Setting up your own home media server isn't particular easy for the majority. How do you configure your system to share audio and video files across different computers, enable playback through your TV or via your hi-fi? You could purchase something like the Windows Home Media Server or the Apple TV. Alternatively, you could find and use some simple software that will enable you to take your audio collection and stream it to various locations in your house.

Airfoil 2.02 is a tool that will take your audio source and then stream this to your hi-fi. It will hijack your audio source, such as a media player, then stream it to your Airport Express. The latest version will stream to multiple locations, so you can playback the same audio to different locations in your house. The only snag is that this can be affected by old property, so the audio may suffer from thick walls. The download is the for Windows version. The Mac version - which we've found to be a better version - has recently been updated to v3.

Airfoil 2.02 link.

Even the average user will have their own music library stored on their computer, yet sometimes it can be tricky to get some of your personal music in to your collection. Maybe you have rare or live recordings want to be more accessible for you to listen to by adding them to your PCs library you can then edit, equalise and burn to a CD. Some of these rare recordings may be stored on vinyl, cassette or even video.

REAPER 2.0 is an application designed for a user to record, edit, mix and render audio. It has an easy to use interface for amateurs and professionals and has a large number of features for a reasonably small application. You can easily create your own compositions using Reaper, perhaps mixing in other tracks, and then exporting as your own music.

Managing and editing your music library can be tedious. Correcting names, track information and searching for album artwork can be time consuming. It would be great if you had one tool which enabled you to all of these things with relative ease.

MediaMonkey 3.0.0.1069 is an easy to use music manager and jukebox for music collectors. It catalogues CDs, MP3 files, and any other information, including album artwork can be sourced easily from the Internet. It includes a tag editor and a file renamer to help organise music, it also includes a CD ripper and audio converter to save music. It has a play list editor to create music mixes. Plus, it levels volume, supports various Winamp plugins, burns CDs, and can sync with MP3 players and MP3 phones.

There are times when you're busy working around the house, want to listen to your favourite music, but are not likely to stick in a particular room. There's one solution: you could stream the audio to various locations around the house and listen to the same track whichever room you're located. Another advantage of streaming audio is that more than one person can listen to the same track, same Internet radio station or other audio source.

AirFoil 2 was a Mac-only product that's now available for your PC. In conjunction with the Apple Airport Express hardware, you can use it to stream any kind of audio source to remote speakers, whether they are connected to a Hi-FI, TV or other source. The latest AirFoil v2 enables you to stream to multiple sources.

Many of us have old LPs, video cassettes and bootleg albums that contain rare audio, live tracks and 12" remixes. There's no way you can obtain these tracks from a music download store and we keep our old analogue audio stored away in the loft for 'safekeeping'. The snag is, a cassette has a finite lifespan and you'll soon find that the audio deteriorates rapidly. The solution is to get these tracks on to your computer as soon as possible. Play your tracks digitally and the original source will remain intact.

Wavosaur 1.0.0.9 is a free audio manipulation tool that will enable you to grab your audio from your old LPs, tapes and videos, cut and paste the parts you need, add various effects and then export your tracks for your portable audio player.

How many of us have old LPs, tapes and other analogue recordings stashed away in the garage, loft or simply boxed up out of the way? There are loads of old tunes, live tracks and other rare grooves that can't be found on online music stores or available on CD. Instead of wheeling out your old cassette player to play these tracks, why not record them to your PC, touch up the audio and then play them through your portable MP3 player?

Spin It Again 2.1 is a tool that you can use to grab external audio, whatever the source. It could be an old VHS cassette, LP, audio tape or another source. Simply connect up the remote source, play and use the software to record the track. Once on your computer, you can touch up the audio, cut, export as an MP3 or other digital audio format.

Most of us have obtained our audio from various sources over the years. Our rare and live tracks could have been recorded from old LPs or even VHS video.  The other option was to find rare and live tracks across the Internet. Tracks you couldn't get on CD or via a download music store. Either way, these tracks might not be up to the required standard. If you've recorded audio from an LP or cassette, you might find that the track starts with a lot of unnecessary hiss and crackle that you need removing from the audio.

Wavosaur 1.0.0.9 is a free audio tool that you can use to enhance, cut, improve and process your music. It can do pretty much everything you need, from recording the audio, processing and enabling you to enhance and then export.

Some people seem to be confused over media players such as Apple iTunes. They believe that you only need the media player if you're using an iPod or want to download your music from the Apple iTunes Music Store. Not true, you can use iTunes to import audio from your existing CD collection and, if you do have an iTunes Music Store account, you can download the artwork so you don't need to bother scanning or locating your covers.

Apple iTunes 7.3 is the latest version of the audio/media player, along with support for the new Apple iPhone, which is only available in the States. There are a number of minor fixes and enhancements, such as support for wirelessly streaming your digital photos from one computer to your Apple TV, without requiring them to be stored on the Apple TV.

You've gone out and spent £10 on a CD and the last thing you want to worry about is whether you need to adhere to DRM (luckily most audio CDs do not have copy protection, so you can now backup your CD or extract the tracks to your computer) or whether you'll be able to play your tracks on your favourite MP3 player. You might want as much control as possible over your audio, where you want to play the tracks and which tracks are transferred across to your portable player.

Easy CD-DA Extractor 10.2.1 is an application that's been around for ages. It's main role is to extract audio from your CDs. However, it isn't limited to MP3, you can rip and store your tracks in just about any audio format and you have control over the compression used, naming of your tracks and more. You might not feel you need to purchase an audio ripping tool, but if you do, Easy CD-DA Extractor 10.2.1 is worth investigating.

When you purchase and download music from the Apple iTunes music store, the tracks are protected with a custom version of the AAC-based DRM (digital rights management), which will control where and how you playback your audio. For instance, these tracks can't be played back on a rival MP3 player, only an Apple iPod. That's absolutely fine if you're happy with your iTunes<>iPod combination (and, quite frankly, most of those users are happy), but if you want to have complete control over your music, you might prefer to purchase a CD, rip the tracks and put the music wherever you want.

Apple iTunes 7.2 is the latest version of the media player, which now supports the new 'iTunes Plus' music format, which enables you to purchase DRM-free music at a higher bitrate than the standard tracks. Currently only EMI music can be purchased DRM-free, but others will follow. Now you have three choices: DRM-controlled (cheaper) tracks, DRM-free downloads or simply buy the CD and rip the music yourself!

Most of us would class ourselves as legitimate music buyers, whether we choose to purchase a CD or via an online music store. Either way (or both), it's easy to build up an extensive music collection. However, if you're a serious music fan, you are almost certain to have found, downloaded and want to manage many rare and live tracks by your favourite artists. In all honesty, there are many live tracks available between fans that have never been made available for purchase - often these are called 'bootleg' recordings/tracks and fall in to a grey area of legitimacy. Either way, like most music fans, you'll want to find music management software that will collect together all your tracks and support multiple formats.

OrangeCD Suite 6.1.5 is a complete music management tool that will support all your important audio tracks, whether imported from CD, bought through iTunes or obtained from other locations. If you prefer to rip your CDs using the OGG format, this is supported. You can manage your albums, track names and artwork.

If you're a fan of music from before the mid-90s, you'll probably find that all your favourite live performances are only available on VHS video cassette. Live performances are a must-have collectors item for the music fan as tracks are often re-worked for the live audience. Most of us would love to get these tracks on to our iPod or other portable player. The thing is, how do you get them from VHS video to your digital audio player? It's much easier than you'd imagine.

Vinyl Studio 2 is the new version of the tool that's designed to record, edit and enhance audio from your old LPs, tapes and VHS video cassette. Connect your old tape player to the 'audio in' socket on your PC, record the audio in one recording. Use Vinyl Studio to cut and create the individual tracks. You can then choose to burn the tracks to an audio CD or simply copy them across as MP3 files to your iPod.

If you're anything like the majority of computer users, you'll have music you've sourced from all locations. This audio may have been purchased through an online music store, extracted from your CDs, recorded from your old cassettes and live or other tracks downloaded from the Internet. These tracks are probably stored in different formats, making the management of all tracks difficult within one application.

Media Catalog Studio Lite 5.5 is the free version of the music catalogue and management application, which will support many different audio formats. You can sort your audio in to different categories, grab track information from CDDB, generate playlists and much more. Media Catalog Studio Lite also has limited support for your video files, too.

Some of us hate to think that we're not in control of our own destination, which will include not being in control of managing our music collection. DRM has both its advantages and disadvantages, in that you can only move tracks to a limited number of other computers (owned by yourself) and devices. Therefore you'll want maximum control over the audio tracks from the CDs you've purchased. You'll want to grab them in a format you control and with or without compression.

FreeRIP 2.951 is a free (adware driven) tool that will enable you to perform one function: grab and record audio tracks from your CDs. You can individualise the way you grab each track, so larger tracks can be extracted with compression, as they'll take up too much space on your hard drive. You can also batch convert audio tracks.

Most of us have old LPs, tapes and video cassettes lying around. The longer you leave them, the more likely they will deteriorate. Digital audio can't deteriorate, so why not grab the audio from these old sources and store on your computer? That's relatively easy, as long as you have an audio card that can record incoming audio. However, the incoming audio is bound to be a mess. You have to manually stop and start the audio, so your new digital track will need editing.

Wavosaur 1.0.0.7 is a superb free audio editing application that will enable you to load your audio and make the necessary changes. This could include cutting the audio to the right length and fading in both the start and fading out the end. You can cut and paste elements of the audio, if you've recorded the entire LP in one recording.

Apple iTunes is excellent free tool for managing your audio and music collection. You don't need to purchase tunes from the Music Store in order to use iTunes. If you have a large CD collection, simply use iTunes to grab the audio from these CDs. However, the latest version wasn't Vista compatible, nor did it work with the forthcoming Apple TV box.

Apple iTunes 7.1 is the latest release. It appears to still be incompatible with Windows Vista, despite Vista being available for the last few weeks. It does now support Apple TV and ships with a few bug fixes and minor features. So, if you're an existing Windows 2000 or XP user, who already has iTunes, this an update that's worth downloading. Vista users will need to wait for an update.

Back in the late 80s, vinyl contained mixes that you didn't get on a CD single, such as that extended 12¨ remix. There are also plenty of old tracks that you might not be able to download through iTunes or other digital stores, so you have no option to keep your old LPs, tapes and VHS cassettes. However, sooner rather than later your cassette player may cease to function, or you might want to reply your old stereo. Now's the time to digitise these tracks and to get them on to your computer.

VinylStudiois a tool that enables you to connect your old vinyl record deck, cassette player or even your VHS recorder and will digitise the audio to your computer. You can then edit your tracks, add custom effects and save as required. VinylStudio is a complete audio toolkit.

Most of us obtain our audio files legitimately through importing audio from our CD collection or purchasing music for download from the Internet. However, there are loads old tracks that are not available on CD or online. These are either live tracks or old mixes that shipped on vinyl. You could import the audio in to your computer, but then you'll need an audio editor to cut and enhance the file.

Audacity 1.2.6 is a free opensource audio editor that's been around for ages. It's tried and tested technology and will enable you to open an audio file that you've imported in to your computer and then touch-up and export. If you wanted to edit a live audio file, you could cut to size and then fade in and out the audience at the start/end of the track. You can also edit your MP3 audio files.

If you're seeking an audio editor, download Audacity 1.2.6.

Up until recently I bought most of my music from the iTunes Music Store. This was up to the point where I realised that every time you re-install Windows or move across to another PC, you're effectively creating a 'new' PC, thus your 5-computer iTunes Music Store license expires, quickly. Now, why should someone tell me how I should manage the music I've purchased legitimately? I've now decided to purchase the CD option, putting myself in control over my music, and where it can be stored/played, even if it means the CD costs a couple of quid more than purchasing online.

Although you can use iTunes as your music store tool, there are alternatives. For instance, OrangeCD Suite 6.04 is a suite that enables you to grab audio from your music CDs, OrangeCD Suite will then find all the information from the Internet - not just the CD tracklist, but also the value of your CD, artwork and much more. You can even publish your collection online for others to see. You could then use the 5-star rated MediaMan 2.6 to lend and control your media library.

Try OrangeCD Suite 6.04 for yourself and see if it's better than Apple iTunes 7.

The latest version of iTunes got me thinking. It's fantastic that Apple are now enabling us to grab artwork for our imported CDs, but any serious music collector will have hundreds of old LPs and even tapes, which they're keen to get on to their computer. Indeed, any DJ will let you know that they can't live without their turntable, simply due to old remixes that only shipped on vinyl.

The answer is to keep your vinyl and tapes for archive purposes and use an audio grabber to extract the music and to store on your computer. You'll probably end up with one big WAV file, so you'll then need some audio software to cut up the tracks, clean up and then export to MP3 or another format for your portable music player.

Our two favourites are LP Recorder 8 and LP Ripper 8, which will cut, edit and save your tracks. There are many other options available, such as EasyRecorder which will record audio to your computer. You could then use a post-processing tool such as REAPER to filter and add effects to your tracks.

It looks like Apple has pulled the plug on the many websites that plunder its extensive archive of high resolution album artwork. The popular Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber, and many others, ran into difficulty when attempting to retrieve the gorgeously detail 600px by 600px covers, offering only the 170px by 170px versions. The larger versions are still available to those who purchase music from the iTunes store but it looks like we’ll all have to turn to the lower quality Amzon.com for our audio library needs.

Nero has released a freeware application for Windows that allows you to compress and back-up your music without the hassle or need for massive storage. It purports to support the latest MPEG-4 audio standards (LC-AAC, HE-AAC, HE-AAC v2), letting you choose sampling rates from 8 to 96 kHz and bit rates to 320 kBit/s per channel. 58 CD’s can then be stored in 1 when selecting the ultra compression options, however, sound quality will be have to be sacrificed greatly. If storage and not audio quality is your aim then this might just be the perfect little program. Indeed, dropping the bit rate to an agreeable 128k/B gives you the best of both worlds.

More info and download here.

On Piracy, radio, & Walmarts is a free downloadable documentary tackling the burning questions of internet piracy. Unimpressed by the regurgitation of tired arguments in the media, it aims to shed some light and bring some depth to the topic. Originally available from their website (until it was Dugg to high heaven), it can now been found and downloaded from the ever trusty Google Video.

Prog beware, with Music Annotator, you can happily sweep technical proficiency aside and start working out the chords of your favourite songs in minutes. Well, that’s the idea anyway. Designed by the Musical Technology Group from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, here’s what they say it can do:

"The purpose of the project is to supervise and correct the results of automated audio-feature extraction algorithms and generate manually edited annotations of audio as training examples or ground truth for those algorithms."

Hmm, basically you can analyse a variety of popular audio formats (ogg, mp3 and wav files) through the idiot proof interface that will quickly get you on track to musical prowess. Detection itself was variable but impressive and one can only imagine that it will only get better as more updates and improvements are added.

More info and download here.

Menuet for Mac is a skinable remote control for iTunes, coming complete with Last.fm integration that allows you to send music, friend recommendations and statistics from within Menuet itself. With a raft of features designed to make iTunes that little bit more flexible, users now get more hot key options, a “smart browse” that improves artist searching, and a sleep timer that lets you put iTunes and your Mac to sleep when it suits you. What’s more, Menuet will retrieve high resolution artwork for your albums from the iTunes store itself, saving you the hassle of using other programs that utilise the often grainy amazon.com.

However, with all these great features, there must be a catch right? Sadly, Menuet is not free and will set you back around £7 pounds for the single user, rising to £17 for the multi user package.

Info and download here.

Last.FM has now added iPod support for its popular personal music player. Previously, users would create a profile of their music using the audioscrobbler plugin, which would send Last.FM details of your musical preferences and dually provide recommendations of similar artists and bands. Now you can “Scrobble your iPod", choosing from a variety of third-party products for differing operating systems. Once installed, you’ll be able to sync up your recently-played iPod tracks with Last.FM, effectively removing the need to use your computer at all.

Download the original player here.

Check out the iPod player here.

Sheetmusicnotes.com is a handy index of free musical notation and information, ranging from free sheet music for children to aggregated news from the world of composing and arranging. Although still in its early stages, there is already a healthy amount of material to sort through. The children’s section is particularly impressive, displaying many of the classics that every child should grow up with, all available as PDF’s for quick and easy downloading. And, since it’s on the internet, your children will instantly think its cool and practice till the cows come home.

Get looking here.

Remember those distant days of taping your favourite songs off the radio? Well, with Stationripper, you'll no longer have carefully edit out the DJ's voice to get your free if slightly poor recordings. This program will scour internet radio, slice songs into individual mp3's, name them and even find corresponding artwork for them. It also claims that, with a broadband connection, you could feasibly download up to 3,000 tracks a day. Can't say this is the most legal thing we've ever found so we remind you to be good.

Check it out here.

Download thousands of songs a day, legally - now with album art goodness [via Digg]

Internet Archive is a vast and free media library, mostly comprising of out-of-copywrite texts, audio, video, and software for the general public to use at their leisure. It’s a library in the true educational sense, with much of it aiming to “preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them”. So, in amoungst the old cartoons and recordings you can often find the odd gem; be it a grainy Bob Dylan recording or Edison’s first attempts to synchronise moving images with sound, these are not only fun but important as well.

Get downloading here.

MusicBrainz tagger is an application that automatically looks up albums and tracks in your music collection and then writes clean metadata tags (ID3 tags, Vorbis comment fields, etc) to your files. Once installed, you simply have to hit ”Search for Song Info" and it fills in all the fields, correctly tagging mp3's that you have, from whatever source. Although not entirely accurate (we found it left out just under a fifth of 3,000), the conversion rate is still impressive and could prove to be an essential tool for big music libraries in need of a little TLC. Linux users can also rejoice with the release of Picard, a cross platform tagger thats works much in the same way.

Check it out here.

Danish National Radio has kindly made 9 Mozart symphonies available for free download in celebration of the grand man's 250th birthday. Indeed, at 256kbps, the mp3’s are clearly showing the music the respect they deserve. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, these are a joy to listen to and a fitting way to celebrate his great work.

Get them here, or simply type in "Mozart 250 år" in i-tunes's podcast directory.

Over 100,000 “lost” tracks, spanning forty years of music will be made available to the public through Universal Music. Rare and previously unattainable music from artists including Marianne Faithful, Fairport Convention and Jacques Brel will be made available by mid February, followed by a further 10,000 albums over the next three years. This will include material dating from the very beginnings of recorded music, bringing a little more diversity to downloadable music along the way. iPod’s ready.

Download plan for deleted tracks [BBC]

Those long running arguments in the pub can now finally be settled with this free and simple music identification program. Either play a song through your PCs microphone or directly plug in an external music source (eg. Radio), and Tunatic will check the song against its database and name the tune. The database is regularly updated by Tunatic’s army of users, and you are encouraged to do the same.

Get it here.  

There was a time when cover art was an important part in the buying journey of any self-respecting music lover. Leafing through the packaging, reading the sleeve notes, admiring the art work was all part of the experience. Thankfully, findmycover.com brings back a little personality in this day of monolithic music libraries. Simply type in an artist or album name and it will retrieve the corresponding artwork, then just download and transfer it to your preferred media player.