Proteron, LLC today issued an urgent update to its drag-and-drop Macintosh audio encoder, N2MP3. All old copies of N2MP3 should be immediately replaced and/or upgraded to the current preview release version, marked 1.01 PR.

This update will prevent unsuspecting Mac users from causing harm to the well known compact disc database (CDDB). Every time an N2MP3 user inserted a non-audio CD (regular data CD-ROM), N2MP3 would continually to query the CDDB with no timeout. This amounted to an unintentional denial of service type attack on the CDDB services. During the past weekend, as a greater and greater number of users installed N2MP3, the number of queries reached a critical mass.

Steve Scherf at Escient Inc. responded quickly by denying service, in turn, to all N2MP3 clients requesting information from the CDDB servers. This quick action helped save the CDDB from being overrun by spurious requests, effectively eliminating the flood of bandwith caused by Proteron's errant N2MP3. Unfortunately, the spread of the first release of N2MP3 will only exacerbate the problem and would contribute to the bandwith limiting.

The free upgrade can be downloaded immediately.

N2MP3 is available for free download as a preview release which limits encoding to twenty tracks and thereafter will only encode the first minute of additional tracks. Pricing for the preview release of N2MP3 remains at $24.95. This pricing is only good until September 6, when the final version will be released and the price will be $34.95.

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February 08, 2012