MP3 Passport for NT/95

Play Access Sort Search Parse Organize and Retrieve Tutor
Welcome to MP3 passport site (formerly known as MP3 Compilation player)... This software is designed to make .MP3 files managment as easy as possible. Have fun with Mpeg Audio Layer 3, the best audio compression system.

1. Description

MPEG Audio Layer 3 (MP3) is a powerful compression algorithm that can reduce your CD music by a factor of 10 to 12 without any audible loss. Imagine you can copy more than 10 Audio CD on a single CDR that costs less than $10. On an standard CD, you can store at most 74 min of CD quality sound, but with MP3, you can store more than 14 hours of CD quality sound on a single CD. Therefore, you probably need a better way of organizing your music than track1, track2,... That's the purpose of MP3 Passport.

Note that MP3 Passport doesn't actually play the MP3 files by itself. It uses the winplay3 MPEG Audio Layer-3 software only decoder (or any other player that accept .m3u playlist files). You can freely download Winplay3 and the MP3 encoder/decoder from the Fraunhofer site as well as you can learn more about MPEG Audio Layer 3.

MP3 Passport is a particular program that I created to satisfy my needs of a good interface to organize and playback MP3 files. It turned out that my tastes are shared with many of my friends, so I guess you may also like it. The only constraint is that you have to create "descript.ion" files with the tittle of each song and some other information. But once this is done, you benefits from all the MP3 Passport playback features that Winplay3 do not provide. For instance :

Winplay3 is still a 16bit executable and it doesn't support long files names very well.
You cannot open files from many directories and/or drives at the same time.
The random play option is not working correctly.
There is no search function.
Winplay3 is totally inappropriate to manage structurally organized set of MP3 files
...

2. Snapshots

This web site is also the user manual of the program. But since a quick look tells more than 10 pages of text, let's begin with some snapshots.

Sample of the main window
Sample of the main window

3. User manual

Just click here to read the user manual

4. Download MP3 Passport 1.1a

4.1. What's new

Release 1.2...

Added the Time Display properties.
Fixed a bug in the replay function (from the traybar) with playlists.
Fixed a graphic problem : on some computers some components were not displayed in the right size.

Release 1.1a...

Support for multiple main "descript.ion" files on different disk/directory was added. Because of that, the program doesn't popup an error box when the main "descript.ion" file is not found. This allows you to setup removable media path (i.e. cd-rom) even if the media is not in the drive at program startup.
Search for Winplay Path in the registry on first use.
You can now sort the album tree and minimize the program window on play.
Added the traybar support.

Click here to download release 1.2 (282.112 bytes).

Note : To all of you who requested the implementation of some automatic function to create descript.ion files, please be patient. It will be included in the next major release due to ship this summer. Meanwhile, you can download MP3 Passport's companion (13.343 bytes) by Moebius which lets you ... guess what... automatically create descript.ion files.

5. About release 2.0

I am currently working on the new release of MP3 Passport. This new release should be a major update, but I have no more time to continue it now (I have a LOT of work with my last year project at school). The final release should be available only this summer, during the holidays.

At the menu, you will find :

Command line options will be included to allow easy and customizable batch and autorun.inf invocation.
You can forget the old descript.ion files system. The program will still recognize them for compatibility reasons, but a new one-file auto-generated database format will be implemented with :

Extra fields (release date, composer, artist, category, mood,...)
No hierarchical limit (you can have as much depth level as you want)
Auto-Generated and in-place update/modify.
You will be able to add link to the full text of the songs (lyrics) and display them in MP3 Compilation by a single click.

More sort/playlist selection options based on the new fields of the database.
The playlists will still be created in the playlist window, but you would play and view them in a third PlayList tab via the same kind of tree view as the main window.
At last a decent search function with auto-generated searchbase.
Resizable form with automatic redesign of the components size and position.
ID3 Tag support
Many other minor enhancement.

However, I you really want the current "work in progress" 2.0 beta release, let me know it and I will send it to you. Ask me so only if you're a day-to-day user of my soft, because I had no time to make a full explanation of the features and some options may still change in the final product.

Have fun and don't forget to send me feed back. ;-)
Any "good" suggestion will be implemented in a future release if possible.

See you, Arcadian.

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MP3 Passport (C) 1996, 1997 Arcadian.
Last updated : April 18, 1997