Tunes - Tuneflow

If you need to increase the volume of an MP3 or WAV file and you're either away from your regular suite of audio-tweaking software or don't have one to begin with, webapp Vloud can help.

Wired's How-To Wiki gets advice from a neuroscientist on how to hear your cellphone better in a loud crowd, whether indoors or outside. By covering the mouthpiece, you'll eliminate hearing the noise around you pitched back at you through the speaker, and your brain will have a clearer shot at singling out the voice on the line.

Windows only: The Digital Inspiration blog posts a tiny AutoHotKey script that takes away the email-ruining power of the most useless key on your deck, Caps Lock, and converts it into an instant-muting tool. Really helpful for anyone using a stand-alone keyboard without multimedia keys, or whose left pinky finger is just irrascible sometimes.

If you're looking to get some more use out of an old machine, or just play around with multimedia programs but not interested in shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars, download Puredyne. Based on Debian Linux, the downloadable disk image fits on a standard CD-R and will boot on almost any machine — you can even run it on your current system without having to partition any drives or re-install your operating system.

Whether you work quietly alone at home or in an office where the hum of fluorescent lights is the dominant soundtrack of your day, tune into one of the 31 ambient loops offered on the iSerenity web site.

It's hump day and I was looking for a quick, fun project to try out. So I figured I try something easy I found over at the Make Magazine blog earlier this week—a set of speakers made from paper cups and a pair of earbud headphones originally created by artist Dmitry Zagga (in no small amount of jest).

Windows only: If you are looking for ways to merge a bunch of MP3 files into one larger file, and don't like the command line solution I wrote about earlier this week, try Merge MP3.

Spice up your videos, games, applications or just make system alerts a little more hilarious by downloading sound effects from Soundsnap. Whether you're an electronic musician using Ableton Live or a budding YouTube auteur looking to flesh out the audio on a Final Cut Pro project, libraries of free sound effects, loops and samples are like mana (I'm a longtime fan of The Freesound Project).