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.

It wasn't that long ago that Napster was the dominant force in online music distribution. Of course, at that point, Napster didn't have a business model, nobody (including the record companies) was making any money off the service, and while the peer to peer network was extraordinarily popular with users, it was soon sued into oblivion. The Napster music service that eventually emerged out of the ashes was never quite as compelling, even after launching a DRM-free MP3 store last year.

But a funny thing happened today. Best Buy (which snapped up Napster last year for $121 million) came up with a business model that actually sounds pretty good. Here's how it works. For $5 a month, you can download and keep five DRM-free MP3 tracks a month. That might not sound that impressive, but here's where it gets interesting: On top of those free downloads, you get unlimited streaming access to Napster's library of 7 million tracks.

In other words, if you subscribe for a year and pay $60, you get a year's subscription to a pretty decent on-demand music service. You also get access to 60 commercial-free internet radio stations and 1,400 "expertly programmed playlists." And when you cancel the service, you'll get to keep 60 songs... which probably would have cost you about $60 anyway if you'd purchased them from Amazon, iTunes, or another online music store.

The only down side is that the streaming music service is no use on the go. You'll need a computer, not an MP3 player to listen to the streaming audio. But if the model proves successful, I wouldn't be surprised to see mobile Napster apps for iPhone, Windows Mobile, or Google Android show up. in the meantime, you can still sign up to Napster's older "Napster To Go" service which lets you download DRMed tracks to portable devices.

[via Engadget]

They're not the first band to do it, but Coldplay is the most recent addition to the ever-growing list of artists willing to give a little back to their fans.

At every remaining show in their 2009 tour, the band will give away a 9-song CD including tracks recorded during the band's worldwide Viva la Vida tour. Starting May 15th, the album will also be made available for download.

The album is titled Left Right Left Right Left and the track list includes Clocks, Viva La Vida, Fix You, and a half dozen others.

Coldplay calls the release "a recession-busting mark of gratitude to everyone who's supported [us]."

Looking for more free, live music? Check out bt.etree.org (which was in our list of 35 places to download free , legal mp3s) for a whole slew of torrents from bands who are "trade friendly."

[via Music Ally]

I've lost count of the times new audio playlist sites have popped up and been compared to the heyday of Muxtape. Comparisons are inevitable, though, when we talk about the latest -- and possibly the greatest -- in a long chain of mixtape sites that never quite seem to catch on: Mixtape.me. It grabs music from around the web, notably from Seeqpod, and does a great job of letting you make and browse playlists in an environment reminiscent of desktop music players.

You don't need an account to create a Quick Playlist on mixtape.me. You can just start adding tracks from searches and other people's playlists. Registering an account lets you add (but not upload) mp3s and save your playlists. There are also a lot of extra touches, like grabbing song info, lyrics and album artwork automatically. You can also share your playlists easily, even with friends who aren't signed up with Mixtape.me.

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]

The photo-bookmarking and discovery site Ffffound still has of the most sought-after invitations online, and it's been around for quite a while. Now there's a sister-site called Ffffoundtape that's trying to apply the Ffffound approach in the world of mp3s. To add an mp3 to Fffoundtape, you can either enter its URL at the site or grab a bookmarklet and click it when your browser is open to an mp3 file.

So far, most of the stuff shared looks to be from popular Mp3 blogs like the ones indexed by The Hype Machine. The thriving mp3-blogger community gives Ffffoundtape a strong base to work from, and since there's no searching, uploading or downloading, it might stick around longer than its predecessors, like Muxtape and Favtape. It's still up to the sites hosting the mp3s to take them down in a reasonable amount of time, so Ffffoundtape should be in the clear. It isn't the easiest thing to use, though. The bookmarklet didn't work on the first try, and you have to enter the song information by hand regardless of whether you use the bookmarklet method or paste the link.

Lately, there's been plenty of news about Google and intellectual property. First we heard (or rather, didn't hear) videos go silent on YouTube. Now we've learned that they're also targeting bloggers who post mp3 files on Blogger.com.

The problem is, some of the people sharing songs are doing so at the request of artists and their promoters. That's the case with Ryan's Smashing Life, whose story has been picked up by LA Weekly and Rolling Stone.
In November, some of Ryan's posts began disappearing. There were no takedown notices. The posts were not unpublished. They were unceremoniously deleted without warning.

What's going on behind the scenes are the same idiotic practices that have plagued the music industry for ages. The promoters push material to people like Ryan for publicity without talking to corporate muckety-mucks. The suits get mad, and blame the little guy. Google hosts the content, so the labels order them to grab the intellectual ballbat and make with the kneecapping.

In Google's defense, surely there's something in the Blogger.com TOS that permits this sort of thing, but these actions don't do anything to further Google's friend-of-the-people image.

Ultimately, though, it's the bass-ackwards business model of the music industry that continues to frustrate and inconvenience the rest of us who just want to listen to our music.

[ via Inquistr ]

Coda.fm is an excellent spin on run-of-the-mill torrent trackers and indexing services. It's been cleverly built to look feel more like someone's web store than a p2p site.

Downloads can be browsed by artist or genre, and lists of the top artists, albums, new releases, and recent uploads are also maintained. Coda's recommendation engine will also offer you other albums and artists based on your current selection. Pictured below are suggestions from the Bad Religion artist page, and I'd say they're well-chosen.

Artist bios and album synopses are presented, as is detailed information about downloads including track listings and individual files sizes. Coda also provides RSS feeds for both new uploads and new album releases.

As you'd expect, the site's footer contains the usual "don't sue us because we don't actually host copyrighted material" note. How long that keeps the dogs at bay remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, it's definitely a site worth checking out.

[ via TorrentFreak ]

I love Last.Fm, but sometimes I'd prefer to listen to songs I've chosen myself. Services like Plorf and Tagoo are one way I can do that, but the files they link to probably aren't legal and sometimes disappear from one day to the next.

Tunerec, on the other hand, may have a system that will ensure your cloud-based playlists keep working. According to the site, everything is totally legal and all it requires is a little bit of patience. Ok, a lot of patience.

How does it work? Once you're registered Tunerec will automatically begin "recording" tracks into your library. The process seems a bit slow, but only because of the sheer volume. I received my beta code yesterday and currently have 17,056 tracks available and the number is steadily climbing.

I'm assuming that the process is necessary to keep things "legal," though I can't say for certain. There's not a whole lot of information on the site about how it works.

There is, of course, a social element to the service. Invite your friends and you'll be able to subscribe to their playlists and share tracks amongst yourselves.

Overall, Tunerec works quite well. Audio quality is excellent, and I'm very happy with the songs I've got at my disposal. It's currently in closed beta, so head on over and request a code to get started!

Every now and again an idea comes along that's so brilliant and simple that you wonder why you didn't think of it first. And then there's bopaboo. The idea behind the site is that it's perfectly legal to buy a CD and then turn around and sell it on eBay or in a used record shop. So why not do the same thing with unencrypted MP3 files?

The answer, of course, is that there's little to prevent you from purchasing a single MP3 for 99 cents and then selling it a few hundred times for 50 cents, thus making a pretty hefty profit while at least theoretically depriving the people who own the original rights to that song of potential revenue.

Bopaboo says it has a way around that problem. The web site allows users to create their own web stores and set prices for song downloads. But users are only allowed to sell each song once. Bopaboo uses digital fingerprinting technology to make sure you don't upload the same song twice.

If it actually works, that technology could ensure that the site is protected by the first sale doctrine, which is the same rule that allows you to sell a CD or video game after you've purchased it. But I can think of a few dozen ways that users could quickly get around that technology, by doing things like inserting some extra silence into audio tracks or using audio editing software to slightly change the pitch of a song.

If you're interested in purchasing music for as little sa 25 cents a track you might want to register for the beta today. Because it's not at all clear that the service will still be around tomorrow.

[via CNet and TorrentFreak]

Just because you're one of those people who actually insists on paying for your MP3 downloads doesn't mean you have to pay an arm and a leg. DownloadShopper is a web tool for searching the iTunes Store, Amazon MP3 and Walmart's MP3 store. The service will show you the price for songs on each service. It will also tell you if the iTunes version of the track is available DRM-free.

You can search by artist, song, or album title. It does take a few moments to complete a search, but it would probably take much longer to search all three web stores for the songs yourself.

[via MakeUseOf]

Back in August I wrote about Screamer, a nice portable streaming radio app. KSoft's Icy Radio offers a similar experience with a couple of nice additions.

Icy Radio is completely portable - just download the zip archive and extract it to a folder. Apart from a large library of audio streams, Icy Radio includes several nice skins and streaming video support.

As with Screamer, you should expect some of the included streams not to work. After all, many of these feeds come from ad-supported sites and their owners probably aren't so keen on the idea of us listening to their music without having to view their banners.

The massive channel list is fully searchable and indexed by genre - more than 60 of them. Adding new stations is easy, and can be done one-at-a-time or in bulk from an XML file. Icy Radio's tabbed main window also sports a favorites list for your top channels and maintains a history of your recordings for easy playback.

Built-in recording supports MP3 and OGG (you'll need to download and unzip the plugin into your Icy Radio folder first). Unfortunately, video streams can't be recorded as of version 0.5.

Icy Radio is freeware for Windows only.