Magix MP3 Deluxe 17 music library organisation software

There are plenty of free programs for playing and copying music, such as Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes, so a paid-for music program needs to have plenty going for it.

Magix MP3 Deluxe 17 turns out to have lots of features that music enthusiasts will enjoy.

It looks like iTunes but worked more like Windows Media Player – especially in the way playlists are put together – but we liked the fact that it can analyse your music collection and divide it into groups sorted by similarity, creating Autoplaylists, groups of songs based on moods (happy, sad, excited and so on).

It's a simple and surprisingly effective way to arrange songs. We also liked the DJ console. These can be complicated but by keeping it simple and including important features such as tempo matching, it's enormous fun and anyone should be able to use it.

Despite the MP3 in the name, the program supports all the popular music file formats – including Ogg Vorbis – and will manage music stored on a range of different mobile devices including phones, iPods and many more. It made light work of importing an existing music collection.

New features include a mini-player (useful for small-screen netbooks and tablet computers), and the ability to schedule recordings from Internet radio stations and then chop them into tracks. MP3 Deluxe can also record anything played through the computer and it includes a an editing program that allows users to clean up audio files – for example ones copied from record or tape with scratches or hiss.

There are 19 presets for different styles of music (including one to liven older tracks) and it can find and delete duplicate songs and edit tags.

It's not perfect though. The program window didn't resize smoothly, it seemed to make the computer run slower and some of the links to new music sites are useless.

If you are happy with how your music collection is ordered, give it a miss, but anyone struggling to organise a large collection should have a look at MP3 Deluxe 17.