Your PC is an entertainment powerhouse, just waiting to be unleashed. Its talents include recording and playing music, supporting editing of audio and video files, and burning DVDs and CDs. Unfortunately, the software that came with your PC probably won't handle these tasks with maximum effectiveness. So to help you unlock your system's multimedia power, we've gathered a group of 15 downloads--most of them free, some of them try-before-you-buy--that all do great jobs.

We've chosen software in three categories: media players and burners, video software, and audio software. For working with media players, you'll find everything from Foxy Tunes (which lets you play media from within Firefox) to several superb players to Online Radio Tuner (which tunes in to Internet radio stations) to Express Burn (the best media burner you'll find anywhere).

Our video software selections include programs for saving YouTube videos to your local hard drive, for uploading YouTube videos, for editing video, for converting video to an iPod-friendly format, and for getting TV shows into your Zune.

Finally, our audio downloads offer unique tools for performing such tasks as recording music from vinyl and cassettes to your PC, and eliminating pops, hisses, and clicks.

So if you want to unlock the entertainment power of your PC, it's time to start downloading.

Media Players and Burners

Here are five great downloads designed to handle all of your media-playing and disc-burning needs.

If you spend a significant portion of your life surfing the Web while listening to music on your PC, you probably have to put up with an annoying problem: Your media player (Windows Media Player, say) is probably a rather bloated application, and all too often you must switch back and forth between your browser and your player to pause songs, jump to the next track, increase the volume, and so on.

Foxy Tunes corrects the problem. Though it runs as an unobtrusive toolbar in your system tray, it offers you a full set of media controls in the form of small clickable icons. The program identifies what's playing (including displaying the album art), is skinnable, and can be controlled via keyboard shortcuts. It supports more than 30 media players, and runs as a Firefox extension, though it also works in SeaMonkey and Flock browsers, as well as in Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client. A beta version of Foxy Tunes for Internet Explorer is in the works.

Download Foxy Tunes for IE, or download Foxy Tunes for Firefox.

Not happy with your current media player? Then it's time to switch to this surprisingly full-featured freebie. It plays many kinds of audio and video files, of course, and it also lets you rip music, burn CDs, and even record music from various incoming sources. Its built-in Internet radio player displays dozens of Internet-based radio stations.

And if confusing media players exhaust you, you'll welcome JetAudio's stripped-down interface and simple method of browsing for files. Another nice plus: You don't have to use the main player controls--a nifty little bar that appears across the bottom of your screen supports such options as playing music, ripping music, and burning CDs.

Download JetAudio Basic.