A Nowadays we think nothing of ripping our music from its CD-based roots and rehousing a huge library of tracks onto our computers to cram it onto a tiny MP3 player. So it’s a relief to welcome a wave of cool new tools that let you mix, match and share your tunes in ways that help restore some of the emotional vibe of those old vinyl and tape collections.

The latest of these is the Filter (www.thefilter.com), a cute little program that lets you build mood-based playlists fine-tuned to your tastes and those of others like you. The beauty of this free software is that it cuts out a lot of the guesswork in selecting the best track for the moment — no more “party mix” disasters.

The downside is that it currently works only with Apple’s iTunes player software (www.itunes.com), and Windows XP, although the company claims to be working on a Windows Media Player version.

Of course, iTunes itself has a pretty neat set of playlist features, including a simple recommendation engine that tries to sell you music downloads from Apple’s online store based on your offline playing habits, but all these features are still fairly rudimentary. And if you want to export your playlists to other software or non-iPod music players, you will need to use a third-party software product like iTunes Publisher (tinyurl.com/qhwdv) because Apple still refuses to help.

If you really want to make the most of your musical tastes, you’ll need something like MoodLogic from www.moodlogic.com. This £21 program features a mood-tagging system that uses the recommendations of thousands of users to create and store playlists of all your tracks automatically. Not only that, but you get the chance to fine-tune these lists by such factors as tempo or year, as well as the usual categories of upbeat, romantic, sad and suchlike.

Once you’ve created a playlist you like, you can download it to any of a wide selection of players, or even burn it to CD. MoodLogic features a staggering 3.6m song fingerprints in its database, which should be enough for all but the fussiest music fans.

Music recommendation systems are a hot technology at the moment, driven by broadband and the increased power of computers. One of the best services is Last.fm (www.last.fm), a free system that works with your computer’s music player or iPod to categorise your playing habits and build up a profile you can share with others. It also provides a superb “recommendation radio” service to help you find new music based on your tastes.

Another excellent tool in this genre is Pandora (www.pandora.com) which makes use of a massive online database of user-categorised music and is eerily accurate in suggesting new music you might like based on your favourite artists.

Finally, one of the best products for managing your digital music library is Winamp (www.winamp.com), veteran music software from way before the iPod era. The basic version is free but the full-featured edition costs £7.85. The real strength of this program comes from the thousands of free plug-ins you can download and install to add extra functions to the basic player and its music library features. Voice control, easy tagging tools and powerful utilities to let you move your music to and from various music players are merely some of the goodies lurking on the download pages.

Do also remember one thing. The more effort you put into tagging your tracks accurately, to give them a clear identity, the more benefit you’ll receive from these clever automated tools. Enjoy!