DBPoweramp Music Converter is a collection of tools to help with the conversion of music – either between formats, if it's music that's already on your computer, or it can help to get music off a CD in the first place.

If you need to get music onto a truculent portable player or to a friend who insists on a particular format, it's ideal.

The basic version is free and will convert between several common formats, except perhaps the most common, MP3. For that users need to pay for the Power Pack, which includes the licence to convert MP3s (although it's often thought of as free, the MP3 format is actually owned by a German organisation, and it's necessary to pay a licence fee to use it).

The Reference version, which is what we looked at, also includes a CD writer and a batch CD ripper. The ripper will automatically find track names by searching several databases. Both Windows Media Player and iTunes, the most common free ripping programs, do the same, but we've found on several occasions that the databases DB Poweramp searches are more broad, resulting in it finding matches for CDs the other two programs missed.

The other clever thing the Reference edition does is to take advantage of dual-core and quad-core processors. These have several processing units so they can effectively do more than one job at once, and here they come into their own.

Format conversion and ripping are intensive tasks, but the Music Converter efficiently uses all the processors available for the fastest results (each track gets sent to a different processor).

In use, the software is unobtrusive – there isn't even an icon to click, which can be confusing at first. Instead, when you right-click a suitable audio file, there's a DBPoweramp entry in the menu, from which you can convert the file or do other things. Once clicked, the process was simple and fast.

CD ripping was similarly easy – just select the program from the list of options that pops up when you insert a music CD. Perhaps its greatest strength is plug-ins – you can download new add-ons for all sorts of music formats, arcane or popular, giving even more flexibility, with pretty much any format we could name covered.

Windows Media Player and iTunes, along with other free programs, offer similar features, but none is as fast or efficient as DBPoweramp Music Converter.

If you often find yourself needing to convert music files, it's absolutely worth the money.