A product from

Functions and tools

This section contains detailed descriptions of the functions and tools in Helium Music Manager. It's meant to be a reference to learn the different features within the program.

The functions and tools are listed below:

Action Manager

The Action Manager enables you to perform several tasks at once on your files using templates.
You create templates with the built-in template editor, which you are able to reuse afterwards with a single mouse-click. There are several actions that can be performed in each template.

Add Audio CD

The Add Audio CD Wizard catalogues regular Audio CD's. The wizard is able to download track information automatically from Internet sources.

Add Files Wizard

Add your music files to the Helium Music Manager library to enable browsing, tagging, renaming, report creating and statistics viewing of your entire music collection. The Add Files to Library tool also automatically assigns album pictures to your albums so you can browse your albums by thumbnails in the different program views.

Add Vinyl, Cassette etc.

Helium Music Manager is capable of storing entries in it's database that aren't directly related to a file. This can be extremely useful for you, if your music collection contains a mixture of different formats, e.g. Digital Audio Files, Audio CD's, Mini disc's and Vinyl records etc.

Add to Playlist

Add to Playlist is used to add files to a new or an existing playlist.

Add to new Playlist

Add to New Playlist is used to create a new playlist and add the selected files to it.

Album Picture Manager

The Album picture manager is a tool which helps you to quickly manage your album thumbnails for your albums.

Advanced Download Options

The Advanced Download Options dialog is where you configure which plug-ins that should be used when downloading information from the Internet. You can also select which information that you would like to download.

Artist Picture Manager

The Artist picture manager is a tool which helps you to quickly manage your artist pictures.
This tool is very similar to the Album picture manager.

Audio splitter

The Audio splitter enables you to split any supported audio file into parts and also if perfered into a different audio format.

Backup

The Backup function of Helium Music Manager gives you the ability to safely backup all your settings (including all templates) and the database where all references to your music are stored.

Burn Audio CD

The Burn Audio CD tool burns your music files to Audio CD discs.

Burn Data CD

The Burn Data CD Wizard burns your music files to Data CD/DVD discs.

CD Ripper

The CD Ripper is used to copy (or rip) the contents of and Audio CD onto your computer. The destination files can be AAC, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, Ogg Vorbis, WAVE, WAVPack or WMA.

Collection Properties

[Note that Collections and Volumes are deprecated features which are bound to be removed and replaced soon]

Convert to Format

The Convert To Format tool is a tool which enables you to convert digital music of any format that is supported by Helium Music Manager to AAC, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, Ogg Vorbis, WAVE, WAVPack or WMA.

Copy Tags

The Copy Tags function enables you to copy information between the ID3v1.1 and ID3v2.x tags in order to keep both tags up-to-date and consistent with the correct information.

Device Synchronization

The Device Synchronization tool is used to automatically synchronize a portable device (iPod, MP3 player, portable media device, USB memory stick, external hard drive etc) with folders, Playlists, Smart Playlists and the Active Playlist.

Download pictures

This tool is used to download album and artist pictures and is available from several menus and tools in Helium Music Manager.

Download Information

The Download Information dialog is used when downloading different types of information for artist, albums or tracks.

Duplicate Finder

The Duplicate Finder has been completely rewritten for Helium music Manager 8 and is accessible from Tools > Find duplicates...

Edit Album Review

This dialog contains controls to edit an album review. You can also download an album review from the Internet with a plug-in that supports downloading of an album review.

Edit Artist/Group Information

This dialog contains controls to edit information about a specific artist such as an image of the artist, biography , home country, several types of relations to other artist/groups and more.

Enqueue Random Tracks

Enqueue Random Tracks can be used to enqueue completely random tracks to your Play Queue.

Enqueue Similar Tracks

Enqueue Similar Tracks can be used to enqueue tracks that are similar to a specific track selected from the Play Queue.

Erase rewriteable disc

The erase rewriteable disc tool is used when you want to erase the contents of a CD-RW/CD+RW/DVD-RW or DVD+RW disc.

Export Playlist

Helium Music Manager supports the direct exporting to two different playlist formats:

Export Playlists

The Export Playlists tool lets you export one or more Playlists to "standard" playlists (M3U or PLS) which can be used in other applications.

Export Smart Playlists

The Export Smart Playlists tool will let you export one or more Smart Playlists to regular playlists (in .M3U or .PLS file format) which can be used in other applications.

Export/Import Player Data

The Export/Import Player Data is a tool which allows you to export player data from one database and import it to another. This is an ideal tool if you are using more than one database and would like to keep the play statistics in sync.

Export/Import Tags

The Export/Import Tags tool lets you move tags from one file to another. The tags from the source file can be converted from one tag format to another. This means that you can easily convert Vorbis Comments to ID3 v2.x and vice versa.

Extract Attached Pictures

You music files can contain pictures. This can be the album cover for the song or a picture of the artist or group that created the song for example.

Favourites

Favourites in Helium Music Manager allow you to quickly identify which Tracks, Albums and Artists are your favourites.

File Properties

The Properties tool launchs a dialog displaying various properties from the selected file.

File Rename Wizard

The File Rename Wizard helps you to rename your files using templates so that you can quickly and easily rename them into a format you want. You can create additional folder structures using the included templates or by creating your own. The File Rename Wizard uses information contained in your tags to create new filenames and/or folders.

File functions

Helium Music Manager supports all standard file functions that are available in Windows Explorer. You can easily Copy, Move, Delete and Rename files.

Filename to Tag

The Filename to Tag tool is used to copy all the information available in your filenames and paste it into the correct tag fields. The Filename to Tag tool uses an advanced system to identify as much information as possible and save it into your files.

Filename to Tags tool

The Filename to Tags tool is a tool which automates much of the Filename to Tag functionallity.

Import Playlists

The Import Playlist tool helps you to create playlists in Helium Music Manager from existing playlists created with external applications.

Internal Player

The Internal Player is used to play your music from within Helium Music Manager. The Internal Player can be used internally or it can be used to remotely control an external player (Winamp and iTunes are currently supported).

Join audio files

The Join audio files tool enables you to join multiple audi ofiles into one audio files also if perfered into a different audio format.

Lyrics 3 v2.0 Tag Editor

The Lyrics 3 v2.0 Tag Editor is a tool that helps you to add lyrics to your MP3 files. You can use plug-ins to download lyrics from the internet or you can type in the lyrics manually.

The Lyrics 3 v2.0 Tag Editor saves tag information in the Lyrics3 tag which also supports a few other fields in addition to lyrics.

MP3 Analyzer - fix and repair mp3 errors

The Audio analyzer in Helium Music Manager is used for checking the quality of your MP3 and FLAC files. It can then be used to repair broken MP3 files.

Manual BPM Counter

The Manual BPM (Beats Per Minute) Counter is used when you want to set the BPM for your tracks manually or if the Automatic BPM Counter is unable to calculate an accurate BPM value for your tracks.

Multiple Artist Editor

Helium Music Manager is able to handle multiple artists for each track. To add more than one artist to a specific track you use the Edit Multiple Artists tool. This tool is used from several tools in Helium Music Manager, the Tag Editor, the Tag Editor (Advanced), the Quick Edit and the Subtracks Editor to just mention a few.

New Collection

[Note that Collections and Volumes are deprecated features which are bound to be removed and replaced soon]

Create or edit a playlist

Playlists are available in the left sidebar of the Music Explorer.

New Volume

[Note that Collections and Volumes are deprecated features which are bound to be removed and replaced soon]

Print Report

The Print Report tool is a tool which allows you to quickly create a printed report. The created reports can either be printed directly or exported to other formats such as:

Query Editor

The Query Editor is a very powerful tool that is used when you want to search or filter for music by more than one criteria. In the Query Editor you can combine several criteria to search or filter for.

Remap Path

The Remap Path tool is used to change the path for on or more files in your database to another path, without the need for you to add your files again.

Remove Tags

Helium can easily remove entire tags or selected tag fields from files.

SFV Checker

The SFV Checker can verify that your tracks are in good condition by analyzing the files against an SFV file.

Report Wizard

The Report Wizard can export your music collection to plain text, html, csv or any other format. The templates used to create reports can be modified in any text editor to customize the layout of the report.

Save Album Picture to Tags

This function is used to add an album picture to all files in a selected album. The pictures will be assigned as Cover (front), and can be used in other programs supporting this tag.

Select Tracks

The Select Tracks dialog allows you to select one or more specific tracks, either from your database or from files not yet added to your database. The dialog is used from several tools.

Sending Tracks to an Existing Album

Helium Music Manager tries to group all albums correctly based on existing tags, but sometimes the tags do not contain enough information. Use the Existing Album (Move)... function when an album or a few tracks are wrongly grouped in the Album Browser and the correct album already exists in the database.

Split Volume Root

[Note that Collections and Volumes are deprecated features which are bound to be removed and replaced soon]

Subtrack Editor

The Subtrack Editor is a tag editor that will help you to apply tags to audio files containing more than one song. By using this tool you are able to search for a particular sub-track within a file comprising multiple songs, or you can view all the sub-tracks that file contains.

You can also skip directly to any particular sub-track when playing the file in Helium Music Manager.

You can manually set the length of each song, or you can import .CUE files to automatically create individual tracks within the file.

Examples when the Subtrack Editor could be used:

Switch Fields

Helium Music Manager allows you to easily switch specific tag fields with each other.

Synchronize Library Data To Files

The Synchronize Library Data To Files tool enables you to keep your database data in sync with the data stored on your files.

Synchronize Library to Files

The Synchronize Library to Files tool will help you to keep the meta-data stored in your files in sync with your library. The tool will write the information stored in your library to the selected files' tags. This function is the opposite to the Update Library tool.

Tag Editor

The Tag Editor is the primary tag editor in Helium Music Manager which enables you to quickly edit multiple files at once using an easy to use spreadsheet user interface.

Tag Editor (Advanced)

The Tag Editor (Advanced) is used to add and edit information (tags) of your tracks. You can edit artist, album and title information as well as lyrics and pictures. The Tag Editor (Advanced) also contains tools for automatically retrieving information from the online sources, such as FreeDB, Discogs, Yahoo, Google or Amazon.com and a Filename To Tag tool to extract tag information from your filenames and put in your tags.

Tag Examiner

The Tag Examiner is a tool which enables you to inspect the tag contents stored in your music files. You can also open two files and view them at the same time to easily compare their tag contents.

Update Library

The Update Library tool updates your library to reflect changes to the files on your computer. Use Update Library when you want to make sure that the library information is up-to-date with the files on your computer.

If files have been added or removed from your computer from outside of Helium Music Manager, you will be unable to view these files from the program until your library has been updated.