iStonsoft FLAC to MP3 Converter 2.1

Despite its name, iStonsoft FLAC to MP3 Converter has actually been designed to be a versatile audio conversion and extraction utility with support for many more codecs than just FLAC and MP3. This utility aims at transcoding any number of audio files between the most widely used formats and to extract the audio stream of standard video files and save them in any of the audio codecs supported.

The problem with iStonsoft FLAC to MP3 is that it simply doesn’t work. It comes with all the features you would expect from any standard audio converter (batch conversion capabilities, a nicely organized menu of output profiles, support for the most popular devices and formats, a built-in media player, etc.), but neither the conversion nor the extraction routines produce any results. Once you’ve set up your conversion list and click on the corresponding button, you get a message in less than two seconds (regardless of the number of files on the list) stating that the conversion/extraction process has finished successfully, except that it hasn’t – no files, not even empty files, have been stored in the selected output folder.

When working your way through the various simple steps required to set up the conversion process, the program showed a worrying level of instability. Whenever I tried to cancel or return to a previous window after making an innocent mistake during the selection process, the program would simply close and disappear from my desktop, forcing me to launch the program again and start the file and format selection processes from scratch. Not even the media player works properly – I couldn’t manage to play any video or audio file in any of the formats supported except for the first couple of seconds of a FLAC file, no matter how hard I tried.

Thus, though it contains all the elements required to become a nice and simple conversion tool for a significant number of popular audio and video formats, in its present state, iStonsoft FLAC to MP3 Converter is a completely useless tool.