Boy, do I ever wish we'd found out about THIS tool last month, when a friend needed us to download a music file from the net, burn a CD and we couldn't make it work. Why? Because we couldn't convert it into the format that our CD burner required. Well, better late than never, and in this case, it's been well worth the wait.

This month's very hot tool is Blaze Media Pro , a super powerful, all-in-one media player, playlist (including full screen video), converter, editor, recorder, and much more. It's the winner of the Shareware Industry Award for 2002, 2003, and experts expect it will be accredited with the award for 2004 as well.

So, what can it do? Well, a better question might be what can't it do, since it does just about everything you could want with music or video by recording, capturing, editing, batch processing and much more. Its features include audio and data CD/DVD recording, video capture, video creation/combining/extraction, video editing, batch video processing, media management, audio merge, MusicID audio recognition, lyrics search, and more. The audio content of video files can be extracted and saved to sound files, and frames can also be extracted to images files in batch mode. Video files can also be created from still frame images and/or other videos.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, we're going to quote directly from their website to tell you just what kind of a tool this really is. "Supported conversions include: CD, MP3, MP2, WMA, OGG, WAV, AIF, VOX, MPC, G.72x, AU, RAW to MP3/WMA/OGG/WAV; CD burning from WAV/MP3/WMA/OGG, WAV and MP3 Compression, and two-way conversions among MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI, WMV, Multi-Page TIFF, and FLIC. MPEG conversion options are available for VCD, SVCD, and DVD compliant output. The CD Converter module provides a CDDB auto-save feature, which enables track title, artist, and album information to be dynamically downloaded from the Internet CD Database and used when converting audio CD tracks to WAV, MP3, WMA, or OGG. This feature is fully configurable to use as much or little of the information desired in any preferred order. Of course, this feature can also be disabled for those who do not wish to be connected to the Internet while converting CD tracks.

Visual audio editing allows you to open, create, and save audio files in any of the supported formats (can also save any portion of a loaded file to disk as a new file); display audio data waveform (Zoom Full, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Zoom Vertical); play audio files or any portion of the files (Play, Pause, Stop); record audio data from a microphone or any other available input device; edit audio files visually (Cut, Copy, Delete Selection, Crop, Trim, Paste, Paste From File, Mix, Mix From File); apply various effects (Amplify, Compressor, Delay, Equalize, Fade In and Fade Out, Flanger, Invert, Normalize, Phaser, Reverb, Reverse, Shrink, Silence, Stretch, Vibrato); apply different filters to any selected portion of audio files (Band Pass Filter, High Pass Filter, High Shelf Filter, Low Pass Filter, Low Shelf Filter, Notch Filter); insert noise or silence into audio files; Insert information into audio files (Album, Artist, Copyright, Genre, Title, Year); complete, multi-level undo and redo capabilities; advanced, and much more. The following audio formats are supported by the audio editing and playback module: WAV PCM; Compressed WAV (ADPCM, GSM, DSP, A-LAW, U-LAW, ALF2, and more); MP3 (MPEG Layer-3); MP2 (MPEG Layer-2); OGG Vorbis; VOX (Dialogic ADPCM); WMA (Windows Media Audio); RAW (PCM, A-LAW, U-LAW); CDA (Audio CD Tracks).

Video editing is available for AVI (uncompressed), AVI (compressed using any available codec), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, and ASF. Comprehensive video editing operations are provided (delete frame, delete selection, crop, resize, rotate, mirror, flip, trim, adjust audio volume, etc.). In addition, an extensive list of over 30 effects and color adjustment operations allow for powerful video enhancement and alternation. WAV, WMA, and MP3 audio files can be inserted into the video or extracted from the video; and BMP, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, RAS, PPM, TGA, and TIF are the supported image formats that can be inserted or extracted. Most video processing operations can also be performed in batch mode on a list of video files using the software's Batch Video Processor."

There. Are you impressed? Well, we certainly are. As you probably know, we don't recommend a tool without testing it ourselves, which is exactly what we've done. And we can tell you, unequivocably, that it works! It's quick, easy, and unbelievably impressive. Best of all, it's amazingly inexpensive....as in $50. That's right; we're not kidding. So check them out, and then do like we did. If you're serious about any type of audio or video conversion, you really can't live without Blaze Media Pro.

Current Version: 5.03 - File Size: 12.0 MB - Developer: Mystik Media OS: Windows 98 SE/Me/NT/2000/XP, DirectX 8.1 Price: $50.00