Hi again,

the latest news from the Vendor is that there is a bug in the program indeed and that is why the version has been locked again recently. Zortam Corporation is really sorry for the situation.

Good news is we will have a rerun soon for GOTD users to have the full-functioning Zortram MP3 Media Studio Pro back.

Please follow our blog to be informed about the date.


Regards,
GOTD team

Hello everybody,

we have contacted Zortam Corporation on this issue and hope for a quick reply.

We will be back to you as soon as there is an answer.

Sorry for the inconvenience.
GOTD Project team

I installed Zortam on thew installation day. It shows as registered and as PRO. However, When I try to use the "find duplicate MP3" function I'm told that I must upgrade to the Pro version!!!

seems to be a striped down version, only a few options are avalilable.

I downloaded it and it seemed to work great for the one day, Aug 13. Now it says I have to upgrade and it does not work. Whats up?

Dawn(63):
I have the same problem. I guess it's not really free after all.

I was actually enjoying this program, even though the only real reason I wanted it was to find and delete duplicate files and, though it certainly found them, it seemed to be having difficulties deleting them. Even at that, I was willing to try it some more, possibly changing the settings, to see if it was actually capable of what it claimed.

Only 2 days after installing it, I get a message saying that if I want to "Continue to use this FEATURE", I would have to upgrade to (BUY) the Pro version. What a scam! According to the information above, this was supposed to be the Pro version, complete with the ability to find duplicate files.

Not a happy camper. If anyone at the company is interested in rectifying this situation, please let me know! Otherwise, this will be uninstalled and reflects badly not just on the company, but on GOTD. Shame on Zortam.

I downloaded and installed as per directions and now two days later it is telling me to buy the software. There was no registration code in the zip and no other activation information. Can someone help?

ARGH! The stupid thing messed up all of the tags for my MP3s! Has anyone else had this problem? *pulls out hair because she doesn't know what anything is until she listens to it and finds out for herself*

----
Examples:
----

This Machine, Julien-K, TRIPLE THREAT Sonic Heroes Vocal Trax =
Sh, Sh, Sh

Un-Gravitify, Cashell, Sonic Riders Shooting Star Story Zero Gravity Tracks =
01 un, 01 un, 01 un

Makenai ai Ga Kitto Aru, Yukie Nakama, One More Chance =
Yukie nakama, Yukie nakama, Yukie nakama

#36, taylor, and maybe some others with vague comments about it not starting, open Control Panel, System, Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows, and add the executable to the Data Execution Prevention exception list.

Primitive compared to MediaMonkey or foobar. Missing features, such as organization. Doesn't recognize all my file types. Slow scanning a library. When I canceled a lib scan it just locked up, had to be terminated via taskmanager, only to discover that stuff done to that point was not saved. Might be OK for someone just getting started, for the first couple weeks. Then get a bigger hammer

#18 is spot on - Media Monkey is an excellent freeware alternative.

.

Regarding the "light speed" matter, Kelly says:

"Other than that, you just HAD to find something to gripe about, didn’t you.Good sign that the product is solid since that’s the only thing you found that you could complain of."


I see quite a number of different complaints, Kelly. Look around, perhaps you can find someone to read them to you.

.

only mp3? oO No ogg, no flac? No discogs support, no musicbrainz? oO Crap.

Totally Awesome programme but needs a face lift to compete with others.

Yea that registration thing is kinda screwy if you look under help/about it is registered to GOTD with a code/key but if you try to input it in the reg box it is invalid....go figure. But thanks I believe I will enjoy this one.

Installed fine.
Took a couple hours to find 11,000 songs (understandable as I let it search my whole computer).
Took another hour to download ID3 info - so I canceled that which caused the program to crash.
Restarted and no song information had been saved so I only had it search my music folder for about 4,000 songs and that was considerably faster.

Program still has the purchase now link and when I chose a song to play the MP3 player says it is not freeware and is only trialware and will stop working after awhile.

So is this program not registering?

This was not stable on my Windows 7 64-bit system. It crashed twice in 30 minutes.

The auto tagging feature is terrible. It pulled in the wrong album, cover art, and/or track number for virtually everything.

The uninstall leaves a lot of garbage in the registry and the file system.

Zortam - Nice program for editing ID3 prog did what is says - I have an older p4 1 gig ram works great Thanks!.

Installed it twice and it still says it's unregistered with no info from GAOTD or any comments as to where to find the registration code.

In about 10 hours I'll be deleting this software if it fails to register before then.

As for speed I have a quad core at 3.4GHz and it only loads about 100 tracks per minute. 'Normalising' is only set to 89 - doesn't what units though, so I'm guessing that's 89% which is very low for normalising... What's wrong with 99%?

Overall a useful piece of software, but still needs a LOT of work before I'd consider paying anything for it.

Tried this on Win 7 Pro, with an AMD dual core. Yes it is a bit slow (in naming the tags), but it is better for batch processing than most free software. What's worse, I ran a check with mp3tag, on Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," and came back with a few hundred choices from folk to Jpop, none of them even dealing with reapers.

With most programs, if it uses the word "security" it means the security of its own DRM copy-protection, not the security of your privacy or computer. So if a program says it won't run because a system debugger might be in use, it means they are afraid you are trying to figure out how to bypass whatever means they have of making sure you don't use it if you haven't paid for it. Simple as that. There are several very useful programs that appear to be debuggers in that context that have nothing to do with figuring out how to bypass DRM. I'm certainly not going to try to figure out which one it is and stop using it, just so I can use this program.

Well, okay, I suppose if there is some program spying on you it might be using the debug library without your knowledge. But most malware doesn't need to do that in order to steal from you.

Downloaded/installed and registered to GOTD on a Quad Core Win XP SP3 - great with no problems. I will not enter into the talk of speed of light because, if we went that fast, we'd probably turn into jello or something. LOL :) However, at this particular point, I have as yet to discover everything about the program. Suprised to find that I had more than 65 MP3s in my music box. Ran the scan and ended up with 1,142. It found recovered MP3s that consisted not only of music, but tutorials, some miscellaneous document files; a combination of art turned into music files I had created; and of all things, various programs and system MP3s. There are alot of WAV files if converted would also add to the total count of MP3. Saved the list that was presented into a CSV file for a spreadsheet. So in all, what I downloaded to see what everyone was talking about, will in fact be a keeper for me. BTW, I like the player, the music was very good. Some could not be heard and I think that was due to the type of data recorded. Thank you GOTD and Zortam, another program to explore. Have a nice day everyone.

Thanks Speedo, for the tip about Lavasoft - i couldn't understand why, when I hit "setup" it went straight to "activated" popup without any program installation until I read your post. Disabled Ad-Aware and it installed fine!

"Speed of light" indeed... I started a scan of my drives at about 9 a.m.; it's now been scanning for an hour and a half and hasn't even finished my D: drive, let alone down to my M: drive, which has about half a terabyte of MP3s on it.
"Speed of molasses in January" is more like it.
;)
Haven't tried ANY features--because it's still scanning!

Downloaded and installed with no problems. The problem arrived after it ran. It accomplished to foul up each and every song in my collection. I cant find any of my songs in windows media player now. I dread the amount of time it will take to straighten out 79GB of music files. Arghhh!

50,000 songs at the speed of light, eh?.......AMD Athlon Dual Core 2.10Ghz with 3Gigs took 2 minutes and 42 seconds to load 945 songs....at that rate I could have made roughly 61 round trips to the moon at the speed of light.....but instead, I sat here and watched the stopwatch while the files loaded......darn.....I've always wanted to go to the moon!!

Other than that bold claim, I haven't tried the software yet.....just wanted to see what the speed of light looked like!!

If you have an extensive music library then trying today’s GOTD is probably a good idea. However, I don’t so from my perspective other than some different visualizations and batch processing capability, I see today’s GOTD as being basically no different feature wise than Windows Media Player; tagging, updating, library organization (sorting by), ripping, burning, etc. The program also has a heavy reliance on one database, the developer’s (Zortram), which I think is a disadvantage in that if the person responsible for updating that database calls in sick to go out partying, well....

#19 Luis P – “If the “Contents” of the library changes, a dialog box is displayed to warn you, but the word contents is misspelled as “contents”.

- I hate to burst your bubble but contents is spelled c-o-n-t-e-n-t-s.

#21 Windowsexplorer – “I get a review of this product that would rival Ashraf’s”

- My apologies, however, that’s not really saying too much.

I ran it as administrator yet it still says register now and the code and key are blank what did I do wrong?
Donna

This product is based on the LAME mp3 encoder and not the commercial encoder from Fraunhofer. While LAME does well above 192k, it fails below that bitrate. ACC is better than either, but since the player here doesn't support any other format the point is moot.
Mp3Gain (another part of the program) adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding. This is done while loading the library. So your entire library gets "normalized" without you knowing.
AKRip from sourceforge is the ripper portion of the program. The developer stopped work on it in 2001 as there were increasing numbers of people using his product without proper licensing.
I'll say no thank you.

Don't tie the menu select window to the upper left corner of the primary monitor. Users like me who use multiple monitors (3) have the application on one monitor and are stuck with the menu select window on a different screen, which is far from convenient. Allow the menu select window to open on the same monitor as the application.

installed it on my machine and it found all my songs quickly, but it is now asking me to register it . when i downloaded the file from gotd i did not have the regestration info. can anyone help?

Installed on HP running Vista. As soon as I try to run it I get Zortam Mp3 Media Studio has stoped working. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

I personally don't require heck of a lot from my mp3 player, but I wanted to check this one out.

the bad I've noticed so far:
-only mp3s
-doesn't like song names/band names with non-standard english characters (like ö and ä that exist in other languages)
-crashed the first time I ran it
-for whatever reason the zortham name at the top of the program window keeps flashing. Not harmful, just creepy.

good:
-it actually finds some of the lyrics of the songs that I have :)
-plays mp3s (well duh)
-updates the file info etc at a pretty decent speed (~500 files in 1 minute).

running windows XP SP3. very old computer.

Installed on windows 7 64bit OS...Installed fine, but it won't open....
Re-started PC and still won't load....

>Load 50000 Mp3′s and more with the speed of light

No it's not. Computers run at the speed of light so it's very technically true.

Other than that, you just HAD to find something to gripe about, didn't you. Good sign that the product is solid since that's the only thing you found that you could complain of.

Positive:
Install was without problems on Windows 7 32bit and his is also fast enough.

Negative:
No unicode support. Due to this many of my mp3 files are inaccessible by this program.

Better alternative:
Media Monkey and WinAmp.

Hi,

Sorry about the phrase "speed of lite". I guess all of us knows that is not possible :(.
So it is just impression about speed of the program.

Regards,

The Zortam Team.

winamp sucks, I installed and uninstalled three different times, each time saying I didn't have "direct x" appropriate for the app. I had the current direct x installed, but the shoutcast video would not play at all. winamp is junk.

Can't play music from network destination ( like NAS ), it's necessery copy music over network on local disk, this app not for me.

Well now. I am not going to get into how much music I have. Installed without any problems,,big plus. Easy to understand,,big plus.. Slower then my SwiftEliteSolutions program($499),,,big minus. It does not and will not ever a load or transfer at the speed of light. I was expecting it to be slow,,lol,, but it was comparably slower then Tricerasoft Swift. It takes Swift Elite 1.5 hours to load my libiary into player,,hint,hint , I have just a few mp3's. When I ran a trial transfer I pulled the plug @ 2.75 hours and it had not even loaded half of my libiary as of yet. We're talking somewhere around 400,000 or more files still left hanging in limbo. I can't have that with my libiary. It seems to work other then being slow. I have already spent far too many months(13 to be exact) going through my libiary straighting out all my tags and removing incomplete,invalid, dupliciates and whatnot files to even know if it really picked anything out. Far too time consuming at this point. As far as WinAmp,MTU (converts everything and then only plays in itself),PCDJ (limited to 200,00 files),MonkyMedia,Itunes(CPU hog) and a list of other programs. They all seem to work within what they can handle(not much) Tricera Soft Swift Elite Solutions will handle whatever microsoft will handle as far as files (4,000,000,000 or more) without loss and it has the lowest CPU usage of any program available to date. Yes it costs $499 but if music is your life it is well worth it. You can try it free for 10 days and see for yourself how great it truly is. Then you will have something to base your comparisons of other media programs on in the future. Don't take this wrong as I am sure some of you will. There are times when you get what you pay for. This is one of them. Don't expect to make a silk purse out of a Pig's ear, cause it ain't happening. This program would probably be fine for the average unknowing user.But for me,,well,, it doesn't stand tall enough to rate a close third . deleted . Thank you any way

Would people please get off the "speed of light" comments. Surely a "SALES" plug shouldn't stir such startling paranoia amongst the natives.

Why don't you all write to the newspapers, radio and TV stations etc and complain about the outlandish claims advertisers make about products there... 'amazing' 'great' 'weight/fat loss' 'grow hair' etc.
... or maybe you all think these claims are true and acceptable.

Installed on XP Pro Sp3 without problem.
•Load 50000 Mp3′s and more with the speed of light
It's impossible as electricity travels "only" near speed of light.
However after 4 hrs only found 5700 out of some 32000+ titles...

Downloaded, installed, and activated fine on Vista x32. Program is feature-rich, easy to use, and efficiently does as it says - so 2 thumbs up for this program - thanks, GOTD and Zortam.

Two good freeware options (for those who miss today's offer):

Jaangle

Music Bee

Kate, thanks for the advice re Media Monkey. That folks often recommend other available free software makes GOTD a "first thing in the morning" place to look.

Loaded and installed fine - but when I attempted to run it, even as an administrator, I received the message: "For security purposes, this program will not run while system debuggers are active. Please remove or disable the system debugger before trying to run this program again."

As I do not know what "system debuggers" they are referring to, I am stumped!

Can anyone help?

TIA,
Sparky

I think this is one of the few marketing claims that could be taken to task. As it is a computer program and since quantum computers are not yet ready to use, It is impossible for a program in the current environment to reach the speed of light as computers still rely on electrons which are somewhat slower than light aka photons. As they say it's all relative.

tHANKS TO ALL OF YOU! By adding all your comments together, I get a review of this product that would rival Ashraf's. So pat yourselves on the back a few times for having produced such a helpful multisourced analysis of this software. Thanks again and keep up the good work.

Downloaded OK, but I am kind of used to that. GAOTD.com usually works.

Installed OK, although the installer clashed with my Lavasof Ad-aware pro. As usual, I had to close the Ad-aware-application in order to install the program. You really should look into this, guys. Closing down some of my protection to install GAOTD-programs is not good.


The program itself...
Nowhere NEAR the speed of light for scanning MP3-library.

Default setting is "update and overwrite ALL tags in library". Not smart, most of us are quite happy with most of our tags.

Had to stop the scanning after scanning 4000 songs (have more than 100.000, but it did seem like overkill to scan them all for this test).

Selecting a song for playing, opened the player in a new window. Why not just put the player at the bottom of the program? New window... Bah...


Decided to try the autotag-feature. (Roy Orbison, I drove all night, from 101 power ballads).
I got Roy Orbison, I drove all night, King of Hearts-album, correct lyrics and the cover from Bee Gees.

And no question as to whether I WANTED to change the tag, if I agreed that the suggested title/performer etc was correct. It just changed it. (But I'll give you this, it did find the WRONG information very fast, and updated the tag with wrong information very fast).


OK, they DO tell you the autotag-function is not 100%, and you DO have the option of choosing what parts of the tag you want to update.


For my part, I might try to download LYRICS to all my songs as a novelty. But I am not sure the rest of the information would survive the updates, so I'll pass.



Free alternatives:
Winamp (www.winamp.com/) for playing the music (the best player I have found when it comes to handling +100.000 songs in all formats)


Winamp for editing tags. The gracenote-database may not find all songs, and may not allways be right, but YOU can choose whether you update the tags or not AFTER you see what winamp/gracenote suggests. And if you do what I do, all albums in their own folders, sorted by artist, it is pretty easy to see when winamp is right and when it is wrong/did not identify correctly.


Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) for manual bulk editing of tags, adding cover-photos IN the file, adding or removing comments in bulk etc.


MusicIP Mixer as a plug-in for winamp to generate automatic playlist based on what you are listening to at the moment (Better than Winamps built-in solution. Google my name and "musicip" if you want it)

Installed successfully on N450/1GB Win7 Starter Netbook.
- Was able to add files on network to its library.
- Love option to set tags fields order, and have it replace all or only blank tags.
- Option to replace underscores with spaces
- Can write ID3v1&V2 tags.
- Can preview how tags will look on (all) files before you confirm.
- Can connect to multiple sites to download the best Album graphics and title.
- Shows lyrics along with Album art (when available).
- Good sound quality playback (to Sony MDR-EX75)
- Can start automatically with Reboot (I think this is default)
- Has visualization plug in that can show Album art and lyrics.
- Accepts hotkeys (ff, rw, next, (etc.))
- CPU (N450) utilization is less than 20% when playing music.
BUGS/Enhancement Requests
- Had to exit and reboot for application to behave.
- If the "Contents" of the library changes, a dialog box is displayed to warn you, but the word contents is misspelled as "contents".
- Automatically start with Windows boot should not be the default.
- Player icons on Main Windows are very distorted. Could not tell FF from RW.
- Clicking the Configure icon on the Visualizer causes stops current song for a few seconds, and then restarts it from the beginning.
Visualizer icons need labels (at least when you move cursor over the icon).
- Can't delete just one item from Player playlist. Right-click or icon.
- Found a SECOND "Visualization" window. This one does have icons labeled for cursor hovering but doesn't allow Full screen mode or auto hide of icons.

Final Review:
This software has some real potential. With a plethora of options and report capabilities, this could be a great way to keep your music organized and play them too. However, there are so many options that are not fully functional or "mysterious" in operation that it is going to be a little frustrating to use. The GUI and operation of it are not intuitive enough for everyone's taste.

At this time I can't recommend this product as a finished solution, but I am sure interested in seeing what they come up with in the next release.