Imagine a mashup of podcasting, Twitter, and YouTube for audio files, and you’ll have an idea of what SoundCloud is all about. It’s a social media service that lets you share original music, rambling diatribes, drunken party chatter, and other sound recordings with eavesdroppers across the globe. It’s a cool idea, but SoundCloud’s desktop Mac application lets users in on only half the fun.

A meticulously maintained iTunes library with ratings for each track lets you easily create best-of playlists to keep lame songs off your iPod. That’s great if you consistently rate music as your collection grows, but what if you’ve got a giant unrated library and no time to add stars to all those tracks? Enter AutoRate, a free application that—ahem!—automatically rates music based on current play count and frequency. Despite some limitations, it’s an easy way to start getting more from your music.

We have a serious media problem in this country. No, not the state of cable TV news—the fact that today’s mobile devices lack the storage to take all our media with us on the go. Even a mighty 64GB iPod touch can only hold so many movies. Enter ZumoCast, a free service that lets you stream videos, music, and more in almost any format from your Mac to other computers and iDevices. While its price for these features is certainly right, ZumoCast left us wanting more polish and stability.