Filed under: Audio

UltraViolet, with its prehistoric-looking ooh-Web-2.0-reflection!! logo, is about to make a big splash in the world of content distribution. If you thought the days of DRM were behind us, you were wrong. Unless you're using an Apple device, actually -- but more on that in a moment.

Be it music, movies, TV shows or books, UltraViolet has enough clout (some 60 major partners) to significantly alter how digital goods are consumed. Ostensibly, UV is a DRM platform, but because the technology will be ubiquitous and omnipotent, 'you won't even know it's there.' It's quite intelligent in its operation too: somewhere, in the cloud, there is a database that stores all of your digital purchases. When you insert a disc (or open a downloaded file), your credentials are checked before the file plays.

Developed by DECE, with partners like Sony, Adobe, Cisco, HP, Microsoft and Intel, this is actually pretty big news. If this means we'll finally have full access to legally-downloadable movies and TV, UltraViolet is huge news. But most tech blogs only picked this story up for one reason: Apple isn't one of the partners. You won't be able to play UV-encoded content on your Mac or iPhone. It'll be Blu-Ray and HD-DVD all over again!

There doesn't seem to be any formal road map for adoption, so I have no idea when we will first start to see UltraViolet-enabled devices and media. Presumably an initiative this large will take some time to reach critical mass... but we'll see!

[On second glance, the UV logo has two mirrored elements -- how overkill is that?!

From the putting-a-smile-on-your-newly-awoken-face department...

The aptly named Recording Industry vs. The People blog has done a little investigative journalism and produced some fantastic figures that truly illustrate just how pathetically pointless the RIAA is. Over the course of three years, the RIAA has spent a total of $64 million in the tracking down and prosecution of music pirates. The total amount recovered by the RIAA, in the form of settlements and fines, is a paltry $1.3 million.

The RIAA, if you weren't aware, is funded by the music industry. That $64 million --instead of going to the artists -- will have instead have been handed to the RIAA to be squandered inefficiently and, looking at the numbers, impotently.

Of course, the other way of looking at it is that music pirates are putting food on the plates of these poor, useless lawyers who can't litigate to save their asses.

Spotify is still not available in the US, but it's now available on Linux. The popular streaming music service is known for its mobile apps, but there's also a desktop version, and now Linux users can take advantage of it. Lifehacker says local caching isn't supported yet, meaning everything is streamed live. That might slow things down a bit, but it still works.

The Spotify app is currently ad-free on Linux, but also only available to Premium users. It's still in the early stages, but it's nice to see a popular, much-hyped service like Spotify paying attention to its Linux userbase. Now, if only they'd hurry up and get to North America!

Apple and Google are jockeying for position when it comes to cloud-based music apps. Google has fired the opening salvo by announcing its cloud-based Google Music service, due to launch this fall, but Apple is poised to fight back with the acquisition of streaming music service Lala. New rumors from Boy Genius Report outline a pretty plausible cloud strategy for Apple that is centered around cross-device syncing and streaming from either your computer or the cloud to your device.

That fits with a recent Steve Jobs email that said Wi-Fi syncing between Macs and iPhones would arrive "someday." Cloud music storage would help Apple get around the storage limitations of its iPhones and iPads. In terms of battling Google, Apple has an upper hand with its established music business and iTunes customer base, but Google has a more established cloud operation. As MG Siegler at TechCrunch points out, the notoriously unreliable MobileMe probably won't be able to handle the massive traffic that a cloud-based iTunes would generate.

There are plenty of ways to get streaming music on your iPhone, but Rockola takes a unique approach. You can search by artist, of course, but you can also choose your mood on a color wheel and listen to music that fits that mood. Optimistic, Intense, Melancholic, and Intense are the four quadrants of this little mood circle, but you can tap wherever you like to find a balance between moods.

You can sign up for a Rockola account on Rockola's (Spanish-only) website, but it's not entirely necessary and doesn't sync that well with the iPhone app anyway.

You can't add favorites while you're listening on your iPhone (although you can click to buy a good song on iTunes). Rockola does let you add songs to your favorites via the web, though, and play them on your iPhone later. Rockola is also free, although (like Pandora) it only allows you to skip a limited number of songs at one time.

[via Mobiputing]

ExtensionFM is arguably one of the coolest extensions you can find for Google Chrome -- it's a must-have for music lovers. But if you're browsing with Chromium or a Chromium-based browser, you may have noticed that you can't listen to MP3 files in it. What gives?!

Alas, this is one of the differences between the open source Chromium browser and its semi-closed brother, Google Chrome. Many of the audio and video codecs included in Chrome aren't included in Chromium due to licensing, patents -- all that fun stuff.

Fortunately, there's a workaround -- and it's pretty dang simple. All you have to do is copy over the official Google Chrome audio/video components and paste them into your Chromium browser's folder.

Let's go!

I'm starting to feel like I'm just about the last person on Earth who hasn't purchased a streaming music service. HP is the latest to get in on the audio action, gobbling up Seattle-based Melodeo for $30 million.

While you may not have heard of the service (I hadn't until today), their site attracts about two million unique visitors per month. As TechCrunch's Evelyn Rusli points out, Melodeo's nuTsie app makes a nice follow-up to HP's earlier acquisition of Palm -- since nuTsie enables users to stream iTunes music to their mobile devices.

HP's certainly got a lot on its it plate right now -- Phoenix's instant-on Hyperspace, a possible WebOS tablet, nuTsie -- and they've got their hands in the Chrome OS cookie dough right now as well.

What do you think, DS readers? Will HP be able to produce something amazing from this amalgamation, or are you anticipating more Apple device wanna-bes?

The BPI -- Britain's equivalent of the American RIAA -- has sent a cease-and-desist order to Google, demanding that it removes links to one-click hosting sites with copyrighted MP3s from its search results.

The DMCA notice (which you can read in full at Chilling Effects) cites 38 copyrighted works that are all easily found using simple Google searches. The cease-and-desist even lists the search phrases that return copyrighted results: usher omg (feat. will i.am download, glee cast i dreamed a dream free download, lady gaga alejandro megaupload -- and so on. The BPI asks Google to remove links to UserShare, MegaUpload, MediaFire, 4shared and others.

Whether Google will remove the links or not remains to be seen. Historically, it does usually remove links to copyrighted content when asked by the copyright owners -- but rather infamously, Google still indexes BitTorrent sites like isoHunt and The Pirate Bay. It's a grey area, that's for sure. Lee tackled it way back in 2009 and there's still been little or no progress made.

As The Guardian suggests, no one really knows whether Google falls under the same umbrella as Napster or Limewire. Does the Google search engine facilitate copyright infringement? The fabric of the Internet is held together by the idea that ISPs and search engines can't be held liable for the data they enable access to -- it's the very basis of free speech -- but I'm sure it's a subject that will continue to be contested in law courts for a long time to come.

They may have had their pants sued off, but that's not stopping the half-naked crew at Limewire from making yet another foray into the digital music business. Yes, like a slobbering brain-hungry zombie that just won't die, Limewire is back from the dead and bent on taking over the world.

Well, the world of cloud-powered digital music, anyway. According to a report from Digital Music News, the reincarnated Limewire will boast all kinds of cloud integration features -- including pulling your iTunes up into the stratosphere.

"Users will have complete and instant access to their entire library and catalog across their desktop, devices, and in the cloud," said one Limewire exec. "By syncing iTunes playlists and content to the cloud, users' existing libraries are available to access and stream to a wide range of connected devices."

Well, good luck with that fellas -- and here's hoping you beat iTunes.com to the punch. It's set to launch in the cloud later this summer, in case you weren't aware.

Regardless, Limewire execs are saying the new service has been well-received by record industry bigshots. Hey, they'd have to like the new idea better than the old model where Limewire's users mostly just uploaded and downloaded songs they probably hand't paid for.

(awesome cloud icon courtesy the tutorial from FreePhotoshopTutorials.com)

I covered We Are Hunted about a month ago, but they've just undergone a fairly major overhaul. In a nutshell, We Are Hunted trawls Twitter, Facebook, P2P networks, and a whole bunch of other sources in order to figure out what music is hot and interesting right now. It looks nice -- and it works.

And now, they've added a new music discovery option, which feels just as slick as the rest of the website. You basically go through a bunch of songs and rate them. Rating is easy; it's "thumbs up/thumbs down" style (not a point system). The tracks are full-length, but as soon as you rate a track, the site skips to the next one.

Once you're done rating (or even if you just stop in the middle, like I did), the site makes a custom playlist that features some of the music you said you liked and music similar to it. The interface looks and feels just like the rest of the site and there's a large, stylish thumbnail for each song.

They've also debuted a new Community feature that lets you listen to other users' charts, and they've added an apps section that ties the site into other services like Grooveshark, Tumblr, Spotify, Boxee, etc.

Another noteworthy section of the site, which might have been there before but I've only just noticed, is the Research branch. You can download incredibly detailed PDF reports about quite a few artists; I downloaded one about Jason Mraz, and I was blown away by 48 pages of extensive data and charts that documented everything We Are Hunted could find about Mraz's online popularity. It was intense.

It all feels a bit hipster-oriented, but the recommendations are nice, it's clean, and it works. It's definitely worth a spin; I should've mentioned it in my roundup of free ways to find music online.

Windows Vista and 7 have a new audio subsystem, with lots of neat features. It is not, however, without its quirks. One such quirk is the inability to automatically change the default audio device; you must do it manually.

This means that if you have both headphones and speakers plugged into your computer, whenever you want to pipe all sound through the headphones you must right-click the volume icon, select Playback devices, go to the device you wish to set as default, right-click it, and select Set as Default Device. Sounds like fun, right? Now try doing this 5-6 times a day.

Incredibly enough, I could find no command-line utilities to automate this simple operation. I thought I might build something myself, so I started digging deeper. It turns out Microsoft seems to have done this by design; they wanted to prevent programs from changing the default audio device on users, because this can lead to a very bad experience (imagine a game which suddenly changes the audio to the speakers, when you wanted to listen to it using your earbuds).

I did try a couple of utilities which claimed to do this, but they were really bad. At this point, I did what I do every time the going gets rough: I turned to AutoHotkey. This amazing free automation program has a solution for just about anything, and indeed, AHK user Veabers already created the exact script I wanted in 14 elegant lines of code. This script toggles between two audio devices in about half a second on my system. Just hit Win+Shift+A, and you switch to the other device. Here's the whole thing:

 #+a::
Run, mmsys.cpl
WinWait,Sound
ControlSend,SysListView321,{Down}
ControlGet, isEnabled, Enabled,,&Set Default
if(!isEnabled)
{
  ControlSend,SysListView321,{Down 2}
}
ControlClick,&Set Default
ControlClick,OK
WinWaitClose
SoundPlay, *-1
return

Voila! The only thing I changed was the default key-binding, because the author's default did not work for me.

The Aviary suite of web apps is best known for its image editing capabilities, but now it's expanding its audio offerings, too, with a new beat creator called Roc. Roc is extremely easy to use and comes preloaded with 30+ instruments, from drums to guitars to pianos. Creating music with Roc is as simple as dragging in the instruments you want to use and clicking out a pattern of beats.

Roc may not be an expensive pro audio tool -- in fact, it's free -- but if you need to whip up a beat in a hurry, it'll get the job done. You can also record your voice and drop that in -- and then export the whole track as an mp3. Pro musicians likely won't be impressed, but novice beatmakers will be happy that Roc is so easy to learn. Some features can only be unlocked if you email out beta invitations to your friends, and that's a small price to pay considering the app itself is free.

Last week news broke of Rdio, the new brainchild of the Kazaa and Skype creators. Everyone was very briefly elated until they found out a) it's USA-only, and b) it's still in the middle of private beta testing. Still, thanks to the kindness of a Download Squad reader, and some network hacking (I live in the UK), I can now tell you all about Rdio! If you prefer pictures, there's a high-resolution gallery after the break.

First, it's entirely Web-based, with a very lightweight almost-no-features Adobe AIR app providing desktop access. The Web interface is seriously slick: a music player occupies the left, and fancy AJAX updates the right. Much to my delight, even back and forwards navigation works! (It's about time an AJAX site made it work...)

Second, I can confirm there's a lot of music available. Still no Beatles though! It'a a breeze to create collections, playlists, or download music. It actually feels a lot like Last.fm, but with a more responsive interface.

Third, the recommendation engine is pretty good. I wonder if they coded it themselves or licensed something from Last.fm or Pandora.

Finally... the social aspect! This really is Spotify meets Last.fm. You can see your entire music listening history (pretty cool) -- but you can also see your friends' entire history (a bit scary).

Mufin Player Pro is a desktop music player that has all of the features you've come to expect and one that you probably haven't; it can map out your entire music collection as a "visual cloud," which lets you slice and dice your tunes in some very interesting ways.

At the heart of Mufin is a sophisticated music identification engine that scans all of your tracks and isolates a variety of musical properties for each, such as percussion, "mood" (sad to happy), instrumentation, and many others. Once it knows your library, you can use it to find similar tracks (a la iTunes' "Genius playlist"). You can also use it to visualize your music in ways that iTunes doesn't come close to.

I was very impressed by Vision and spent quite some time playing around with it. I created a fairly extensive video review of the software, which you can watch after the jump. It's worth seeing in action; a textual explanation does not do this feature justice.

Mufin comes in two flavors: Free and Pro. The Vision feature is only available on the Pro version; luckily, Mufin's developers have been gracious enough to provide us with 20 Mufin Pro licenses to give away to DLS readers. If you want one, just leave a comment for a chance to win!

You have until 11:59PM EST Thursday, June 10, 2010 to enter the competition. Full terms and conditions follow.

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
• To enter, leave a comment below.
• The comment must be left by Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Twenty winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: Mufin Pro retail value of US$29.99.
• Click Here for complete Official Rules

After popularizing peer-to-peer piracy and single-handedly destroying the conventional-plastic-disc distribution channel, it's only fitting that the creator of Kazaa now plays a part in rebuilding the music industry. Enter stage left: Rdio, flanked by the creator of Skype. Sign up now, because you're going to want a piece of this pie when it leaves private beta testing.

CD sales are at an all-time low. Disillusioned consumers are fleeing to the digital realm -- where music is cheap, where music is bountiful, where music is good. And there, awaiting their arrival, is a new breed of in-the-cloud music providers. Spotify is perhaps the service that exemplifies such a business model, but Rdio looks set to blow it out of the water -- to put it another way, I think Spotify knew what was coming when it dropped its prices last month.

In essence, Rdio is like iTunes and Spotify on steroids. There are no real surprises when it comes to the feature set. It's simply taking things to the next step. It's like iTunes, only without limitations on moving your files around. It's like Spotify, but cheaper, and with better music discovery. The coolest bit is that you can see -- presumably in real time -- what your friends are listening to. I guess it's also like Last.fm in that regard.

Now, both iTunes and Spotify are certainly working on similar features, so I doubt Rdio will be unique by the time it leaves beta testing -- but it's competition. $4.99 per month for unlimited music downloads from a library of 5 million tracks is pretty damn good... and it's only going to get cheaper!