Sonnox Codex Toolbox £35 - worth it?

Steve,
 
Honest question, honest reply...
 
No, you do not need this unless you want to throw away the price of admission. You can do this all for free. Think I might have posted this before, but what the hey...
 
I'd advise to download dbPoweramp to get all the codecs you could ever want, continually updated. I registered the thing years ago so my mp3 encoder is still active. They let you keep a freeware for all other formats, but the mp3 encoder goes down after a month. Then you use the open source LAME encoder with LameXP as the front end. Covers all the bases and has the batch processing capability.
 
Respect to the Frau guys for inventing mp3, but have some reservations about how they strangled out the little guys trying to offer a free encoder for mp3.
 
My opinion...  Ages ago in the land before LAME, the Frau dudes had a monopoly if you wanted quality conversion. We used the infamous "fatboy wave" to test for potential conversion artifacts and adjusted settings accordingly to avoid garbage in the squeeze.
 
This day and age, there may or may not be any advantage to Frau over LAME, but if there is, only a bat can hear it.
 
Go for the excellent free stuff and take your girl out for the 35 yen saved.
 
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
 
http://lamexp.sourceforge.net/
 
http://lame.sourceforge.net/
 
John
 
 
 

Hi John, 
Thanks for the info.
 
When I first posted this I thought is was a new version of the Sonnox Pro version.
When I reread the info and found the comparison chart (link below) I realized it was not.
http://www.sonnox.com/pub/plugins/products/compare-codecs.htm
 
With the Pro version you can audition the different conversions which seems like it something really useful for tweaking a mix for SoundCloud or iTunes.  The Toolbox looks more like a glorified tag editor.
While the Pro version looks cool, it's not cool enough for me to shell out the approximately $430+ 
At least not at the moment.

With the exception of "real time" auditioning between full bandwidth input and compressed output most all of the most useful features of its "big brother" are there in one single, much cheaper, package. I'd use it daily in my commercial broadcast use just for the meta data alone. YMMV.

Got it simply because of the Tagging thing and real time audition , worth every penny imho .... i have soundforge but this is so more fun to use , quik ...