. Audio Editor

. Encoders Information

. Mp3 Cutter

Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST plug-in effects.

EAC is a new audio grabber for CD-ROM drives. The main differences between most other audio grabbers : the cost of registration is low (just a postcard and a stamp), it works with a new technology, reading audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can't be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player.

Features :
- Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
- Secure, fast and burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
- Read error and complete loss of sync detection and correction in secure modes, as far as possible
- Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions
- Normalization of extracted audio
- Support of external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction
- Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
- Automatic creation of CUE sheets for CDRWin, including all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC
- etc...

Configuration Files

Complete configuration files (not made by me)

Tutorial

Complete tutorial with screenshots

Often called a Swiss army knife of Audio, dMC  is able to :

- Convert from one format to another, just about every audio type is supported: mp3, mp4, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Monkeys Audio, FLAC and many others [Codec downloads], whilst preserving ID Tags ,
- Volume Normalize audio files,
- Windows Explorer Integration - right click Convert To & popup useful information on audio files (such as bitrate, length). 
- ID tag editing [Power Pack Option],
- Record from LPs or anything [optional Auxiliary Input install].

Latest Lame codec *** 3.6.1

Download the lame-...zip file, and extract the files "COPYING" and "lame_enc.dll" in folder ...\dBpowerAMP\Compression\Lame.

Ogg Codec *** GT3 b1

Vorbis GT3 is a quality improved version of the Vorbis 1.0 encoder. It is currently unfinished, although beta versions are already available.

It is a drop-in replacement for standard oggenc, supporting the same options. Tuning was done for quality levels 5 to 10.

PSYCLE is a music Creation Studio, using a tracker interface.
It can be used to make any type of music, using either its native plugins (synths and effects), VST2 plugins (synths and effects), internal sampler and effects and .wav files through the sampler.

you can see some screenshots on the docs page
Notes are entered in patterns, where lots of different commands (plugins related or general) can be used to change any plugin (native or VST, synths and effects) parameters at any time.
The patterns are then organized in the sequencer.
This sequence is the song and can be saved in .psy format, but also to .wav (this allows to compress the song in .mp3 or .ogg formats for example).

EncSpot is an application which reports useful facts about your mp3 collection.
The most famous feature is its ability to guess which encoder was used to encode each file. It will also give you a general idea of the audio quality of the file.
For files encoded with Lame (and that's what everyone's using, right?) EncSpot can read the 'Lame Tag' which gives detailed information on the switches used when the file was encoded.

. A shareware version ($19.99) exists with more features.

KaraFun is a full karaoke software for PC.
It's based on a powerful animation engine and contains its own editor.
Even if it's supporting KAR files (midi), it's planned to work with digital files (MP3 for example) and it introduces the new KFN file format.

Player
- Direct 3D animation engine
- Play KFN and KAR midi files
- Playlist management
- Fullscreen or windowed display

Editor
- Real-time render
- KAR and KOK file import
- Support MP3, OGG, MID, KAR, S3M, MOD, IT and XM files

TPlayer is a free music player and mixer for mp3, wma, ogg, and wav audio files.

TPlayer's main features are:
- Adjustable Automix Settings based on audio data to adapt to different music genres.
- Four different Automix sort options.
- One click manual mix and fade out options: Cut, Fade 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 seconds.
- Dual independent players with real time Vu meters or Waveform display and Peak indicators.
- Hierarchal explorer like Songlist grouped by artists, albums and songs.
- Drag&Drop Playlist Editor: reorder, save and load playback sequence.
- Multiple sound cards support for pre-listening on monitor speakers or headphones.
- Play, Pause, Stop, To Monitor/Master speakers and Set Start/End position buttons.
- Volume, Balance, Crossfader, Pitch and Seek slider bars.

mp3DirectCut is a small tool for editing MPEG audio directly. You can remove parts, change the volume, split files or copy regions to new files. All without the need to decompress your MP3 into PCM/WAV. This saves work, encoding time and disk space. And there is no quality loss through any re-compressions.

Trim your CD grabbings or directly to MP3 recorded vinyls or tapes. Cut favorite songs from long MP3 radio or live recordings. Make multiple cuts and fades. mp3DirectCut is very fast and gives you extensive control over your MP3s.
- Several prelisten functions
- MP3 visualisation and VU meter
- Easy navigation
- Fading, volume setting, normalizing
- Pause detection
- Direct recording of MP3 (ACM and Lame encoder supported)
- Layer 2 support
- ID3v1.1 support
- Cue Sheet support

foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include :

- Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player
- Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3
- Audio formats supported through official addons: MPEG-4 AAC, FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
- Full Unicode support on Windows NT
- ReplayGain support
- Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
- Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
- Highly customizable playlist display
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts
- Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)

Take the special version, it's the most complete, have recent updates of plugins, and choose the components you need.

foobar Best Addons

Best plugins, categorized, and some foobar related sites.

foobar Configuration

My configurations files for Quick Tag and WWW services plugins, and my formatting strings for foobar, OSD, Text writer plugins,... which add useful informations and a clearer display.

foobar Wiki

Complete guide on foobar

Tired of reaching for your volume knob every time your mp3 player changes to a new song?
MP3Gain analyzes and adjusts mp3 files so that they have the same volume.

MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear.
Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

VorbisGain *** 0.34 Open Source

VorbisGain is a utility that uses a psychoacoustic method to correct the volume of an Ogg Vorbis file to a predefined standardized loudness.

It is meant as a replacement for the normalization that is commonly used before encoding. Although normalization will ensure that each song has the same peak volume, this unfortunately does not say anything about the apparent loudness of the music, with the end result being that many normalized files still don't sound equally loud. VorbisGain uses psychoacoustics to address this deficiency. Moreover, unlike normalization, it's a lossless procedure which works by adding tags to the file. Additionally, it will add hints that can be used to prevent clipping on playback. It is based upon the ReplayGain technology.

The end result is that playback is both more convenient and of higher quality compared to a non-VorbisGain'ed file.