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Have you ever needed to convert some media file to another format? It might be images, audio files, or some video thing. There are just so many different formats, and most applications are limited in the formats that they support. Having an all-in-one solution might come in handy.

SUPER, the Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer, claims to be just such a solution. With a huge number of different formats supported, it shouldn't require Herculean effort any more to convert between any of the supported formats. All the necessary codecs are built in, so you can spend your time converting files, instead of looking around for more plug-ins and add-ons to really make the software work for you. You can even rip video files to audio, grabbing the sound for your MP3 player.

SUPER, the Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer, is a Windows app, and it's compatible with most systems.

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Are you interested in all things astronomical? Can't afford to finance your own visit to the Hubble Space Telescope? The folks at Microsoft may be able to give you a hand.

No, they're not going to send you up on the next Shuttle mission, but they do have a "virtual telescope" that you can download. The WorldWide Telescope is a "visualization software environment" that lets your system act as a telescope, using images collected from any number of terrestrial and space-based telescopes. You can take advantage of the images they have, as well as going on a "guided tour", presented by scientists from some of the country's preeminent observatories and planetariums.

WorldWide Telescope is a Windows application. You'll need Windows XP or Vista as well as version 9 of DirectX and .NET Framework 2.0, and because of the large amount of data involved it won't hurt to have as fast an Internet connection as you can get your hands on.

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Can't get enough YouTube? Whether it's the latest viral video, some slick "how-to" program, or any of a zillion other types of content, we've all grown addicted to YouTube. Here's a tool that helps you download YouTube videos to your machine, so that you can enjoy them again and again.

Free YouTube Downloader does exactly what the name suggests: it enables you to grab those videos and save them locally. Just copy and paste the URL of the content you want, and press the button. It couldn't be easier. It supports multiple downloads as well—just type several addresses into the box, each on a separate line.

Free YouTube Downloader is a Java application, which means that it will run on Linux, Macintosh, Windows, or just about any other platform that has Java Runtime Environment Standard Edition, with Java version 1.5 or better.

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Pretty as a picture. Or several pictures.

You've got an extensive music collection on your system. You can listen to tunes for a couple of weeks nonstop with no repeats. But are you getting the full experience?

Back in the day, albums came with a 12-inch square piece of art. The cover art on record jackets helped everyone to enjoy the experience even more. With the advent of the CD, this was scaled down considerably, but you could still look at the pretty pictures while you listened to the tunes. With MP3s and other downloadable music, this totally goes away.

MP3 files allow you to associate images with them, but of course you have to go out and get those images. Tools like Album Art Aggregator may help you in that quest. This application looks through your music collection, sees what you've got, and then goes out hunting for the corresponding art to go with your music.

Album Art Aggregator uses Amazon's collected cover art to find the images for your music. Because of limitations in their API, you can only search for one album at a time, but it's still faster than having to do all the digging yourself.

Album Art Aggregator is a Windows app. It also requires the .NET Framework version 1.1.

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Tired of Guitar Hero? Beat all the songs and looking for something more? How about playing a real guitar?

TuxGuitar is a multitrack tablature editor and player. You can write, edit, and play tracks and songs. With its graphical interface, it's easy to add notes, rearrange them, lengthen or shorten, and so forth. You can use multiple instruments, allowing you to write and arrange for the whole band at once. With its ability to use both regular five-line musical staves or tablature to represent the notes, it doesn't matter whether you can read music or not.

You can vary the speed of song playback, so that you can play along on your own Strat or ES-335. The "speed trainer" function allows you to practice by playing back a passage that you're learning ten times, gradually increasing speed as you become more confident.

TuxGuitar is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

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Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of like for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

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Orbit Downloader is a tool you can use to download files off the Web. Along with plain-old garden variety text and application files, Orbit downloader excels at grabbing "social" content: music and videos.

Found an exciting new video on YouTube that you've just got to have? Orbit makes it easy to save that movie off to your local machine, without having to go through a bunch of extra gyrations. Hover your mouse over the movie, click on the pop-up "GetIt" button, and away you go. In most cases, Orbit can handle interrupted downloads, in case things go awry.

Orbit works for music downloads as well. Interfacing with Pandora, MySpace, and other music sites, you can grab audio as easily as you can video. In fact, just about any streaming content is fair game for Orbit Downloader.

Orbit Downloader work with IE, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. It requires Windows NT/2000 or later.

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What would you get if you took iTunes and made it better? It might look something like musikCube. Built on top of a sqlite database engine, musikCube is fast as well as flexible. Featuring "dynamic playlists", musikCube actually learns what you listen to, and then gives you more of it.

You can import your music collection by telling musikCube where to look–give it a list of directories or other locations where you usually keep your music–or you can add tracks manually by either browsing to files or using drag-and-drop. Of course, you can also rip from audio CDs to get music in there too. You can easily transfer your music between home and work computers using thumb drives or MP3 players, which sure beats carrying a pile of CDs on the bus.

When you want to expand your horizons beyond your own music collection, musikCube allows you to listen to streaming audio as well.

musikCube runs on Windows systems.

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Okay, the truth is out: we all love Legos! There's always been something very satisfying about the look and feel of those little plastic blocks. From the simplest construction–look, I made a cube!–to complex animated beasts, everything just kinda' looks cool when it's made out of Legos.

In fact, the only real drawback with these little Danish blocks is when you step on them in the middle of the night. There is nothing in the world as sharp as those little plastic corners at 4:30 in the morning when you've just GOT to go.

Logo Digital Designer protects you from that danger, while giving you much of the fun of the Lego experience. Whether using a pre-built model as a starting point, or just starting with a blank screen, you can build just about whatever you want. The Camera Control lets you rotate your virtual model, and to zoom in and out, getting a better view of your handiwork from all angles. You have an unlimited number of bricks, so you'll never run out. Once you're done, you can check the Price Window to see how much your project would cost if constructed with real Lego bricks. Heck, you can even click through to the online store to buy them right now.

Lego Digital Designer is available for Windows (XP) or Mac (OS X 10.3+).

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Are you an air guitar aficionado? Do you lust after that sunburst Strat hanging in the music store window? If you've got a computer keyboard, this may be your lucky day.

Frets On Fire is a keyboard-based guitar playing game. Using a combination of Function keys and the the Enter key, you play along with individual notes and chords to rack up a big score. You can start at Easy level to learn the moves; graduate to Medium as you gain confidence, and eventually you'll be at Amazing, shredding with the best of them. There are tons of songs available, or you can import from Guitar Hero, or even create your own songs.

It may not be time to quit your day job yet, but with Frets On Fire, you'll feel like that big recording contract is just around the corner.

Frets On Fire is available for Linux, Mac (x86 processors), and Windows.

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