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.

Remember the panic a while back about social music site Last.FM supposedly leaking listener data to the RIAA? TechCrunch sure does, because they started the rumor, and then faced accusations of shoddy reporting from basically the whole Internet when it turned out to be false. Well, now TechCrunch have uncovered some new information that shows they were right after all ... sort of.

Last.fm's parent company, CBS, was the source of the leak to the RIAA. Last.fm didn't know about it at the time, having just turned over the data to CBS, which explains their vehement denials. TechCrunch isn't saying Last.fm lied, but they are saying that CBS duped them during the reporting for their original story, asking TC to attribute a CBS quote to Last.fm.

The reason for the link, according to Techcrunch's source at CBS, is that the requester (it could have been the RIAA, or an individual label) had the ability to hurt CBS/Last.fm on streaming rates. The source also claims that Last.fm premium accounts aren't making any profit, and the leak was made with the intent of protecting Last.fm from increased rates that could put it out of business.

No comment from Last.fm yet, but it's still early (and a three-day weekend) at their headquarters in the UK. We'll know more when they've had a chance to respond.

Last.fm has rolled out an updated version of its music player, which shows music videos for the songs you're listening to when available. And when they're not, it will show photo slideshows of the artist.

All told, the new Last.fm player gives you something to look at while you're listening to music, which is probably little more than an attempt to get you to stick around on the web page instead of opening the music player in a browser tab and then tucking it away in the background while you go and do something else. It's a lot easier to rake in the advertising dollars if you can get people to, you know, look at your web page.

The slideshow pictures come from related images uploaded by Last.fm members.

Even if you don't care about visuals, there's another reason you might want to check out the new Last.fm music player. You can now create instant radio stations by entering the names of up to three different artists instead of just one.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Internet radio service Last.fm is holding off on a plan to begin charging customers outside of the US, UK, and Germany a monthly fee to access streaming music. The move has received a fair amount of criticism, primarily from users who don't want to shell out 3 Euros a month to pay for the service.

In a blog post today, the company explains that it hasn't been able to make enough money from advertising in each country where the service is offered to support the service. Last.fm is holding off on charging subscription fees until it makes a few changes including the ability for users to purchase gift subscriptions for friends and pay for transactions using services other than Paypal.

[via Mashable]

Last.fm is apparently on a mission to tick off everyone who uses the service, one group at a time. Yesterday the company announced that it would begin charging for access outside of the US, UK, and Germany. Now Last.fm is killing support for unofficial clients that run on mobile devices.

The official Last.fm apps for iPhone and Android still work.

On the bright side, Last.fm plans to release a public API that will make it easier for developers to come up with third party clients for the service -- as long as they run on desktop computers. The API will ensure that only Last.fm subscribers can stream music. But the API will not work with mobile phones due to licensing agreements.

Responding to the predictable outcry of criticism, Last.fm updated its official blog post on the subject to suggest that some exceptions to the no-mobile client rule may be possible. But you'll need to get permission from Last.fm.

[via Gizmodo]

Online music streaming service Last.fm is about to begin charging users in all but three countries a subscription. If you don't live in the US, UK, or Germany, you'll be able to listen to up to 30 tracks as part of a free trial. after that, you'll need to shell out €3.00 each month to use the service.

Last.fm, which is owned by CBS works with thousands of musicians, labels, and others to secure the rights to stream music in the US and internationally. But either Last.fm is getting greedy, or someone at the company realized that the cost of streaming music and paying for license fees in all of those countries was too high and Last.fm needs to find some way to pay its bills.

Last.fm competitor Pandora pulled the plug on all of its international streams in 2007 and 2008.

[via Mashable]

I wrote about LastSharp a while back - it's an application developed in C# that allows you to download tracks from Last.fm. If you'd prefer an option that doesn't require the .Net runtimes, there's Last.fm Music Downloader - which is also totally portable.

Launch Music Downloader and drop in a Last.fm url - it can be a similar artists link (http://www.last.fm/listen/artist/Tool/similarartists) or global tag (http://www.last.fm/listen/globaltags/polka). Click the start button, and the playlist begins downloading to your hard drive. There are a few settings you can tweak: default save folder, album art downloading, download speed limit, and maximum number of downloads.

Files are automatically named artist - track title.mp3 by default, and the deep folder layout option will sort them into \artist\album subdirectories.

It's also worth noting that I was able to download tracks from Aupeo - even though the service isn't available to me in Canada. Finding artist links can be a little tricky, though, without access to their web site.

You might encounter some trouble downloading from Last.fm from time to time like I did, but that's something I fully expect when using an app like this. It's not really the way Last.fm intends its library to be used, after all.

[via gHacks]

I went looking for a Last.fm client for my Mac recently, and discovered that Amua is well worth considering. It passes the basic tests for a good Last.fm app: it scrobbles tracks, it lets you skip, love and ban songs, and provides access to artist, user and tag stations. It also stays out of the way in a menubar icon, and only shows its small, discreet current track display when you tell it to.

I didn't realize it at first, but Amua uses iTunes to stream songs from Last.fm. Not a big deal to me, since I have iTunes open 90% of the time I'm on my Mac. If iTunes is a dealbreaker for you, then you might need to find yourself a different player. There are reasons to stick with Amua: it hardly uses any system resources, and it supports Growl. The main improvement I'd like to see would be hotkeys for the play/pause/skip functions. The iTunes hotkeys will stop Amua, but won't get it going again or skip to the next track on Last.fm.

Last.fm has finally put up an official blog post to respond to the TechCrunch-initiated rumor that they turned over users' information to the RIAA as part of an investigation into leaked copies of the new U2 album. The post reiterates that Last.fm takes its users' info very seriously, and that they really don't have the time or system resources to start running extra data dumps, for the RIAA or anybody else. The post is amusingly titled "TechCrunch are full of shit," although I doubt anyone at Last.fm is very amused by this incident.

It also includes an interesting graph of U2's popularity on Last.fm. After the TechCrunch rumor came out, U2 plays skyrocketed. Either more people realized the new album had leaked, or they faked the metadata in protest, as several commenters at both Last.fm and TechCrunch suggested they would do.

Here's the kicker, courtesy of Ars Technica: even the RIAA says they never asked Last.fm for user info, and Last.fm never gave it to them. If you had any doubt that Last.fm was telling the truth, you don't even have to take their word for it anymore. This supposed data sharing never happened.

Incidentally, Ars also figured out how the new U2 album leaked in the first place: it was briefly available for sale on an Australian music site before they realized the mistake and took it down.

Oops! Too late! High quality, DRM-free U2 files are now all over the Internet.

Have you torrented the new U2 album? We won't tell, and neither will Last.fm, if those unreleased tracks show up on your listening profile. That's not what TechCrunch is saying, though. Earlier today, they incorrectly reported that Last.fm turned over listener data to the RIAA as part of an investigation into piracy of the U2 record. According to TechCrunch's anonymous source, "I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks."

But according to one of Last.fm's founders, commenting on the TechCrunch post, "This is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a "tip" from *one* person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11." I'm not attacking TechCrunch's reporting here, I'm just doing some reporting of my own to make sure everyone knows that this story should apparently be downgraded to rumor status, and there's no need to dump your last.fm account over it.

UPDATE: Despite it being past 1AM at Last.fm's London HQ, the Last.fm staff have posted in their forums: "Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."

If you love Last.fm and happen to have an Android handset, today's your lucky day: the popular social streaming audio service has released a client tailor-made for your device. More good news: it's free.

In addition to browsing and searching for artists and genres (and listening to them, of course), you can also find concert information and let your friends know whether or not you'll be in attendance.

As an added bonus, the app works in the background - allowing you to enjoy your favorite Last.Fm stream while staying productive with other apps.

To get the app installed, point your G1 to this page on the Android Marketplace.

[ via JKOnTheRun ]

Songbeat is a desktop application for accessing web-based music search and discovery services including Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, and Last.fm without a web browser.

When you fire up the application you're greeted with a search box. Just type an artist or song title and Songbeat will attempt to find songs from the music search engines mentioned plus a few more. Or you can click on the Station tab and enter an artist or song title to launch a Last.fm audio stream.

Songbeat lets you listen to as many songs as you want for free. But you can also use the program to download music or record audio from Last.fm. Once you hit 25 downloads, you'll have to pony up some cash to keep downloading the free music. A full license costs 19,99 Euros or $29.99 US.

There are a few kinks to be worked out. While I found the search and playback features worked fairly well, once I tried recording an audio track Songbeat went hog wild and started downloading a bunch of songs I hadn't asked for. In a matter of minutes all of my 25 free downloads were used up.

[via TechCrunch]

There are plenty of ways to find music that meets your tastes on the internet. Last.fm, Pandora, and similar music discovery services will recommend new music for you based on the songs you like. YouTube is filled with music videos from popular and not so popular artists. And music search engines like SeeqPod make it easy to find songs and videos.

Now if you take all of those music discovery methods and roll them into a ball and add about half a dozen other ways to search for, browse, and find music, you'll have Soundflavor.

We first looked at Soundflavor two years ago, but the service has come a long way since then. Here are just a few of the things you can do with the web-based music discovery service:

• Find and play YouTube videos from artists by searching.
• Browse for music by genre, decade, mood, or subject matter of the lyrics.
• Enter an artist or song name to generate a playlist of YouTube videos of similar songs.
• Embed the Soundflavor Video Jukebox widget on your social networking profile or blog.

Because the music comes from YouTube you will occassionally get a clip of some kid sitting in his or her bedroom with an acoustic guitar, but for the most part the music recommendation engine is pretty good. And hey, some of those kids with guitars are halfway decent.

Last month I wrote about mufin.com's music discovery engine. Unlike traditional music discovery services like last.fm or the Genius Mode in iTunes 8, mufin analyzes the actual musical structure of a song. This is great for music lovers because it can really open up more opportunities to discover new bands.

Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.

Today, mufin is officially entering public beta. If you missed out on the private beta, you can now sign up for the service and give it a whirl. Even better, mufin's public beta now supports both Facebook and iTunes.

Mufin for Facebook is pretty similar to the existing mufin widget for MySpace. You have access to the mufin discovery engine and song catalog from within Facebook and you can add your discoveries to your profile or share them with friends.

Last.Fm is one of the better streaming music services around, but you're probably wishing you could save the tracks it plays. Brush up on your German (or just keep reading) and grab LastSharp, and you'll be downloading in no time flat.

The download link on the author's site is just below the Aktuelle Version text (to save hassles, it points to RapidShare or you can find mirrors on Rapidspread). LastSharp doesn't require installation, just extract the contents of the rar file. As you may have guessed from the name, you'll also need the .Net 2.0 runtimes to use it.

When you launch it the first time, the interface will be in German. To change it, click the tab marked Erweiterte Einstellungen. Click the dropdown marked Deutsh and change it to English, then close and restart the program.

Log in with your Last.Fm username and password, and enter your search text - results are displayed neatly in the "Tune In" box. Downloading is as simple as checking the songs you want and marking the Continue Downloading Automatically option (otherwise you'll be grabbing them one at a time).

LastSharp has a lot of useful options, including on-the-fly normalization with MP3gain, automatic scrobbling, cover downloading, and filtering. Downloads are automatically filed in a tidy Artist -> Album name folder structure.

This is a great app for music downloaders, and I hope it sticks around long enough after this post goes live for our DS readers to enjoy it.

[via gHacks]