Aliases are custom commands which can replace a longer command or a group of commands, thus making it faster and easier to execute particular tasks by only typing a few characters. For example, one can only type upgrade instead of typing sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get upgrade and upgrade his Debian-based system. Aliases are very useful time-savers.

This guide focuses on showing you how to manipulate and convert various audio files using tools included in the Ubuntu repositories.

If you've installed Ubuntu Karmic since it's Beta like me, you probably have a lot of unused Linux Kernel headers, images and modules. Actually, even if you did a fresh install of the final version, you should have a few of those which you no longer use.

Twidge is a command-line microblogging client for Twitter and Identi.ca. It is designed to be useful when you're sitting at a shell prompt.

While I prefer TTYtter, Twidge may be easier to use and also can be install with just one command.

MediaInfo is a free, open source and multi-platform (works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) application which supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file, which we are going to use to create .nfo files.

Plowshare is a command-line downloader and uploader for some of the most popular file-sharing websites. It works on UNIX-like systems and presently supports: Megaupload, Rapidshare, 2Shared, 4Shared, ZShare, Badongo, DepositFiles and Mediafire.

A shell is a command interpreter which allows the user to interact with the computer. The way things work is simple: the user types in commands, the shell interprets them and performs the tasks it was asked to do, and finally it sends the result to the standard output (which is usually the screen).