Magnus Brading has apparently stopped supporting MP3TS. The last update was in 2011, and he has changed the downloads on his website to be time limited, that is, they stop working after 30 or 90 (or some number) of days.

The catch-22 is that the countdown starts in 2011, so anything you download is already expired. If you were a registered purchaser (like me) you can register your download and everything will be fine... except that you have to run the program to register it, and the program won't run because it expired three years ago.

After my computer died last month, I've had to reinstall all my software, including MP3TS, which of course won't run.

I tried setting my system date to 2011, and the program indeed did start up, but the moment I tried to actually do anything with it, it crashed. Perhaps it is not compatible with Windows 8.1?

Even the pop-up message telling me the software is expired is problematical -- there is no way to do anything with it (it isn't "mouseable") and the only way to get rid of it is to kill it with Task Manager. Oh, wait, if I just let it sit in the middle of the screen long enough (4--5 minutes) it crashes with some kind of memory violation.

After nine days, Magnus responded to my email about this, but his instructions weren't workable. They apparently assumed that I could actually do something with the "Expired" pop-up, but I can't.

Perhaps now is the time to investigate other options.

Suggestions, anyone?

tanstaafl.

dBpoweramp

...or rdio...

Mp3tag
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

What does MP3TS do? I use Tag & Rename for tagging and MediaMonkey for generating playlists etc

I ran into the same problem some time ago (half a year?) because the beta period of the free trial essentially ran out.

I then contacted Magnus, and much to my surprise he responded quite quickly. He told me he had no plans of further supporting MP3TagStudio, because ever since the rise of streaming services like Spotify, a lot of people didn't bother downloading and maintaining an MP3 collection anymore. That simple fact showed bigtime in the registration numbers of MP3TagStudio, which apparently had plummeted. As a means of "thank you" to Marcus, I registered the program right there and then (something I should have done years ago). I received a registration and nowadays I'm still using MP3TagStudio on a very frequent basis, on Windows 8.1.

I guess I wrote up all this just to say: contact Marcus and ask him if he can help. It seems he still gets and reads the emails and he seemed like a nice enough guy. I guess it can't hurt to try.

I ran into the same problem recently when I needed to reinstall MP3TS on my new computer. I also emailed him and he did reply. Yes, it's a bit tricky to get it working on Win8.1 but I was able to do it.

The pop up message that appears if you click on the expiration screen and wait around... that popup screen that you complained that is not mousable... it's actually the actual About screen from the main program. Even though it is not mousable, you can perform the registration steps on THAT screen. You don't need to be inside the program to perform the steps to register it, you just do the steps on that popup screen. The steps are hold down CTRL and type R E G I S T E R if I recall correctly.

The parts that weren't clear to me, and what tripped me up were:

- After clicking away the expiration screen there is a 30-second pause before the About screen appears. I was task-killing the program when it didn't respond after about 15 seconds.

- When the About popup eventually DID appear sometimes, I had no idea that THAT was the same as the about screen inside the program where I was supposed to type CTRL-REGISTER. After he explained it to me in email I understood, but that wasn't made clear anywhere else.

ALSO:
ALSO:
ALSO:
ALSO:

If you still have the old computer hard disk, you can just copy the file mp3ts.rg from the old installation directory into the new installation directory, and that works fine too. Skip all the stuff above.

Effectively the same as Tag & Rename. I did go through quite a number of them after "Dr Tag" which I had purchased dropped off way back. It was surprising that some couldn't do very simple things (perhaps specific to my wants)

Brilliant!

Once again, Tony, you have saved my day. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I don't have the old C:> drive, but I DO have a copy of it, minus the "Windows" directory, stored (for a while longer, at least) on my new C:> SSD.

tanstaafl.

Good that your backups helped you out although I wouldn't generally waste my valuable SSD space on backups like that.... If you have heaps of free space it's not an issue of course.

Not heaps, but enough for the moment, about 22 GB.

Once I have decided I have everything I'll ever want from the old C drive, I'll delete it from the SSD, and then the SSD will have over 50 GB free.

I've got another 760 GB free on my two data drives, and a bit over 640 GB free on my internal backup drive, plus 200 GB free on my external backup drive, and another 1100 GB free on my off-premises backup drives.

My important stuff is backed up on three separate drives: one internal, one external, and one off-premises.

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me!

tanstaafl.