Online music sites Pandora and Last.fm do a great job of providing you with streaming music you might like based on your listening history. But what they don't do a great job of us letting you listen to any song you want at any time. That's because music labels actually want you to do things like you know, go out and buy the songs.
But in this new information age, practically any song you could ever want to hear has been uploaded to one web site or another. All you need to know is how to use search engines like Google to find them. And that's where music search engines/players like SeeqPod come in. The site doesn't actually host any audio, it just provides the means to play audio hosted on other sites. So while the music may kind of sort of be illegally hosted, SeeqPod isn't violating any laws.
Favtape combines some of the best features of Seedpod and Pandora and Last.fm, with a whole lot of muxtape thrown in for good measure. Here's how it works. You visit Favtape.com, enter your Pandora user profile or your Last.fm username and Favtape will find your favorites and/or bookmarks. It will then create a playlist out of those songs by tracking down the music from other sources online.
The upshot is that you should get a playlist with up to 10 songs that you've already said you like, and you can hit the play button to listen at any time without any of the limiations imposed by Pandora or Last.fm. The downside is that sometimes Favtape will think it found your song when in fact it found another song with a similar file name. See that BNL link above? Yeah, when we clicked play we got some song we'd never heard before and didn't particularly much care for.
There's no shortage of music recommendation engines. Whether you want to find music from artists that sound like Madonna or Meat Beat Manifesto, all you have to do is hit up Pandora, Last.fm, or a similar site and pop a name in the box. If the web site starts playing a song you like, you give it a thumbs up, while a thumbs down should help the software avoid playing music that makes you want to throw up in the future.
But one thing that Pandora and Last.fm have in common is that most of the music they play comes from major label artists. If you want to find music from independent artists, you might want to check out StumbleAudio. The web service uses a music recommendation image engine much like the other sites. But all of the artists are independent acts, which means they're either unsigned or signed to smaller labels.
If you find an artist you like, you can flip through the tracks on their album and listen to full length audio streams. Or you can click on the links on the side of the page to purchase digital downloads or physical CDs.
StumbleAudio currently features over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. We found the recommendations were decent, but not exactly spot on. For example, the service claims it was able to find 388 artists that sound like the Allman Brothers. As far as we can tell, it actually found about 5 or 10 southern rock/blues bands, and a few hundred artists that sound nothing at all like the Allman Brothers.
It can takes a lifetime of schooling and practicing to learn how to write music. But why do you have to write music the traditional way? Is there really a need to learn the theory behind music? Maybe it's time to start drawing music.
With HighC, you won't need any formal music training to write your first piece. All you need is a mouse and the ability to drag it across the screen.
Of course when we tested it we had dreams of creating something that would ride Billboards Top 10. Unfortunately, it turns out that what we created sounded like a twisting knobs on an analog synth at the beach and nothing like the next club hit.
No matter how hard we tried, everything we made sounded a bit more atmospheric than anything danceable. But HighC never claimed that it would make dance music and is probably used for more for the creation of sound textures.
So if you're into musical experimentation give HighC a try but if you're sights are set on winning a Grammy better get back to that theory class you skipped out on.
The newest version of the VLC media player isn't ready for the streets yet, but if you're they type who doesn't mind risking your precious computer for the sake of satisfying a primal curiosity for experimental software, the pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 is now available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, anybody with a Windows 98/ME or OS X 10.3.9 machine is out luck since such technology is no longer socially acceptable as those operating systems are no longer supported.
It now supports Last.fm (AKA Audioscrobbler) straight out of the box disk image, so it'll update your Last.fm account as you play music through VLC. To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber, but don't forget to visit Control interfaces to check the box labeled "Submission of played songs to Last.fm."
Other changes also include better tag support, more subtitle support, improved mouse gestures, album art support, Shoutcast TV listings, and a lot more that we don't want to bore you with, but you're more than welcome to check out the whole list on the VLC forums.
Free media players for Windows are a dime a dozen these days. Or umm, no dimes, because they're free. But while some media players try to set themselves apart from the crowd by piling on the features, Evil Player goes the opposite route. This media player has the simplest interface we've ever seen. Yet it still has most of the features you could need including support for streaming audio, global hotkeys, and playlists.
What Evil Player doesn't include is a flashy player window. There aren't even dedicated play, pause, stop, forward or rewind buttons. To access most features you either need to right-click on the player window or on the system tray icon.
You have a choice of installing Evil Player or downloading an installation-free file which you can run from any directory or load onto a flash drive. Our favorite not-quite hidden feature? When you install the application one of the language packs you can choose is called "Elmer Fudd." We'll let you figure out what it does.
VirtualDJ is one of many mixing applications out on the market today. But what separates it from the rest is that it combines some nice features to help beginners as well as pros get the most out of their mix.
The greatest feature we like about VirtualDJ is that it displays the actual waveform of the music. This allows you to see the musical beats, giving the user greater accuracy when mixing two songs together. Also you can see breaks in the music, which gives you some key points to where you might want to mix in another song.
In addition, VirtualDJ also tries to figure out the tempo of each song and gives you indicators along the bottom edge of the waveform that act like visual aids to help you mix. And if you just can't get both songs playing in tempo, it also provides you with a sync button that will stretch the new song to fit the tempo of the current song.
We did notice that the accuracy of the tempo matching feature depends largely in part to the type of music. Your standard disco style beat gives more accurate results than one with more a more complicated drum pattern as it tend to throw off the system.
Other notable features include a built in sampler so that you can make loops on the fly, audio effects, scratching via the virtual turntables and cue points. These cue points are saved to a VirtualDJ file, so that each time you load up a specific song you can go directly to the cue point saving time in locating certain parts in the music.
VirtualDJ is available for both Windows and Mac operating systems and should be seriously consider for those wanting to dabble in electronic mixing.
We've covered several apps that integrate with the social music platform Last.FM, and we've expressed our worries about what might happen to the site when it was bought by CBS. As it happens, though, Last.FM has only gotten better lately. And now that they've released a shiny new version of their public API, we're hoping for more development on the downloadable app front.
Here's the skinny on the new API features: there's now read/write authentication for desktop, web and mobile apps, which, besides being essential for any service that logs your music listening, sets the stage for -- dare we hope? -- a killer Last.fm app for iPhone. The API will also allow apps to access search functions and make playlists, which means easier access to Last.FM's growing library of free streaming tracks. Scrobble on, amigos.
Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer.
This baby is free and it's available for Windows AND Mac and it comes from unFun games. Yay.
Don't have any music writing chops? No problem, neither do we. It makes fun noises and has cool Mario icons. 'Nuff said.
The default song when you load up Mario Paint Composer is a jazzy version of your favorite video game theme song ever. But it's up to you to write the next masterpiece.
And not just any masterpiece, you get to use pigs and cats and hearts.
Best part is that when the app is loaded, everywhere you click on your computer, the sounds follow. I like hearing a nice Yoshi sound when I click on an email or on iChat.
unFun built an interface for you to lo in and download all the songs you want, for your personal listening and partytime enjoyment, but it took forever to log into the system, so we wouldn't hang our hats on that feature.
If you listen to a ton of music and the word "scrobble" is part of your vocabulary, you'll get a kick out of Lastgraph. It's a service that generates interesting visual representations of your Last.fm listening history. You can view a sweet line graph of your listening to a given artist, or you can generate some snazzy posters of your overall listening.
The posters are pretty huge and take quite a while to render, but you can actually print them out as some stylish, informative wall art. If you don't need something that huge, there's also a smaller version available through the quick timeline feature. You can also export your data as an Excel file, a CSV or JSON.
It's hard to take a site called Worry About You seriously, especially when they claim that their search engine will direct to you to over 15 million songs. In an attempt to overlook the bizarre name choice, we're just going to refer to it as WAY from now on because Worry About You is possibly the most irrelevant Web 2.0 name in history.
Despite the fact that they might be prone to exaggeration and might need a lesson or two in brand marketing, the site works pretty well. We tried a bunch of different searches, from obscure eighties one-hit wonders to every cover of Wild Horses we could lay our hands on and WAY always delivered.
They give you the choice between streaming the song or downloading it, not that we're encouraging the latter. The site follows in the footsteps of countless other web-based mp3 search engines that are anything but legal, but it doesn't really differ much from its predecessors, apart from offering the service in six languages.
RealNetworks has launched a DRM-free MP3 music store. The Rhapsody MP3 store has music from all four major labels, with over 5 million tracks available for download. Most songs are priced at 99 cents, and most albums cost $9.99. That's about the same price that Apple charges for DRM-free AAC audio files, but a bit more than Amazon MP3 charges for many songs and albums.
All songs will be encoded at 256kbps, and will be playable on any device that can handle MP3 audio. RealNetworks isn't killing off its DRM-restricted music service, but rather, plans to have the two services peacefully coexist. You can pay $12.99 a month to stream unlimited music to your computer, or you can pay per download to save songs that you can play forever.
RealNetworks is also rolling out a service that will let Verizon Wireless customers download music for their handsets. For $15 a month, users will be able to download an unlimited number of songs (with DRM) on a Windows PC and sync those songs with their cellphone. Currently seven handsets are supported, with several more coming soon.
The Rhapsody MP3 store is offering a $10 credit to the first 100,000 customers who purchase an album by July 4th. You need to sign up for an account and fork over your credit card information to qualify. But hey, free music, right?
Rifflet is the perfect meeting ground for musicians without a muse. The site allows users to upload snippets of music, up to 60 seconds long, and offer them up to the community to do what they want with them.
The 'rifflet' can be as simple as a drum beat or bass line - as long as it gives another musician something to work with. When you find a 'rifflet' that appeals to you - you can finish it off, remix it, slap some lyrics on it - whatever you want. Anything uploaded on Rifflet is under the Creative Commons license, so whatever you come up with. Users can also share the final product since the 60 second limitation isn't enforced on the actual upload size. Not only does Rifflet target musicians, it also targets DJs, who can take the bits and pieces posted on the site and put them together any way they like.
The musical elitists in us thought that, since the site is open to pretty much anyone, it would be strewn with sorry excuses for songs, but we were pleasantly surprised with the quality and variety of music on the site.
Amazon offers one of the most compelling iTunes competitors around right now. The online retailer offers music downloads from all four major labels. And unlike Apple's iTunes, Microsoft's Zune Marketplace and other digital music stores, Amazon MP3 offers DRM-free music at reasonable prices. There's just one problem -- the service doesn't work outside of the US. Yet.
For months, Amazon has been saying that it plans to go international. Now it looks like the company is taking the first steps. The Telegraph reports that Amazon MP3 officials visited London last week to meet with record label execs. It's possible that Amazon could launch a UK version of its MP3 music store by the end of the year.
Qbox is a search engine/media player combo that lets you find and listen to music available from social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube. The interface is a bit more complicated than it needs to be. If you just download the standalone media player for Windows, you'll be told that you need to sign in if you want to search for music.
Search results are displayed in your default web browser, which is odd because the Qbox media player acts as sort of a stripped down browser for playing web audio and video clips. Don't ask us why it won't display search results.
Now here comes the important part: Qbox is not compatible with Firefox 3. If you conduct a search from the media player or the web site using Firefox 3, you'll get a list of songs. But when you click the play buttons next to those songs, you'll be told that you haven't installed the Qbox media player if you're using Firefox 3. When we logged into the web site with Internet Explorer, everything worked properly. But when we tried to search from songs from the media player interface, the results were again displayed in our default browser, which was Firefox 3. There doesn't seem to be a way to select your prefered browser from within the software.
You can also click on genre tags to browse for songs within the media player itself. Qbox is currently available as a public beta, so it's possible the company could improve the interface and adds Firefox 3 compatibility.
Back in 2006, Microsoft decided to kill its MSN Music store. But MSN Music customers didn't have anything to worry about, because the songs they'd already legally purchased would be theirs to play forever. Sort of. In April of this year, Microsoft announced that it would be pulling the plug on its DRM servers for MSN Music. That meant that once you authorized your purchased music you'd be able to play it to your hearts content on your existing computer. But if you want to buy a new computer and transfer your music collection to the new PC, you're out of luck.
Needless to say, this was not a popular decision. And now it looks like Microsoft has reconsidered. Rather than shutting down the DRM servers in August, the company plans to keep them up and running... through at the end of 2011. Microsoft may decide to keep offering the service after 2011, but nobody's making any promises at this point.
We can understand why Microsoft would want to shut down the DRM servers. The company isn't making money by selling music through the MSN Music store anymore. So why waste the money on keeping the servers up and running? But that's the problem with DRM -- it doesn't go away. So if you're going to commit to selling music that comes with a set of heavy restrictions, you'd better be prepared to offer long term support.
VirtualDJ
