Tunes - Tuneflow

Every year music lovers from across the country head to Austin, Texas for SXSW, and for the past six of those years, SXSW has offered hundreds of DRM-free tracks from artists playing at SXSW—and it's all available via BitTorrent.

Windows only: Free audio/video conversion utility Oxelon Media Converter handles the task of batch converting music and video files to and from almost any format—and it adds a handy Explorer menu integration to make it easy.

When you bop between your work and home computers all the time, it's tough keeping your favorite music at your fingertips ("Which computer has my Once More, With Feeling soundtrack on it?") AudioBox lets you listen to your music from anywhere.(Click the image above for a closer look.)

We've all been there: you hear a song in a commercial, over the radio, or in a video clip and you can't figure out who the artist is. AudioTag scans your files or YouTube video and returns a list of matches. You can use AudioTag by uploading a file or using the URL for the file. AudioTag recognizes WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, FLV, MP4, and more. You can also paste the link of a YouTube URL into the AudioTag search box and have it scan the video.

Back in November, Apple introduced the ability to see what songs were available in the iTunes store through your web browser, but it looks like they've finally added the pièce de résistance (or rather, the thing that really makes this useful)—30-second song previews.

When you sync your iPod/iPhone in iTunes 9 and you've got space left, check off the "Automatically fill free space with songs" box on the Music tab to use every last free megabyte. As David Chartier at The Finer Things in Mac site notes, there's no way to see what songs iTunes pulls and adds there for you. I'd like to think it uses some sort of smarts to determine what songs you haven't synced that you should have.

If you're a fan of VLC—the open-source and awesome media player that had made appearances in our Hive Fives for best video players, best portable applications, and best desktop media players—you may have noticed a little cha

Mac only: If you're going to warble along with your favorite song, make sure you get the words right. Get Lyrical is a free app that automatically displays the lyrics of whatever song is playing in iTunes.

Apple's acquired online music streaming service Lala, and "people familiar the matter" are confirming that Apple is planning on bringing a web interface to iTunes—we want to know: would you use it?

Windows only: If you love your iPod but aren't crazy about iTunes, CopyTrans Manager is a solid alternative that can add media to and organize media on your iPod, iPhone, and Palm Pre. (Click the image above for a closer look.)