first-open folder for saving as the same folder as where the files came from. May not be the right folder, but has to be closer for many than ‘My Documents.’

Final Verdict

Well, if you think you will need to join MP3 files (Which is unfortunately uncommon and infrequent for many,) I would recommend getting this app now. It works smoothly and efficiently; Very professional. Is it worth $19.95? Depends on how much you plan on using it. Honestly, their Personal and Business pricing would have been more effective if they made personal a little lower for those who would really only use it once or twice a month. I would recommend this application to any who may have the need for it, even at personal price.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, February 07, 2007