Windows (with iTunes, WinAmp, or KMPlayer): Free plug-in tool MiniTube hunts down music videos from Flash-based video sites and plays them along with your tunes. MiniTube's signature feature is the ability to play the video synced up to your local MP3—in other words, lip-synced to wherever you are in the song when the video starts playing. Its video accuracy depends, of course, on the accuracy of YouTube uploaders (and the video's copyright status), but you can tell MiniTube that a video is wrong and have it re-search, and it can be set to disappear when there's nothing to grab. Check out a video demonstration of MiniTube in action below.

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Windows only: Rename the thousands of MP3 files in your digital music library and add or edit tags, lyrics, and album art in one fell swoop with free utility TagScanner. Not only can TagScanner clean up the artist, album, song title, and track number information for your digital music files, it can rename your songs based on a pattern you define (like %artist% - %title%), it can make music playlists, and search online databases like freedb and Amazon to automatically tag music missing information. It includes a built-in player as well so you can listen to tracks while you edit. We've recommended Media Monkey to whip your music's metadata into shape, but TagScanner looks like a solid alternative. TagScanner is a free download for Windows only.

Want to share music playlists Muxtape style but don't want to muck around with PHP and host it yourself using Opentape? New service Tumbltape creates playlists of songs hosted on our favourite blogging tool, Tumblr. The ReadWriteWeb blog runs down how Tumbltape works.

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Beloved music playlist hosting service Muxtape's gone offline to "sort out a problem with the RIAA," but if you've got some web server space, you can host, stream, and share your own digital music mixes Muxtape-style with newly-launched PHP web application Opentape. Opentape isn't affiliated with Muxtape in any way, but it's wildly similar, boasting a sparse, easy-to-use interface with drag-and-drop song rearrangement. To run Opentape, you've got to have a web server running PHP5 (or set up your own at home), and install Opentape on it. Let's take a closer look.

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Windows and Linux only: Amarok 2, the next version of the free, open-source media player, has just rolled out an official beta release, Nerrivik. The beta of the media manager we previewed back in June, improves memory management, overhauls the add-on scripting and metadata tracking, adds gapless playback, and streamlines the interface. Center-rail widgets still seem a little rough, but it's a usable preview of what's to come. Amarok 2 is a free download; Windows users can install it through the KDE on Windows Project, while Linux users can download the source or add the nightly build repository listed in our screenshot tour.

YouTube, Google Video, and family is ripe with music videos whose soundtrack you'd love to add to your music collection, and VidtoMP3.com can do just that. Enter a video URL and it spits back the MP3 file available for download. [via]

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Web-based music search tool Mix Turtle creates playlists of songs you find online. Working from an index of millions of songs, Mix Turtle supplies suggestions to your search terms as you enter them. Covering a broad spectrum of time and tastes, Mix Turtle returned impressive results for diverse searches such as Miley Cyrus, Robert Miles, and Miles Davis. Once you find songs you would like to listen to, you simply click on them to start playing or click on the plus symbol next to the song to add it to your playlist. Create an accoung and log in to save your playlists, but a login is not required to use the service. The playback applet has no control for volume or jumping about within the track that is playing, but otherwise the playback is clean and the quality of the tracks high. While not a replacement for more robust service like Pandora, song selection was easy and playback enjoyable. Mix Turtle is free to use.

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The Digital Inspiration blog hits upon a pretty nifty use of a file-hiding technique we've shown here before, to share MP3s with a select group of friends, or even embed a related sound file inside a photograph. Using Flickr's easy photo-sharing and a command-line trick, you can create a JPG file that anyone can download and, once renamed as a .mp3 file, plays in any music player. For more file-hiding fun, check out our feature on easy steganography tools.

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US only: Napster debuts its brand new DRM-free MP3 store today. Like Amazon MP3, the songs will play on any device and any number of computers, and cost $.99 per single, and $9.95 per album. [via]

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Windows only: Freeware application MP3-Check examines your music library to weed out files that are missing important metadata or those that don't match certain criteria. iTunes built-in duplicate finder is pretty limited, but MP3-Check similarly weeds out MP3s using criteria like bit rate, sample rate, and gain volume. As an added bonus, MP3-Check handles huge directories of MP3s with aplomb, and when you find files that don't meet your standards, you can launch your favourite metadata editor and set things straight. MP3-Check is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.

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