Fixes for News, Work, Music Overloads

Even good things can become unmanageable at times. Let's look at software to cherry-pick the news, organize your projects, and unearth forgotten gems from your music collection.

The News You Need

We're all awash in news. Reduce that flood to a trickle limited to just the topics that interest you with FeedDemon, a longtime, popular RSS reader that's now available for free.

FeedDemon's dual-pane, tabbed interface lets you easily navigate RSS feeds and read news items. The well-chosen default selection of feeds ranges from fluffy entertainment gossip to serious news.

You can also save items in Clippings folders and instruct FeedDemon to keep an eye out for articles you might like. If you prefer offline reading, you can have FeedDemon prefetch the feeds for later perusal.

With so many RSS feeds, it's easy to oversubscribe, so you may appreciate the Panic Button, which deletes all news older than a number of hours or days that you specify. Think of it as a life preserver. Free.

The Mountains of the Mind

You need to marshal your thoughts--but Roman-numeral outlines are too linear, and so-called mind maps are too flat. With 3D Topicscape Lite, you can build three-dimensional maps of your projects and fill in the necessary information. Then you can "fly" over your mental landscape, zooming in and out, changing the angles, until you home in on what you need.

3D Topicscape depicts topics as 3D cones. The parent topic dominates the area like a mountain, with child topics as hills around it and their children around them. You drag and drop files, links, and archived Web pages into any topic, compiling a list that organizes your resources without moving files around.

Making sense of messy connections is 3D Topicscape's forte. If a topic is related to others, you can associate it with more cones. Forget what's associated with what? Click any instance of the topic in question, and a glowing white dot appears over its associations.

After watching the short demos, you'll need only a few minutes of using the program to get comfortable--and then addicted. 3D Topicscape Lite is a powerful way to store, explore, and retrieve all kinds of information. Free trial, $50 to keep.

Mine Your Musical Gems

A good playlist is a work of art. But any hard drive full of music is bound to harbor neglected jewels. Mufin MusicFinder Base analyzes your collection and creates playlists based on musical criteria, not on tags or obvious associations. The bigger your collection, the more cohesive-sounding--and eclectic-looking--the playlists.

To use MusicFinder, just import your collection, select the track or tracks that suit your mood, and let the program find similar songs. You can save the playlists for later or play them right there in MusicFinder.

The program is ideal for locating great tracks hidden on uneven albums, such as movie sound tracks. For one memorable playlist I created, MusicFinder pulled tracks from albums classified as heavy metal, jazz piano, and samba. I could never have dreamed up the result on my own. Free, registration required after one week.

Did you have an interesting experience with one of these programs? Is your favorite file missing from PC World's Downloads library ? E-mail your comments to Laura Blackwell . Messages containing attached files will be deleted unread.