Snakebite - Convert Your Entire Music Collection to MP3 in One Easy Step

I'm an audio nut. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm a bona fide audiophile, because I don't think that my ears are "that" discriminating, but I love music, and I love software applications that deal with music. Show me a new music player, an iTunes add-on or something similar, and I'm a happy guy.

So I'm constantly looking at new multimedia software, and when I see a new program in the audio/visual section called Snakebite, well... you know I had to take a look.

Turns out that Snakebite is the name of an audio converter (to mp3, specifically), that was just released. Snakebite is described by the developer as being "an audio conversion application that can convert your entire music library to MP3 in a single step."

Not bad.

But does it really work the way it sounds? If so, that's a program I want.

Turns out, Snakebite really does work as advertised.

As mentioned, Snakebite only converts to MP3. So if you're looking for something to convert to any other format, you'd be better off with another program, like Soundconverter or Soundkonverter (for Gnome and KDE, respectively). Soundconverter can convert audio to Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC or WAV, and Soundkonverter has even more functionality.

But what makes Snakebite so nice is that it's so simple to use. Just point it to where you store your music, and the folder where you'd like your converted music to be saved, and that's it. You'll want to tell Snakebite the quality encoder you want to use (it supports bitrates of 128, 160, 192 and 256 kbit/s), but other than that, Snakebite has no preferences. Just hit the "Convert these Audio Files to MP3" button and off it goes!

As Snakebite drills into your music collection, it's looking for one thing, and one thing only... music files not encoded as you specified. So if it runs across a WMA or OGG file, it will encode it, but if it finds an already-existing MP3 file, it leaves it alone.