Asus Xonar D2
4. Utilities
Asus also includes the Asus PMP and several trial versions of well known sound authoring software (Ableton Live Lite and Cakewalk Production Plus Pack (SONAR LE, Dimension LE, and Project5 LE). The Asus PMP (Portable Music Processor utility) can backup digital music content or CD audio into regular MP3/WMA files with Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual Speaker (w/ Pro-Logic II), and Smart Volume Normalization processing.
An MP3 encoder is not installed by default, but you can download a freeware package as prompted by the software:
The main interface of the Asus PMP is easy to navigate through and understand. Its main purpose is to convert Audio files (WMA <-> MP3), which it does very fast, using the Asus CPU AV200.
In addition, you can add several effects like Smart Volume normalization or Dolby effects:
We ran a quick conversion test. We selected one Mp3 file and decided to convert it to WMA 320Kbps:
Asus PMP prompts us that it will "freeze" all sound card operations:
The encoding started, and for a 7.09 minutes in length MP3 file, the conversion to WMA took only 12 seconds!
The version we installed was the latest: