Internet radio stations Pandora and Last.fm have been in the news a lot over the last year for removing features - like the ability for users in most of the world to listen to free music streams. So it's nice to see Pandora launch a raft of new features, even if they're only available to users in the US.

At the top of the list of new features is support for lyrics. Pandora has partnered with Gracenote to provide lyrics for some songs. To see if lyrics are available, click the "About This Music" tab and then select lyrics. You'll see the first few lines and a link to click for the full set of lyrics, which will open in another browser window.

Honestly, I tried listening to about a dozen songs this morning and Pandora only managed to find lyrics for two. So this feature is clearly still a work in progress. But it definitely shows promise.

Pandora has also added a new "gift" option that lets you create a custom station by selecting up to 5 artists and songs and sending it to a friend with a message. It's sort of like a somewhat randomized mix-tape.

If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using TuneUp, which we took a look at a couple of months ago, is probably as painless as it's going to get. The application is available to the public starting today. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a great UI. There were a few kinks here and there the first time we used it. It crashed every time we tried to save the track information for a few songs, although strangely enough, it always happened with tracks we wouldn't admit to owning.

Drag up to 50 or 60 songs from your iTunes library into TuneUp and it automatically starts looking up the track information using Gracenote. You can either save the information for each song individually, or save them all in one go. TuneUp is extremely accurate, but we would definitely advise you to scan through the results as some of the more obscure singers aren't in Gracenote's database. The drawback we highlighted last time hasn't been solved. Even if two tracks appear on the same album, but also on other albums, TuneUp won't necessarily group them together. On the other hand, we were impressed with its ability to differentiate between studio and live tracks.

TuneUp will also dig up the missing cover artwork for your collection in minutes, provide links to videos on YouTube and album recommendations from Amazon depending on what you're listening to, and concert notifications from StubHub depending on what's in your library. TuneUp, despite being in its early beta stages, is already so good, it's worth the hassle of having to use a bloated program like iTunes. The free version of TuneUp limits you to fixing 500 tracks and finding 50 album covers, and an unlimited version of the program is available for an $11.95 annual subscription or a one-time payment of $19.95.

MetroLyrics, one of the largest online sites to search for and find song lyrics, has just announced the addition of Gracenote's catalog of lyrics into its existing database.

In case you didn't know, Gracenote is currently the largest database of licensed (read: accurate) song lyrics out there, and has agreements with the big dogs: EMI, Universal/BMG, Sony/ATV, and Warner/Chappell. That last line included the most forward slashes we've ever used in a single sentence. Ever.

In its humble beginnings, MetroLyrics was mainly driven by community submission, meaning an individual would submit lyrics to a song that he or she liked, and then the community would rate the accuracy of those lyrics. Of course, because none of these submissions were authorized by the music companies, they were probably infringing on some sort of copyright. Worse still, their accuracy could never be completely assured.

After all, how could you know for sure that you downloaded the correct lyrics to "It's the end of the world as we know it" by REM? How would you know whether this line reproduced here:

Right you vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light,
Feeling pretty psyched

Was correct or not?

Don't we already live in enough uncertainty?

The inclusion of the Gracenote catalog is a boon for MetroLyrics and its users. We're not sure at this point how MetroLyrics intends to monetize their site; including the Gracenote catalog seems to imply that the artists will get proper compensation for the use of their creative output, and it's not clear whether that compensation will come from online advertising or from the users themselves. Only time will tell.

(Thanks for the tip, Alan!)

Quintessential Music Player aims to be your one-and-only digital music jukebox and library. With its small footprint, skinnable interface, plug-in architecture, and wealth of support for all digital media formats, Quintessential is quite a suitor.

Here are the highlights:

Playback
Quintessential supports a massive variety of popular audio and video file types, including mp3, mp3 PRO, Ogg Vorbis, WMA , CD, ASX, AU, and much more

Ripping and Encoding
You can convert your CD audio or existing media files into any digital audio format, including Ogg Vorbis, LAME, WMA, etc...

Gracenote CDDB Support
The Quintessential Player uses the Gracenote CDDB Music Recognition Service to fill in artist, album and song info. But if you really want to get detailed, you can expand the incoming data to include up to 30 fields, such as track-level songwriting, production, playing credits, release date, label, genre, and more.

Extensible, open architecture
Quintessential is a small package; the developers wanted it that way. Once Quintessential is installed, however, you can customize and add on to the player to your heart's content. Add visualizers, custom skins, language packs, specific audio encoders (such as LAME), library/playlist functions, all available as free plug-ins from the Quintessential website.

Quintessential Player is a free download for Microsoft Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista. Build 120, just released, adds some bug fixes and new plugins.