Free LAME MP3 Conversion in MediaMonkey

I've spent years searching for a good music player on Windows. Years ago J. River's Media Jukebox, which later became Media Center, "just worked". Then came the day a version started modifying my music files. Even though I had been a very early paying customer, my complaints were met with "updrade to the new version". So I switched to Mozilla Songbird—multiple times. The early versions were incomplete and buggy. The later versions were incomplete and buggy. Songbird as well started changing my file modification date and no one would respond. Then I found MediaMonkey.

MediaMonkey manages large databases of music files, and doesn't muck around with tags and other info unless you want it to. In fact, it even keeps a list of attributes it things should be updated, and you can update them if you want—but only if you explicitly ask. It never goes around modifying your files behind your back. It works smoothly. And best of all, it's free.

The free version has few limitations. Perhaps the biggest is that, after 30 days, it will no longer allow manual conversion of files to MP3 unless you upgrade to the paid version. I need to convert my OGG files to MP3 to play on my Nokia C3-01, which is behind the times when it comes to supported music formats (not to mention the gasping Series 40 it uses).

If you can affort MediaMonkey, I fully encourage you to upgrade. But if you're running short on cash, you can get free MP3 conversion on MediaMonkey simply by downloading the latest LAME DLL from a site such as RareWares, and replacing the lame_enc.dll used by MediaMonkey with the one in the distribution. Long live MediaMonkey. Long live LAME. Best of luck, OGG---we hardly knew you, unfortunately.