Blaze Media Pro – The Swiss Army Knife

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Blaze Media Pro from Mystik Media has been traditionally a powerhouse among Multimedia toolkits. So how does the latest version fare? Lets have a look.

Interface

At first glance Blaze Media Pro looks like a standard Media player with a Playback and a Playlist window. A closer inspection reveals the plethora of options presented by the software. The simple interface works very well. Instead of overwhelming a user by presenting an all-in-one confusing and cluttered interface Blaze simply presents all the options. Clicking on each of them opens their individual workspaces. Even a novice should find working with Blaze fairly easy. And in case Gray isnt your colour you can always change the appearence using skins.

Blaze Media Pro

Features

Now coming to the what actually Blaze can do – and trust me it can do a lot. First I will deal with it’s Audio tools and then move onto Video tools.

Audio :

Audio Editor : Like most other Audio Editors Blaze displays the waveform of the audio file and allows basic operations like Cut, Paste and Copy. Besides that it has a number of filters like Compressor, Equalizer, Flanger, Normalizer. Other advanced filters include Notch (removed range of specified frequencies), Band Pass (changes a single selected frequency band), Low Pass/High Pass(blocks all frequencies above/below the selected value) Low Shelf/High Shelf (boosts/reduces gain of the selected frequency).

Audio Converter : Blaze includes a CD-Ripper as well as audio converter. The Audio Converter can output to MP3, OGG, WAV and WMV. One notable exclusion is AAC. The CD-Ripper is capable of automatically filling in relevant tags thanks to CDDB support.

Audio Merger : Just as the name suggests this tool merges several audio files into one audio file. The audio file formats supported for this option are WAV, MP3, WMA, and OGG. You can also use audio from CD tracks and video files.

Audio Recorder : The audio recorder supports recording from the Mic as well as from the sound card. Once again output formats supported are WAV, MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis.

Audio Tagger : Blaze also includes a very basic Audio Tag Editor that allows you to change ID3 Tag for MP3 files. However, this isn’t one of the strong points of Blaze. Only very basic fields are available and you need to fill in all the data yourself. The lack of support for online tag databases is surprising.

Lyrics Finder : Blaze also includes a Lyrics Finder, but once again given the lack of options I found this to be a pretty useless tool. Even popular songs like “Seasons in the Sun” didn’t return any results. Moreover, once you find the lyric you were looking for there isn’t any way to embed it into the mp3 file.

Burn to CD : Blaze Media Pro converts MP3, MP2, WMA, OGG, WAV, AU, and SND files to CD Audio format for normal CD player access.

Video :

Video Editor : Blaze features a basic Video editor that would meet the requirements of most standard users. Standard options like cropping, trimming resizing and text overlay are present along with a host of filters like Aging (imparts a retro feel to a movie), Deblocking, Ghost (makes moving objects invisible), Motion Blur and Streak.

DVD Ripper : The DVD Ripper included is extremely simple to use and supports DIVX, MPEG and WMV output formats. Disappointingly support for xvid and x.264 codecs as well as the Matroska (mkv) container is missing. But then Divx is the codec of choice for most users.

Video Capture : This tool allows you to capture video using any video device available on your system. AVI and WMV containers are supported. You can choose any codec that is installed on your system.

Audio Extractor : This tool extracts audio from any supported video file.

Video Encoder : The Video Converter supports a number of output formats including AVI (all codecs installed on your computer are supported), WMV, MPEG (MPEG -1 and MPEG -2 – standard, vcd and svcd), MOV (MPEG4, H.261, H.263, H.264, Sorenson3 and more), 3GP (MPEG-4 and H.263), PSP (MPEG-4 and H.264), MP4, FLV and SWF. The only notable omission is Matroska Video (mkv). Blaze can accept as input any of these formats thus it also doubles up as a Flash Converter and MOV Converter.

Blaze Media Pro – Video Converter

Video Decompiler : This is an interesting tool that extracts all the frames present within the selected video file, or any defined set of frames or time range, as single images in the following formats: BMP, EMF, GIF, J2K, JPG, PCX, PNG, RAS, TGA, TIF, and WMF.

Video Constructor : Video Constructor performs the opposite task i.e. it creates video from selected images.

Burn to CD/DVD : Blaze can burn AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (DVD compliant and non-DVD compliant), and WMV files to DVD-R and DVD+R discs.
VCD/SVCD creation is also supported. You can also burn media as Data Disc.

Blaze Media Pro can actually do a lot more. The full list of features is available here.

So is it worth it?

When you consider everything that Blaze Media Pro is capable of doing, it emerges as a clear winner. It’s a CD Ripper, Audio converter, Audio and Video Recorder, Audio and Video Editor, DVD Ripper, Video Converter and more. Fifty Bucks is normally quite a steep price for a software. However, Blaze’s feature list justifies the price tag. It’s a complete multimedia suite – a Swiss Army Knife for all your multimedia related needs.

Download Blaze Media Pro (19.2 MB)
Official Website
Platforms Supported : Windows 98 SE / ME / 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista
License : Shareware
Cost : $50.00
Version Reviewed : 8.02