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?

Running across QuickTime or Real Player content around the net is not hard to do. We all find ourselves occasionally trying to access a .mov file or any of the many Real Player file formats. Either way, you’ve usually got to end up installing QuickTime or Real Player. Here at Make Use Of, we really don’t have a problem with either of these services, they just seem a little bloated for our very limited usage of them.

In comes a great site called CodecGuide.com with two great alternatives for these two aggravating applications.

QuickTime Alternative

ooVoo is an application for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you talk to up to six friends at once via a webcam and a microphone. ooVoo is currently in beta and also allows free calls to any landline in the US and Canada up until May 13th.

One of the many problems trying to actually GET anything done online these days is the multitude of distractions that are available on the internet. Short of unplugging your network connection, there are a few things the undisciplined can do to minimize the sites calling your name.

Over the past few years a new breed of text editors have flourished - so called ‘minimalist’ text editors - which can be used to block out all other distractions and let you focus on the task at hand - crafting words into sentences. These “no-frills editors” don’t offer formatting or many of the other features you see in modern word processors, what they offer is the ability to concentrate solely on your writing.

At least 112 programs are installed on my computer and for 29 of them an update is available. Looking through these 29, I would say that I use around two thirds of them on a regular basis, and I did know some of them required an update.

Frankly, when I boot a program I can’t be bothered with updates, which is why I was still running old versions of FileZilla and Winamp for quite some time.

UpdateStar provides a quick and easy way to check all installed programs on your system for updates. It covers freeware, shareware, demos, and commercial software.

I have had the email purists gang up on me for this in the past but I constantly use my Gmail account for backing up my digital life. This has led to the online lynch mobs chanting “an email account is not for backing up important documents!” and they are right to a certain extent. I wouldn’t dream of putting into my Gmail account things like my passport or my birth certificate. I’m not stupid!