River Past Audio Converter Reviewer's Comments

River Past offers some great features, like the ability to extract sound from CDs and video files, that helped propel it near the top of our list. But, in the end, it was a combination of great music format compatibility and good support information that really made River Past stand out among the other audio converters. That’s why we gave it our “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award.”

River past did a great job converting common music download files like MP3, WMA and AAC. However, we did find that it had some problems when converting to OGG format, although it worked better for some files than for others. Minor glitches like this are the only things that kept River Past from taking the top slot in our list of audio converters.

River Past Audio Converter Screenshots. Click for more
       


Features Set:  

River Past is a solid product. It offers the ability to customize sample rates, bit rates and channels when converting songs, so you can control the quality and file size of your songs. River Past Audio Converter also has some useful extras. Our favorite is the ability to extract audio information from video files, and River Past can also convert CDs to MP3 or other audio files. This is very useful if you have a song or audio clip that you want to use in a Powerpoint presentation or other application because you can extract it and convert it to a compatible format.

River Past is capable of doing batch conversions and editing audio tags. This means you can add or edit the information regarding artist, album and song name for each file. It also has several options for parsing and decoding songs that can be useful for specific conversion tasks.

Input/Output:  

River Past is compatible with just about every type of sound file you will ever need to use. This program can convert 43 different file types, including MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG and AAC. We were a little frustrated by the fact that it doesn’t have a DRM removal feature like NoteBurner or TuneBite.

The number of output formats is more limited, but River Past does support the most common formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG and FLAC. As we mentioned above, we had some problems converting OGG files, but various songs reacted differently.

Ease of Use:  

River Past has a simple interface that lets you queue songs for conversion. The controls for customizing bit rate, channels and so forth is hidden at the bottom, along with the output directory. It took us a moment to find it, but it turned out to be nice that you could collapse those menus or bring them up right on screen instead of going through menus to find them.

Help/Support:  

River Past offers quite a few ways to find information on their audio converter. There is email support for complex questions, but most people will probably find the answers they need in the comprehensive FAQs, tutorials or user forums.

Summary:  

River Past is a great product that only needs to fix a few small bugs before qualifying for the top slot. It’s functionality and compatibility are good enough for any situation.