It has been a while since I have come across such an amazingly useful utility as ‘Super’. It is a free program (as in free beer - I don’t know if it is open source), that its creators describe in this way:

If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file, without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER © is all you need. It is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click.

SUPER © is totally FREE to download and to use. It plays & converts very fast full length movies to any other format without any time or function limitation. NO trial or evaluation version of SUPER © but one unique fully working version.

SUPER © does NOT require any additional external codec to be installed, absolutely nothing. Necessary codecs are built in!

SUPER © can also play and save Internet Media Streams with different protocols ( mms:// rtsp:// http://)

Please read the changelog and the following details to see how: SUPER © does for FREE what other encoders CAN’T do for money.

If it sound like a bunch of hype, I thought so too. The website itself gave me a bit of pause. It seemed amateurish and I felt like I was walking into some scam. I downloaded the program about a month ago and poked around for a while. It seemed ok, so I left it on my computer looking for a reason to use it.

Yesterday, I got that reason. A friend needed a song from a certain pageant for a project she was working on. She had looked on iTunes and several other music sites, but was not able to find the song.

I went to work and even signed up for Rhapsody (I won’t link to it since they zorked me off in several ways during the sign-up, install, running, and especially canceling of the service when I had to call a customer service rep “Linda” who was probably in Bangalore, India over a crackly line - but I digress). I had not luck.

I finally had a brainstorm. I would see if I could find a video of a pageant on one of the video sites. I quickly found a video that included the exact song I needed. I decided that instead of just sending the link, I would try out a couple of utilities. First, I grabbed the video off the site using the Ook extension of Firefox. This extension allows me to download video from video sites as long as they exist as either flv, mov, wmp, or swf files. I was able to grab it with a problem.

Once I had the video on my hard-drive, I was able to drag-n-drop it into Super. Once there, I was able to select an output. In this case I opted to ignore the video and simply rip it as an mp3 file. If I had been thinking, I should have ripped it to a wav file since I needed to use Audacity to pull-out the minute of music from file. The way I did it, however, was to rip the mp3 at 320 kbps and then compress that down to 128 after the final edit.

In all of this, I was able to use the ‘Super’ utility easily. The interface is intuitive and clean. There is a lot of information on the screen, yet I had no problems getting the job done.

Since yesterday, I have experimented with the utility a couple more times, I have continued to be pleased with the ease of use and the high quality output. I recommend you take a look and keep it in your ‘utility arsenal’. You’ll need it, it’s just a matter of when.

Download Super here.

Tags: Resources, Technical, Evangelization, Recording, Utility, Firefox | No Comments »