Just over a month after the first release candidate made its ways to the masses, Songbird 1.0 is available for download. Songbird is an open source music player built on Mozilla code.

The cross-platform music player comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, and can handle playback of most music formats. Like most Mozilla-based software, Songbird supports plugins, including a QuickTime Playback plugin that adds the ability to play music purchased from the iTunes store. There's also a plugin that allows you to sync your music with portable media players including an iPod.

Songbird is much more than a music player. It's also an online music browser. You can visit web sites using the built in browser and automatically stream or download MP3 music from those pages. And thanks to the Last.fm integration, you can get additional information about songs and artists you're playing, or stream related songs from Last.fm.

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]

FluidTunes is an app that lets you control iTunes from a webcam, using your hands, head or feet. The main screen looks like CoverFlow, with the image from your camera image lightly visible behind it. You can swipe across the album covers to navigate, or swipe the large forward and back buttons for finer control. Play is at the bottom of the screen, and stop is at the top. It reminds me a lot of the display from Minority Report.

FluidTunes can be a little bit difficult to control. It's quite responsive, but it's easy to hit a few buttons at once, or accidentally scroll past the song you wanted. Also, don't rock out too wildly in front of your camera, or you're liable to change songs with your head. For right now, Fluidtunes is an impressive showpiece, but it's not entirely practical for everyday music browsing.

Oops, there goes my entire day! I just discovered an addictive new musical puzzle game called Auditorium, and I'm trying to play though all of the demo levels. Gameplay in auditorium is centered on a flow of "audiovisual particles" that you can direct by moving and resizing different objects that are available to you. The object is to direct the flow across musical audio containers, using arrows, attract and repel symbols, and any other special tools that pop up.

The audio containers each represent a different piece of the music, and they get louder the more you fill them up with flow. To clear a level, you need to max out all of your containers, which brings the song together. There are multiple ways to solve each level -- right now, there are 3 acts, with 5+ levels each, and 20 total acts are being planned. Once you get into some of the more complex levels, you have to deal with multicolored flow, and even containers that need more than one color to fill up. It's challenging, but the freeform gameplay gives it good replay value.

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.

Wondering what to get your less-than-tech-savvy friends? On a tight budget and can't buy them a PS3 or even a single Blu-ray title? Worry slightly less courtesy this cheapskates' guide to gifting content from the internet. Not everything is budget-friendly, but almost everything on the list is a terrific value.

MUSIC

Lee wrote up a lovely list of 35 places to download free, legal MP3's back in August. If you're still intent on forking over cash for tunes (and I don't blame you), here are a few other ideas:

Rhapsody
Possibly one of the best music-subscription services on the planet. Featuring a gigantic catalog (over 4 million tracks) and awesome search, Rhapsody is a full-featured subscription service. You can also shop for MP3's. There is a free trial account which limits you to 25 tracks per month, but you'll probably want to gift Unlimited (all music, browser-based playback only, $12.99/mo.) or To Go (all music, including portable music players, $14.99/mo.).

Other subscription contenders: eMusic and Lala
Streaming awesomeness: AOL Radio and Pandora
Downloadable win: Amazon music, offering songs and albums cheaper than iTunes and higher-quality tracks free of DRM restrictions.

Open source, Mozilla-based media player Songbird is inching closer to version 1.0. This week the team behind the cross-platform application made the first release candidate of Songbird 1.0 available.

So what's new in the latest build? First up, Songbird 1.0 RC1 uses GStreamer to handle media playback whether you're running the Windows, Mac, or Linux version of the program. The Songbird team says that should mean better performance and reliability. The latest build also includes a number of performance enhancements, including the ability to import media into Songbird more than twice as fast as before.

Here are a few of the other changes/improvements in Songbird 1.0 RC1:

• Users can also drag and drop images to add album art to a song.
• Addition of new keyboard shortcuts
• Smart Playlists can be used as rules within other Smart Playlists
• Improved search speed
• Faster startup times
• Scrolling large libraries is more efficient

While this is a release candidate, which means it's a bit more stable than your typical beta software, there are still a number of known bugs and issues. You can read the complete list in the release notes.

There's no denying that Apple's iTunes Store is both well designed and chock-full of music, TV shows and movies for you to buy. It's also got a rather awesome Genius feature for playlist creation [whilst cunningly up-selling you more tunes via the Genius Sidebar]. However when it comes to buying music, a large proportion of it remains crippled (and at 128kbps bit-rate) thanks to the iTunes Store's FairPlay DRM. Sure, there's iTunes Plus: but the selection remains lacking thanks to the devious tactics of the record labels. Amazon, on the other hand has had a high-bitrate DRM-free store for sometime.

Thankfully, there's now a new option that allows you to make the most of Apple's excellent store: and then skip over to Amazon to actually buy the music: Advantageous. Simply run the Advantageous installer, and a script [added to your iTunes Script menu shown above] will take the currently-selected track from the iTunes store, open your default browser and load the relevant Amazon search page.

It's a neat, and above-all free, timesaver that may just provide an incentive for iTunes Store addicts to go DRM-free. Advantageous requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and iTunes 8.

[Via BoingBoing]

I love a good price war. And it looks like Walmart is challenging Amazon and Apple to one by offering select MP3 downloads from Walmart's online music store for just 74 cents. Not every song will go for that price, but standard tracks start at 94 cents per song, which is still cheaper than music on iTunes. Amazon typically sells MP3 music for between 89 and 99 cents per song.

Walmart is also rolling out improved support for web browsers that aren't Internet Explorer and operating systems that aren't Windows. You can now download MP3s from Walmart's web store using OS X, Linux, or Windows, Firefox, Safar, or Internet Explorer.

Walmart has a library of over 3 million DRM-free MP3 tracks from the four major lables and a number of independent artists.

[via Electronista]

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]

It seems like the days of the family computer have come and gone already, and more and more people have their own individual computer to use. In my house, everyone over the age of 3 has one (plus a couple of extras), and keeping data synchronized amongst them all is a bit of a nightmare.

Our main two machines are the Macs that my wife and I use. In our family, I'm the techie one, so over the years I've spent a lot of time ripping our CD collections into MP3 files. Though she certainly enjoys listening to music, she's never bothered to do the same on her machine. The other day she decided that she should have access to all of the music that I've been dutifully ripping from our CD collection, and since 1/2 of the CDs were hers in the first place, she's right.

So, what's the fastest way to get my iTunes library over to her machine, while maintaining the song ratings and playlists that we've come up with together? I found an application called Syncopation that fits the bill perfectly.

Syncopation does exactly what I've described - it allows you to grab an entire music library from another machine over your local network. It even supports synchronizing podcasts, movies and TV shows! The process is very straightforward:

1. Install Syncopation on both the machine you want to synchronize from, and the machine you are moving the music to
2. Set your preferences; do you want to transfer videos and podcasts, or no?
3. Subscribe to the other machine that should be showing up in Syncopation's browser
4. Press the Sync button, and wait.
   
5. And wait, and wait, and wait.

Depending on how big your library is and how fast your network is, it could take a number of hours to transfer everything across. On our 802.11g network, it is taking about an hour per gigabyte transferred.

You'll have to keep Syncopation running on all machines that are actively synchronizing while they perform the transfer. Syncopation supports up to five Macs, though the trial verison only supports two, and the trial is good for 30 days. I see myself purchasing this tool when my trial period is up, because it makes keeping our iTunes libraries in sync a snap.

Buying music directly from the Amazon.com MP3 store is one of Android's coolest features. Although it might not be the "killer feature" that some were hoping it would be, it offers a great way to get quality, DRM free music directly to your device. The only downside is that you have to download music over WiFi (the iTunes WiFi Store works the same way).

As a huge music junkie (my total collection, including digitzed CDs is probably about 2 TB in size -- and that's not 2 TB of FLAC either, that's 2 TB of mostly V0 LAME MP3s), Amazon's MP3 store is easily my favorite place to buy digitial music. Although it might not be making a dent in iTunes sales figures (here's a hint - get in more countries ASAP and start offering digitial exclusives like iTunes does), its increasing selection and weekly deals and promotions continue to make it the best game in town.

So how does the Android version of the store stack up? It hits the most crucial points, but it does lack some of the finesses that could make this a real mobile destination.

Lala is back, and while it's probably better than ever, it may not be good enough. Lala started out its life as a CD swapping service. But in a world of digital downloads, that's not much of a business model. Now Lala is back as an online music store - with a twist.

You can download albums or individual tracks of DRM-free music from Lala just as you can from iTunes or Amazon MP3. The company has worked out deals with all of the major labels plus a bunch of independent artists. So while not you might not be able to find every song you're looking for, there's plenty to choose from. Individual tracks run from around $.80 to $.99.

But here's what makes Lala different. The website features a built in music player. You can listen to any song on the site for free. Once. If you want to listen again, you have to pay $.10 for a "web song." You can then listen to that track any time you want from any internet connected device that can access the website. In other words, you can buy some albums for a buck or less, as long as you don't feel the need to download the music.

To get you started, all users get 50 free credits for web songs. So you can check out the service without paying a dime. You do need to register for an account, but you don't have to give up any credit card or PayPal information, so you won't accidentally buy something without knowing about it.

So far so good. But there are a few problems. First, the service is only available in the US. Second, while the downloaded tracks are DRM-free, the web tracks can only be listened to on Lala. If the company goes under next year and you've spent $100 on web songs, I doubt anyone's going to refund your money. Sure, you could download MP3 versions of all the songs. Your $.10 per song will go towar the purchase price. But that means you'd have to pay as much as $900 just to save backup copies of the songs you've already paid for in this hypothetical example.

Finally, there are plenty of other ways to listen to music online - for free. If you want to go the legal route, there are ad-supported services like MySpace Music. And if you don't care so much about legalities, there are services like SeeqPod. While Lala does offer a nice interface and a decent music library, it's hard to compete with free.

Glue is a browser add-on for people who consume movies, books and music online. It keeps track of what you're browsing on sites like Amazon and IMDB, and lets you enter your comments about each item you're browsing, and see what your friends thought about it. The name "Glue" makes a lot of sense, because it sticks together info from multiple sites for each product. If a friend reviewed a movie on Amazon, and you're looking at it on Rotten Tomatoes, you'll still be able to see their comments.

Glue also integrates with other social networking sites in interesting ways. You can link your Twitter page to Glue, and your profile will show up in the Glue Topbar when other users visit it. The Glue Topbar would be sort of annoying if it were always on, so it's fortunate that you can click to hide or show it when you're not on a Glue-enabled site. Even if a site doesn't have special Glue features, though, you can still mark it as a favorite or leave a review of it.

So far, I think Glue is on the right track. The number of sites we use to keep track of the stuff we like is getting to be unmanageable, and a browser plugin is a smart way to aggregate all that information. As long as Glue doesn't go overboard with the potential to inject advertising into the system -- there's none right now -- it could catch on quickly.

There are plenty of ways to share music, but most of them are slow or have clunky interfaces. SoundCloud aims to be the first player in the market to catch on in a big way, by making things easy for its users. Soundcloud works like an inbox, so new songs come in from your friends (or from artists and record labels) and you can handle them all in one convenient place. You can also put a dropbox on any site (including MySpace, Facebook, and your blog) where people can click to send you a track.

I love the idea of being able to play incoming tracks selectively before downloading them, and also the idea of letting them stream as one big playlist. Sending music looks to be just as easy. You can send to an email address or another SoundCloud account, and the result looks a heck of a lot better than MySpace Music. Also, there are no file size limits!

If you're a musician, SoundCloud looks like a good place to post your new tracks. Each song gets its own URL and its own privacy settings, so you can decide who's allowed to listen to or download it. Create Digital Music says SoundCloud could be the Flickr of music, and after testing it out, I'm inclined to agree.

[via Create Digital Music]