If you like to play a little guitar in between reading Make Use Of and surfing the internet then I am sure you’ve often wished for a few free tools to help you learn your guitar playing online. Unfortunately most decent guitar software and tools are either commercial or shareware.

Well luckily there is always a free alternative. This list is short, but provides you with all the essential tools and resources to learn and improve your guitar playing.

Guitar Tabs

MediaMonkey is a full-featured music player and music collection organizer. It can convert audio, automatically rename your files, find duplicates and missing tags, create and save playlists, generate statistical reports and more!

Believe it or not, MediaMonkey comes with many FREE features that make it easy to organize your music collection and enjoy the latest Gnarls Barkley or Beethoven. If you are throwing a party (wild, crazy, or otherwise), just set the “Party Mode” and you don’t have to worry about your friends and guests changing the playlist.

Why do I need MediaMonkey?

As a hybrid animal combining an online music marketplace driven by social media forces, Amie Street delivers generously on its promise: fans are empowered to explore and discover new music while musicians enjoy immediate feedback generated by a vibrant community.

On Amie Street all songs start equal: absolutely free. The more listeners download a song or album, the more its price goes north until it maxes out at 98 cents per track. Up-and-coming talent like St. Vincent as well as established artists like Interpol, Thom Yorke, Barenaked Ladies, and Tiesto have already jumped on the bandwagon!

A while back, I made a decision to thin out and refresh my CD collection. Rather than dumping them off at a music store and collecting a few dollars, I decided to give Lala a try.

Lala is a music player, store and discovery tool. It’s also a fantastically downplayed CD trading site. Back in 2006 or so, Lala was primarily a platform for trading CDs with other users. Today, the focus is on its music player but the trading community is what makes it a great site.

Screamer Radio is currently my weapon of choice when hunting for new music. It’s simple, CPU-light and unconditionally free. It can handle just about any streaming format, your machine will hardly feel it’s running, and you can minimize it in the system tray.

Whenever I tune into something exciting, I hit the REC button and the output mp3 file is automatically encoded with the artist and song data. Using this information, I can track down the song or album and add it to my shopping list.

The main function of an audio converter is to change audio file from one file format to another. Sometimes, it’s good to experiment with different audio codecs to see which ones fit you. Some prefer MP3 or AAC, but others like OGG. Why? Different sound quality, smaller file sizes, for playing files on other devices (iPod, mobile phone etc.), it all boils down to your personal perference.

This is how it works: load the file you would like to convert to another format into the converter, choose the output format you want for your file and the converter will first decode the file and then re-encode it to match the output format.