Dear Lifehacker, Could you recommend some podcasts to me? I've been listening to This American Life, TED and Radiolab and want to broaden my horizons with some fresh content. I'm most interested in podcasts in mp3 format as I like to download them to my phone for later listening (no internet connection required).

Windows: Mulve is a portable, single-minded, lightning-fast MP3 search-and-download application. It's not pretty, but it sure does work.

Unhearit uses a fight-fire-with-fire approach to getting annoying songs out of your head by barraging you with new and catchy tunes.

Although we'd previously given a nod to Incompotech for their free graph paper they have a vastly more interesting collection of royalty-free music. Check out the huge selection and add some quality tunes to your next presentation or video.

Chrome: The web is packed with millions of MP3 files — on music blogs, in links shared on Twitter, tucked away in directories — and ExtensionFM aims to turn that massive pile of untapped music into your personal library.

We've featured more than one MP3 search engine before, but most are filled with ads and confusing layouts. Sad Steve is a plain but effective MP3 search engine and player, complete with profiles on new bands to get you started.

Ripping audio from a YouTube video isn't a new trick, but Dirpy Studio is one of the most polished tools around. Don't just rip the audio as a generic MP3, rip the portion you want with the ID3 tags you assign.

Need a quick ringtone or an isolated snippet of audio from a bigger file? CutMP3.Net does it with a file upload button, two sliders and a "Cut" button.

When you need to slice a piece of of an MP3 and you don't have time to mess around with downloading a new application and learning how to use it, MP3Cut offers dead simple and web-based MP3 snipping.

Dear Lifehacker,

I have unabridged Asimov audiobooks that are great, but read at a mind-wrenchingly slow pace. I can boost an MP3's speed 20 per cent using Audacity, but I have around 250 MP3s. How can I process these files all at once?

Gnoosic is a hassle-free recommendation service. If you can think of three bands you like, it'll start cranking out suggestions for your future listening pleasure.

If music is part of your everyday work routine, workouts, or commute, stuffing your player full of tunes and hitting shuffle just won't cut it. Scan these 10 tips for improving and expanding your music playlists.

Microsoft has teamed up with music site ReverbNation to hand out more than 1,000 MP3 and M4A files. You won't know most of them, but there are likely a few keepers worth an extra click.

Want to show your friends which tracks you can mixtape for them, or just show off your brilliant collection of pop hits and esoteric oldies? Dusty Tunes converts iTunes libraries and XML files into web-based lists.

Windows only: Free application iWatchSyncer monitors any folder on your computer and automatically adds new MP3s to your iTunes library, bridging a very annoying gap in the default iTunes behaviour.

We've already taken the bold (for us) stance that Twitter can be actually useful. Now Wired comes along and suggests it can actually do something else—serve as a fresh searching pool for new music.

MP3 Search is a web music finder with a simple interface. Similar to previously reviewed Mix Turtle, MP3 Search sports a spartan, grab-it-and-go interface. Unlike Mix Turtle, though, you can download the tracks to your computer. The music you select loads in a small pop-up flash player for preview or quick listen, though you can't queue up multiple tracks as on Seeqpod. If you have a favourite site for streaming music or finding tunes, sound off in the comments below.

MP3 Search

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.

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.

TagScanner