Regular readers know I’m a big fan of iTunes and the way it organizes music, but one problem I have with it is that it doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts (and you productivity nuts know how useful those can be!). Fortunately, there is a third-party piece of software called iTunesKeys which lets lets you create your own shortcuts.

One of my favorite media players to use, particularly for videos and DVDs is VLC, which is available for Windows, Macs, Linux, and a few other operating systems. It’s free, lightweight, and supports nearly any format you could possibly imagine. Because of the small resource usage and its ability to run even on PocketPCs, VLC makes a great tool to be able to stream video from one device to another. Imagine being on the road with a PocketPC, bored out of your mind…you could easily fire up your portable and connect to your PC using VLC and watch any movies or listen to any song you want, all for free. Engadget has posted a guide on how to stream almost anything with VLC which is sure to be very useful for a lot of you. If you use it, let us know how!

I’m a big fan of iTunes, but there are a few things that bother me about it. For one, it only allows you to create one library, so if you have multiple people using the same computer, you may have music on your library which you may not necessarily want to hear (my wife and I have completely different music tastes, for example); not only that, but it’s possible that iTunes may become unresponsive when your library gets too large. If you want to use multiple libraries, there is a free application which lets you switching between them, called Libra.

iTunes is great to manage large music collections, but it’s missing some features which some music fans may not want to be without. IdleTunes is a fantastic new piece of software for Windows which fills in the iTunes feature gap and makes managing your music even easier. IdleTunes provides some great features like finding and inserting album art into tracks without them, the ability to add iTunes playlists into any MP3 player, better playlist creation and control, and the one feature I find conspicuously missing from iTunes, the automatic removal of dead or missing tracks (that exclamation point is not enough Apple!). IdleTunes is completely free, but donations are accepted, and requires the .NET Framework version 1.1, as well as iTunes 4.7 or higher. If you’re looking to better manage your music, IdleTunes might definitely be an application worth trying out.

I, like much of the world it seems, own an iPod so I often forget that there are other MP3 players available on the market. iTunes is great because it automatically synchronizes any podcasts you download straight onto your iPod, but what if you don’t have an iPod? Many MP3 players don’t really require software to transfer songs onto it, instead using a simple drag and drop interface. If you have one of these devices, you may find it bothersome to have to download podcasts with a podcatcher then move those files onto your device, but I found out about a little tool the other day which does it for you, MP3Loader.

The ever helpful Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a list of CDs which contain the Sony/BMG rootkits we have been hearing so much about for the past week or so. The list is not 100% complete by any means but should help you find titles to avoid. They also offer a couple of tips on how to detect whether a CD will install a rootkit on your PC including if the CD says Content Protected on the spine, or if you see a Compatible With label on the back of the CD. Additionally, be sure to disable CD autorun if you are using Windows XP. Mac users beware, the rootkits will infect your computers as well, so be careful!

Back in my early college days (maybe even before), Palm devices were all the rage (I had a couple which ended up just being used as universal remote controls). I’m not sure how many people still have one, but I found this pretty cool piece of software called The Missing Sync for Palm OS which lets you sync all kinds of information between your Palm and your Mac, including music. There are different conduits for contacts (which has been greatly improved with the latest version), events, photos, tasks and more. Some interesting ones including the aforementioned iTunes sync which will copy your music over to your Palm, but even better, backup and folder sync conduits so you can use your Palm device as a portable backup medium. The Missing Sync for Palm OS is available only for Macs, and will cost you about $40 USD for the electronic download.

A lot of websites embed audio and video files into their webpages to make it a little more difficult to download (though of course, it’s not). There are various ways to download an embedded file, but the easiest, at least if you use Firefox, is a little extension called Download Embedded (clever, huh?). Once installed, all you have to do is right-click on the Flash animation, movie, or any other file and select the proper option to have the extension download it automatically for you. Definitely much easier than the old way of looking through the source code, huh? Download Embedded is free, and will work on all versions of Firefox up to the 1.5 release candidates.