MP3 Maker 12 is designed to handle your collection of electronic music. Although the title says 'MP3', it's just as happy with WAV, WMA, OGG and AAC files. It can record them, organise them, convert between them and other formats and save them to hard drive, CD or DVD.

Although the interface is designed to control a wide range of different functions, each control area is carefully delineated and it's easy to learn where everything is kept. At the top of the screen, directly beneath the main menu, is a symbol bar with large, easy-to-read buttons that call up major functions within the program.

Below this is a mode bar which switches between your music database, a file and folder view, control of Podcast and Web radio playback and buttons for playlist, portable player and jobs. The main display area can show audio files and Web radio or Podcast sources. To the right is a panel for copying files to a music player, with full control of recordings - including timed recordings - at the extreme right.

At the bottom of the screen is a small graphic equaliser, information about the current music source, transport controls for playback, a volume meter and a disk space meter for when you're recording music to CD or DVD.

Like most music managers, MP3 Maker 12 can search out all the audio tracks on your PC, play any of them back to you and organise them by category. These categories can be either the ones provided within the program or ones added manually. You can search for doubled tracks (two recordings of the same track) too, to save space and simplify your database. A similar feature can be applied to the metadata attached to audio tracks, so you can reconcile different spellings of artists' names and track titles.

The program supports playlists and provides a DJ function, which can be used either manually or via the Auto DJ feature. This matches the tempo of dance tracks so you can make effective cross-fades without disrupting the beat.

Simple editing of audio tracks is provided, so you can split MP3s or Internet radio recordings. This is particularly useful for extracting the music from recorded programmes. Once you've compiled a music selection you can use Magix's own Goya Burn CD and DVD burning tool to record all types of media. This is very straightforward and completes a comprehensive set of playback and transfer functions.

Despite a plethora of different features, MP3 Maker 12 is easy to control and is organised to provide a logical screen interface. It handles all the common audio formats with the exception of Flac, and has been sensibly extended to play back both Web radio and Podcasts. A very useful music manager at a good price.