Download.com Review of Helium Music Manager

Helium Music Manager is a music tagger, renamer, cataloguer, browser, playlist manager and report creator. It can catalogue, edit and play the most common music formats (MP3, Ogg, WMA, iTunes M4A, FLAC, APE and MPC) as well as standard Audio CDs. Helium fully supports the major tagging standards including ID3 v2, APE2, Vorbis, WMA, Lyrics3 v2 and iTunes tags. Catalogue your entire digital music collection and audio CD collection with just a few clicks, regardless which media the files are stored on.

Use the new built in Music Information Browser to navigate through your music collection in an intuitive manner by means of a Web style user interface. Helium facilitates the structuring and searching of your favorite music by using the contents stored in the tags. Avoid manual typing; download tag information from various sources on the Internet (CDDB, Amazon.com, AllMusic, Discogs to mention a few). Download album art, artist pictures, track data, biographies, and lyrics.

Download.com Review of Helium Music Manager

All the buttons and windows can be overwhelming, but Helium Music Manager offers some valuable functions. It burns CDs from audio files on your PC. It includes a full-fledged audio player, Radon, which supports playlists. You can tag albums by type including bootleg, soundtrack, EP, and compilation, although first you have to select all the tracks in the album folder. The powerful tag editor and search engine support a variety of tagging formats.

It's not all good news, though. The confusing program installation prompts you to install MSXML files, opening up a separate installer window. You can't rip CD tracks. Gracenote CDDB hits a sour note with a registration that requires a username, password, and e-mail address. The nag screen appears at start-up and exit, reminding you of how many of the 15 allowed uses you have left. Still, people who have a lot of digital music on their PCs may find Helium Music Manager quite helpful.