Just because a song is old doesn’t mean it will trigger nostalgia. If you keep Beyoncé in regular rotation, listening to “Crazy in Love” probably won’t take you back to 2003 every time. But I’ve found a kind of music that’s way more likely to trigger nostalgia: The one hit wonder.

Trying to find the perfect iOS apps can be tough, and we’re willing to bet that your iPhone or iPad is full of pages and pages of apps. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to come up with a short list of favourites. We understand. Allow us to help you with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for iOS.

Which Android app is worth a spot on your new smartphone or tablet? Trying to find the very best of the best is a challenging process, because there are millions of apps to pick from on the Google Play Store. Even if you just scan Google’s “top free” or “top paid” list on a daily basis, you’ll miss out on a lot of digital gems. Allow us to help you out with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for Android.

Early morning runs can be rough, but to get through them it helps to have a little teamwork, camaraderie, and gleeful singing about death. Fortunately, military running cadences are available on all your favourite streaming services.

Some parents, I'm realising, are good at mornings. I'm not one of them, but I'd like to be, and I sort of have to be, especially as my kid heads off to kindergarten where there are school bells and real tardy slips.

In case you didn’t know, Alexa can help you find that one song with those one lyrics that go sort of like “blah blah blah” or whatever.

Video: Classical music has been evolving for centuries, so there are all different kinds of sounds. That means that if you hate one kind, you can still love several other kinds. Hate opera? You still might love the orchestra. Symphonies too overwhelming? Try some shorter, sparer chamber music.

“Sea chanteys are work songs, so they’re designed to coordinate effort between a group of people doing physical labour,” says video producer Jamison Hermann, who sang them while working on ships at the Mystic Seaport maritime museum. “The saying in maritime historical circles is that a good chanteyman is worth ten sailors on a line” — because he helps everyone pull the rope at once.

Every music streaming service kind of sucks, we already know this. One of the ways Spotify sucks is that it limits how many songs you can download on each device. But the service just raised its download limit from 3333 tracks per device up to 10,000 per device, for up to five devices. Great news for anyone who needs to keep their data use down, or use Spotify anywhere with bad reception. You can finally listen to the music you pay $11.99/month for!

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

The Beatles single “Hey Jude”, the band’s longest-running #1 hit, turns 50 on Sunday. Paul McCartney wrote it for John’s son Julian Lennon, about dealing with John’s affair with Yoko Ono and separation from Jules’s mother Cynthia. But Paul’s advice is broad enough that every fan can read their own meaning into it. (John, being John, felt that the song was actually for him.)

Here’s what we read into it, and relevant Lifehacker posts on how to make it better.

In 1993, the world's biggest pop star (Michael Jackson) agreed to produce music for the world's biggest video game franchise (Sonic The Hedgehog - come at me, Mario fans!) It was a magical melding of two cultural icons; akin to Fred Astaire meeting Jerry the mouse.

Or at least, it would have been, if Sega hadn't permanently scrubbed Michael's involvement from the record books. Today I discovered what happened.

Certain moods need soundtracks. When you’re sad, or excited, or making out, a certain kind of music can elevate the experience and lend a grandiose, cinematic quality to your life.

If you have particular music tastes, playing one of Spotify’s prefab playlists doesn’t scratch that itch. You want a custom playlist, first crafted in a few minutes, then honed over years. Here are the five playlists you should prepare for yourself.

Usually when I load up a “biggest hits” playlist, I end up skipping half the tracks. I’m barely skipping anything on NPR’s new playlist, “The 200 Greatest Songs By 21st Century Women+”. Every song is good! Even the country songs! And the lead performers are all women or non-binary.

Highlights include “F**k the Pain Away” by Peaches, “Two Weeks” by FKA Twigs, “Drone Bomb Me” by Anohni, “Soy Yo” by Bomba Estéreo, “Help I’m Alive” by Metric, and “Good as Hell” by Lizzo. There are also megahits such as “Run Away With Me” and “Single Ladies”. This is real singalong stuff.

Video: Mozart wrote a party song called “Kiss My Arse”. The filthy lyrics (“kiss my arse, quickly, quickly”) weren’t discovered until 1991. This is the stuff you’d learn if The A.V. Club was doing interviews in the 1700s. And it’s another great way to appreciate classical music. Just like pop music, the music is more fun if you learn the story behind it. In this video we tell you how.

There's something so exquisite about a slowed-down, moody cover of an upbeat song you know by heart (see: Antony and the Johnsons covering Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love"). But it can be particularly transporting when a band gives the MTV Unplugged treatment to one of their own songs, as in a-ha's acoustic version of their 1980s synth-pop classic "Take on Me".

"Uptown got its hustlers, the Bowery got its bums. Forty-second Street got big Jim Walker, he a pool-shootin' son of a gun". Jim Croce sang those words in 1972, six years before I was born. They've been burned into my memory for so long that I can't remember when I first heard them.

iOS: One of the best parts of any science-fiction game or movie are those ominous tones that suggest a conversation or discovery is about to head south — a quintessential part of the soundtrack that adds a lot of atmosphere (and tension) to an experience. And now, thanks to an open-source iOS app, you can make your own imposing synthesiser sounds and teach yourself the basics of music production.

Video: If you’ve ever tried to get into classical music, but gotten too bored or distracted, it isn’t your fault. Classical music works differently than popular music, and it’s much easier to appreciate when you understand its structure.