Years ago when I was first using Napster on a then blazing-fast dual-channel ISDN connection, WinAmp was my media player of choice. It's come a long way since the early days, and gone from being used by those in the know to the go-to player of more than 84 million people worldwide.

When I finally updated from my trusty old RCA Lyra to an iPod Touch, I quickly downloaded WinAmp again and let it go to work on my library. Autotagging, organizing, and syncing was a breeze.

Tonight, version 5.5.6 arrives and brings with it beefed up discovery and social features thanks to the Orgler plugin. Orgler has been available separately since May, but it's now included as part of the main WinAmp download.

Similar to Last.fm scrobbling, the plugin keeps tabs on your listening and allows WinAmp to provide discovery features. Tracks you play are automatically added to your AOL Music profile page (here's mine - keep in mind I only activated the Orgler this morning). Streaming tracks aren't currently supported, though that will likely appear in future releases. Don't feel like sharing? It's not required, so just change your options in the Orgler preferences.

3RVX is a utility that lets you control your computer's volume using global hotkeys including keyboard or mouse shortcuts. If you don't have a keyboard with volume controls on it, this can come in handy and save you the valuable fraction of a second it takes to click on the over the Windows volume icon and adjust the volume the old fashioned way.

As an added bonus, 3RVX also has a rather attractive volume indicator that shows up when you adjust the volume. The default view looks a lot like the OS X volume indicator. But you can choose from a number of skins or create your own. You can also change the global hotkeys, choose whether to show a system tray icon, and tweak a number of other settings. You can check out some of the settings in the image after the break.

3RVX is available as a free download. The developer's page is a bit sparce, but just look around until you find the installer for the most recent version. You can also check ou the documentation for more information.

[via Freeware Genius]

KissTunes is an online service that makes it easy to play and record music using your computer's keyboard. It offers three different instruments, and all the home row keys (and a few from the row above) represent notes. You can save your song, along with any comments from friends, as a .kiss file that will open from the KissTunes on any computer.

The "kiss" in KissTunes probably refers to a show of affection, but it could also very well stand for "Keep it Simple, Stupid!" KissTunes isn't a complex compositional tool, and it's not aimed at professionals. It's more akin to a greeting card, except instead of sending cheesy canned music, you play and send the music yourself. Obviously, this isn't going to revolutionize the Internet, but it's a fun idea.

Wax MP3 is a web based music player for that plays songs from Magnatune's catalog of Creative Commons-licensed tracks from independent musicians.

When you launch the website, you're greeted with a basic music player that gives you information about the song that's currently playing, download links, and the ability to skip to the next track. You can also choose a genre from a drop-down menu in the top left corner if you'd rather hear classical, folk, ambient, or another style of music. There's a pretty eclectic mix of genres, including medieval, Middle Eastern, and metal. And that's just in the M section.

You can also grab URL links that will take you directly to a song if you want to share tracks with friends. Overall, Wax MP3 provides a pretty nifty interface for finding music you might not otherwise have known about.

[via Boing Boing]

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace.

While iPods have been able to speed up audio books for some time, the latest 3.0 iPhone / iPod Touch release has added the ability to speed up (and slow down) podcasts as well as audiobooks. That's the good news. The bad news is that whatever the algorithm is that is being used to speed up the audio ends up sounding quite rough.

For podcast listeners that are not using an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are not many options for speeding up podcasts, short of doing it yourself manually with a program like Audacity.

Luckily, there's a new site that is looking to take care of this problem for us. PodShifter is a site that will allow you to enter the RSS feed for a given podcast, and it will spit out a new feed URL that will deliver podcasts that are sped up to exactly the speed you prefer. You can choose from slowing down your feed to 0.6 times its original speed, all the way up to 3.0 times the original speed, in increments of 0.2. Based on the demo MP3s on PodShifter's homepage, the sped-up audio is quite smooth.

Unfortunately, in my testing PodShifter has generated new podcast RSS URLs, but when I put them into iTunes, the audio files that I get are exactly the same speed as the originals. I was surprised that they downloaded at all to begin with, so I'm hopeful that there is processing going on in the background and a new version of the podcast will arrive that actually is sped up.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is quite likely that some podcast publishers will not be thrilled about a republishing service such as this. Larger podcasts that rely on download statistics for determining advertising rates could potentially lose track of the subscribers that sit behind a republishing service like PodShifter. And unfortunately PodShifter's site is not particularly forthcoming with information, so it's hard to determine whether they offer publishers some manner of tracking statistics properly.

In any event, the service that PodShifter provides is a very useful one, and one I hope will succeed. Now excuse me while I go refresh my podcasts to see if any of my PodShifter subscriptions have delivered on its promise.

[via Lifehacker]

Creating playlists can be tedious, and every bit of information can help. While some people maintain the ID3 tags in their MP3 files in excruciating detail, others (like me) can't seem to find the time. But when it comes to finding the tempo, no amount of manual ID3 tag maintenance will help.

If you're trying to put together a playlist that contains songs that are a similar speed, knowing the beats-per-minute of each song is immensely helpful. Luckily, there is a free download called BPM Analyzer from MixMeister that will analyze all of your MP3 tracks, and update the ID3 tags in them with exact BPM information. With that done, it's a simple matter of sorting your music library by the beats-per-minute field.

Now you can put together an upbeat energy-boosting playlist full of fast songs, a mellow playlist with slower songs, or pretty much anything you desire. And for the nerds like me, it's just another piece of information to sort and group your music by.

BPM Analyzer is available on both the Windows and Mac operating system.

[via Lifehacker]

Google is beginning to send out invites to people who signed up to try Google Voice. The service is still in private beta, but this is the first time new users will be able to gain access to the service since Google purchased the technology from GrandCentral. Up until now, only former GrandCentral users have been able to use Google Voice.

Google Voice allows users to route all of their phone calls through a central phone number. For instance, if you have a home phone, cellphone, and work number, you can link them all to Google Voice and just give out a single number to your contacts. When they call your Google Voice number, all of your phones will ring. You can also use the service to check your voicemail online, transcribe voicemails and forward them to your email account, screen calls, or perform a whole slew of other nifty features.

As part of the wider launch, Google will begin sending out invites to users who signed up to request them. New users will be able to choose a new phone number, hopefully in a local area code. Google also has a new tool that will let you try to snag a phone number that matches a word or phrase (see the image above for an example).

If you haven't already requested an invite yet, Google is still accepting requests.

After months of private Alpha testing, the Boxee team has finally released a public alpha of the Boxee media center application for Windows. That means you can now run Boxee on Mac, Windows or Ubuntu Linux. The public alpha for Windows does seem to be a bit more stable and responsive than the earlier private alpha version.

Boxee provides you with a full screen browser designed for managing and accessing internet media as well as audio and video stored on your hard drive. Over the past few weeks, Boxee has gained a ton of features through a new "App Store" which allows third party developers to create plugins for the media center.

In addition to launching a public Windows Alpha, Boxee also announced last night a new partnership with MLB.com to offer live and recorded Major League Baseball games through Boxee. Boxee has also added support for Digg, Current.tv and Tumblr.

Songbird, the open-source, Mozilla-based music player, has a bunch of new features in version 1.2 that make it worth taking a look at. The most important addition is 2-way iTunes syncing, so you can import and export songs and playlists back and forth between Songbird and iTunes. If you thought the whole point of Songbird was to keep you from having to use iTunes, this feature won't make you happy, but if you have an iPod or iPhone that you want to put music on, this is the closest Songbird gets to letting you do that.

The other new features include an integrated Last.fm radio add-on. Songbird already supported Last.fm scrobbling, but now it supports Last.fm listening, too, so you may be able ditch your existing Last.fm client and just go with this. There's also automatic library organization, which is something you might be familiar with in iTunes. It can move all your music files to one location and sort them based on artist and album metadata. Last, but not least if you're an audiophile, is a 10-band equalizer.

Royalties have been a bone of contention between major record labels and Internet radio stations for years, and now it looks like the two sides only have 30 more days to iron out an agreement. After they failed to agree by the February 2009 deadline that Congress set last year, Congress took action to extend the deadline to 30 days from last Wednesday.

Until last year, the Copyright Royalty Board had the authority to determine the rates webcasters would have to pay for songs, but a 2008 bill called for negotiation on the issue instead. What's missing from all the coverage of this extension is what happens if an agreement can't be reached by the new deadline. According to the bill -- which was passed without amendment -- after the 30 day period passes, no agreement can be reached under the existing provisions, which means the rules of the game could change again at Congress' whim.

[via AppScout]

I'm a big fan of the streaming music site Grooveshark. It's a great way to listen to practically any song and share new music with friends. EMI doesn't have any love for Grooveshark, though: the label is suing the service. It's not clear what the claims in the suit are, yet, but Grooveshark's side of the story is that they were negotiating some kind of licensing deal with the major labels, and EMI sued as a negotiating tactic.

I can see why a label would want to sue Grooveshark. According to one small label that's done business with them, Grooveshark just uses the labels' content to pay its bills, and offers little to nothing in advertising revenue in return. On the other hand, I don't know too many people who use Grooveshark as a replacement for buying a legitimate digital download of a song. You need to be online to listen, and you can't put streaming tracks on your iPod, so it hardly seems like an equivalent product.

I selfishly hope Grooveshark survives this lawsuit, because I enjoy being able to preview full tracks before I buy them. I also enjoy sharing music with my friends by embedding Grooveshark widgets or using the Facebook plugin, and maybe those friends will hear something they like and go buy an album. If I were the music industry right now, I might take those sales where I could get them.

[via AllThingsD]

Meta-iPod is a Windows app that can clean up and repair the metadata on your iTunes songs - stuff like star ratings and album artwork - with a whole bunch of useful automated features. It can find and delete duplicates and locate tracks on your computer that aren't in your iTunes library. It can also fix files that have been moved from their original location and thus unlinked from iTunes (the ones iTunes marks with a (!)).

Additionally, meta-iPod can transfer music from an iPod to iTunes, and it can transfer star ratings and play counts from an iPod too. This is really useful if you're rebuilding your music library from scratch for some reason. You might think your iTunes metadata is gone, but it's right there on your iPod, waiting to be collected with meta-iPod. Unfortunately, for Mac users, this is one instance where Windows has an iTunes-related tool the Mac doesn't: meta-iPod is Windows-only.

If you've been looking for a way to stream music from your iTunes library on the web that "just works," you should give pulpTunes a look. With pulpTunes, it's extremely easy to set up a stream at a private URL, and even password protect it. Even better, it's available on all platforms.

The basic premise of a web server for your music is pretty cool, but pulpTunes throws in a lot of other iTunes-ish perks, including AAC support, album art, and iTunes DJ support. You can also download songs from your iTunes, or share a direct link to a song or playlist with your friends. That's a lot of features for an app that's so simple to set up.

[via AppScout]

I got a chance to catch up with Aviary today at a CEA event in New York, and the first thing I wanted to know is when the company will be ready to launch its web-based audio editor. Aviary makes web-based image editing tools, but the company purchased online audio editor DigiMix in March with the intention of launching its own audio production tools. And with the recent announcement that music community site Indaba Music would be updating its web based audio production suite, I was wondering what Aviary had up its sleeve.

So here's the deal. Sometime this summer Aviary will launch its digital audio editing application. It will let users create and mix audio using a web interface. There will be a variety of sounds available to work with, or you'll be able to upload your own audio tracks. At launch you won't be able to record new audio tracks using the web interface, something Indaba Music's new suite is expected to offer.

But while Indaba music's site is built around a community of users who share and talk about music, Aviary is building an application that will have an open API that the company hopes will be used across the web. In other words, if all goes according to plan, you won't just be able to edit audio at Aviary.com, but also on other sites making use of the tools.

In the meantime, Aviary is continuing to move ahead with its image editing tools. The company recently launched an Firefox add-on that lets you right-click on any image in your web browser to edit it with Aviary. The company hasn't begun to promote the add-on yet, because it's still experimental. But it's already been downloaded over 5,000 times.

Pixelpipe defies definition a bit, but basically it's a mo-blogging / mobile micro-blogging tool that satisfies nearly every sharing feature I've ever wanted from my mobile since the first time I picked up a smartphone.

When I mention Pixelpipe to people they usually say, "Oh, like Ping.fm." Yes, yes, Ping.fm lets you update a ton of services but, Ping doesn't do video or audio -- although they've been threatening to do video for a while. On the other hand, while Pixelpipe does text, audio, photo and video, until recently there wasn't a convenient way to get your video to Pixelpipe while on the move.

Friday Pixelpipe launched a new version for Android phones, taking advantage of the newly released video recording features in Android 1.5. When I read the anouncement, I realized -- as much as I've pimped out Pixelpipe on my own Twitter feed -- I've never actually posted about it on Download Squad. For shame!

With clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android, you can send quick updates, longer blog posts, just-snapped photos, just-taken video, and audio snippets to over 75 different social services. All your favorites are there (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, 12seconds, etc.. ) along with some services you might not have used -- If you can name all the logos on the PixelPipe list, you're doing better than I am.

Added to that, Pixelpipe will do traditional, non-social sharing like uploading to any ftp server, email any address or post to just about any blog.

Pixelpipe clients for all platforms are available for free at PixelPipe's site, and the updated Android client is available via the Android Marketplace from your phone.