TuneUP is an an application designed to help keep your iTunes library more organized. While a library of only iTunes Store music will be tidy indeed, if you have acquired music from many different sources, the ID3 tags might be a bit confusing.
TuneUP works by comparing the unique sound print of each song to a database, and if new information is available, TuneUP will fix the metadata and rename your songs. It's sort of like having a genius put your books on your shelf for you. Not only does it help with naming, but the software also is able to download album art automatically with a few clicks.
While the design of this software is superb and visually appealing, it doesn't quite deliver in the area of organization. It does indeed make more coherent ID3 tags for songs, but we had hoped that it would properly shelve everything into one album each, rather than the usual album fragments, (with track 1 and 4 in one album, 2 and 8 in another, etc). Hopefully this will be refined in the final release.
TuneUP is in private beta, but we've got 100 invites to give away. Just click the link after the jump.
After successfully releasing the last Nine Inch Nails album in 100% digital format with a variety of pricing levels ranging from free to $300, Trent Reznor has decided to go all out and give away the band's new album, "The Slip" for free. You can download all ten tracks in a variety of DRM-free formats, including MP3, FLAC, M4A lossless, and even 24/96 WAV.
This latest move proves one of two things:
It's possible to give away your music for free and make money by touring, and asking fans to pay for premium content.
Trent Reznor has made so much money from music that he can affort to give away his songs for free.
While we'd really like to think that numbe one is true, there's no doubt that the second option is absolutely true. In other words, this is hardly a business model that's going to work for most struggling musicians. But it's encouraging to see the direction that some popular artists are taking when they're freed from the shackles of the major record labels.
Audio players come in all shapes and sizes, from resource hogging beasts such as iTunes and Windows Media Player, to relatively more lightweight competitors such as Winamp, MediaMonkey. And if you happen to have an iPod or some other sort of portable media player, chances are you are sort of locked in to whatever application works best with your portable device. But let's say you don't care about support for a portable player and just want a capable, lightweight player that has frills but not too many.
Meet AIMP2. AIMP2 weighs in at a mere 2.88MB, has a slightly smaller memory footprint than Winamp and can do just about everything you want except sync with a portable device. It supports anything from AAC to WMA, allows you to record radio streams, has a fully fledged library to organize your music, allows you to manipulate playlists while listening to another, and even supports a number of Winamp plug-ins. And for those who like to wake up and fall asleep to music, AIMP2 also includes a timed start and an auto shutdown timer.
Although lacking some of the features that the bigger media players may have, AIMP2 has an impressive feature set for its size. Additional skins and plug-ins are relatively scarce, but the basic skin works so well other skins are almost unnecessary beyond mere aesthetics. It has also been localized for a number of languages (the default being Russian), which makes this a very international user friendly application.
Overall, AIMP2 just feels right, and is a good alternative for anyone that is looking for something that works the way it should.
Several companies that broadcast internet radio streams, including RealNetworks, Yahoo!, and this blog's parent company, AOL owe ASCAP millions of dollars. That's according to a federal court in New York. While the court did not determine the exact amount of money owed, ASCAP estimates that the fees could climb as high as $100 million.
ASCAP stands for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and the group represents over 300,000 songwriters who are currently receiving no compensation when their music is streamed by the three media companies. This despite the fact that the radio streams are supported by advertising, which means AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! are making at least some money through their streaming music operations.
This whole issue is separate from the dispute between the RIAA and online radio stations last year. The RIAA represents recording artists, while ASCAP covers songwriters.
There are two things that make FLV.To absolutel amazing. The first is the sheer number of Google AdSense and referral ads that the developer managed to cram into a small space. But we're willing to overlook that because the other remarkable thing about FLV.To is how easy the site makes it to save YouTube videos as MP3 files.
No, you're not going crazy. YouTube deals in videos, and MP3 files are audio only. But there's a huge number of music videos on YouTube, and FLV.To will let you save the audio from those videos in a matter of seconds. Just pop in the URL of any YouTube video and the site will proces the file and spit out an MP3 which you can download and listen to. If you've already gone through the process of downloading YouTube videos as FLV files, you can also upload Flash videos from your desktop for easy conversion.
SeeqPod is a search engine for finding music on the web. But it's much more than that. Enter an artist or song title in SeeqPod and it will look for MP3s, video files, or web sites related to you term and present them in a nice clean list -- with links to play the files on the site. You can use SeeqPod without registering for an account, but if you want to save playlists you'll want to sign up for a free account.
SeeqPod has been around since last year, but we're having one of those days where we keep thinking of cool things we've never shared with you before. This morning it was the K-Meleon web browser, and now we bring you SeeqPod.
There are a few other nifty things you can do with SeeqPod, like embed audio clips on your web page or find lyrics or tour dates from an artist. Or you can even embed an audio search and playback widget on your web site.
Bear in mind, many of the songs that SeeqPod finds on the web are not exactly being legally distributed. But since SeeqPod isn't actually hosting the files itself, the company is sort of gray market and may be able to stand up against any future legal challenges. Or it may not.
CaTraxx is a music management tool that aims to catalog all of your music, from digital media to CD's, cassettes, and vinyl.
CaTraxx will automatically scan your computer for any supported audio files and import them into its music database. Additionally, you can insert your CD's and CaTraxx will scan and download the audio tracks automatically. The program has a direct connection with the CDDB database; track and album information are instantly downloaded as you import your files.
CaTraxx also functions as a basic jukebox/media player, though iTunes and Windows Media Player would be better options if all you want to do is play your music.
So what good is CaTraxx? In our minds, it's beneficial to think of the program as a database rather than a music collection. So why do you need a database of your music? Well, for example, you might need a database for insurance purposes, in case your beloved vinyl collection is usurped by a thief (or vengeful ex). The database can also keep records of who borrowed pieces from your collection and when they borrowed it, so you never lose track of a CD.
CaTraxx is available as a fully functional trial; after that, it'll set you back $40. In our minds (can we say that twice in a post?), you'd have to be pretty obsessive of your collection to shell out that kind of dough.
There are plenty of music videos on popular video sharing sites like YouTube. Some of them were even uploaded by content owners who had the rights to the videos. But many aren't, and there's always a chance that music video you bookmarked yesterday could be pulled down tomorrow.
PluggedIn is a new music video site that doesn't have that problem because are all posted with the cooperation of 3 of the 4 major music studios: Universal, Sony BMG, and EMI. Warner hasn't signed on yet, but it could in the future. The site has about 10,000 videos and they're all high quality, with many available in HD video.
The biggest problem we have with the site is that like with most other 100% legal music sources, there's a good chance you won't be able to find what you're looking for. If you're looking for videos from Ashanti, Akon, or Nine Inch Nails, PluggedIn's got you covered. Mike Doughty or Tori Amos, not so much (although there is a Tom Jones video featuring Tori Amos on backing vocals available).
The service does have profile page for a ton of musicians, including artists with no videos available on the site. Users can view photos, read information about the artist, or purchase albums from Amazon. Users can also treat PluggedIn as a social networking site by creating profiles, marking favorite videos, and finding others with similar musical tastes.
Your voices have been heard. And by you, we mean the faceless mob that is the internet, not baseball fans who actually attend Mets games at New York's Shea Stadium. Last week, the team asked fans to vote in an internet poll on the song they'd like to hear during the 8th inning sing-a-long for the rest of the year. And some Digg, Fark, and other users decided it would be funny to write in "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. (Note, this does not count as a Rickroll, because you absolutely know what you're getting if you click on that link... unless we decided to link to something else. Only one way to find out).
Apparently Mr. Astley's pop tune got the most votes and the Mets played the song during last night's season opener. But the Mets have decided that you can't trust anything you read on the internet, especially poll results. So the team will be playing the top 6 songs once per game for the first six games of the season to see which one the actual fans in the stadium like the best. Judging by the booing in the fan-made videos floating around YouTube, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that last night may have been the last time anyone will hear "Never Gonna Give You Up" at Shea.
If you've got about a dozen MP3s or other digital music files on your computer, odds are you don't have too much trouble keeping them organized. But if you've got a few thousand, it can be hard to find what you're looking for unless each track is properly named and tagged. While popular music players like Windows Media Player, iTunes, Foobar2000 and Media Monkey will check online databases to find the appropriate metadata for songs you download or rip from a CD, sometimes mistakes occur. TagScanner can help clean up the mess.
TagScanner is a free Windows application that gives you a variety of tools for organizing your digital music collection. You can import tag information from freedb.org, Amazon, or TrackType.org. you can also generate tags from files and foldernames, or rename your files based on tag information. The application supports a wide variety of formats:
ID3 1.0/1.1/1.2/2/2.3/2.4, APE v1 and v2, WMA, MP4, and Vortbis tags, comments, and metadata
There's also a playlist editor and support for exporting playlists as HTML, Excel, and CSV files. And to top things off, there's a rudimentary audio player built right into TagScanner so you can listen to tracks while you're organizing them.
MySpace, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, and Universal Music have announced plans to launch an online music web site called MySpace Music (not to be confused with the existing web site called MySpace Music, rather the new site will be a spinoff of MySpace's existing service).
The music companies wil be making their complete content libraries available. Users will be able to stream ad-supported audio and video for free, or pay to download files includign songs and ringtones. MySpace Music will also sell concert tickets and artis merchandise.
EMI hasn't signed onto the project yet, but the New York Times reports that sources say the 4th major label will probably join up soon.
The music labels will own a minority stake in the business, which will compete with Apple's iTunes. Of course, the labels are making money through iTunes sales as well, but they've been complaining for a while that as the dominant online music retailer, Apple has too much control over the pricing and distribution of digital music.
There's a rumor floating around this morning that Apple has surpassed Wal-Mart to become the top music retailer in the US. Ars Technica reports that Apple has sent a memo to employees showing the results of an NPD MusicWatch survey in January. There's just one problem. In February, Apple publicly stated that it was now the number two music seller in the US.
As Engadget points out, there may have been a spike in January because a whole bunch of people picked up new iPods and iPod gift cards for the holidays in Decemeber. Suffice it to say, if Apple was really the top music retailer in the country right now, they wouldn't be passing around an internal memo. They'd be sending out press releases with pictures of Steve Jobs stepping on a smiley face with blood poring out of its nose. Wait, smiley faces don't usually have noses, do they? We're fairly certain that digital music will surpass physical media sales one day. That day just doesn't happen to be today.
Update: Nope, apparently that day is today. Apple has issued a press release stating that NPD's numbers show the company was the top music retailer in January and March.
New York City hipsters have struck again, bringing quick and easy mixtape sharing to the 'net at Muxtape.com. The site was built by Justin Ouellette, and early mixes have been uploaded by Jakob Lodwick (of Vimeo) and Patrick Moberg (of nygirlofmydreams.com fame). Muxtape is easy as pie: upload songs in mp3 format, drag and drop to organize, send the link to your friends.
Muxtapes hold up to 12 songs in a nice minimal layout (LARGE TYPE! CLICK TO PLAY! CLICK AGAIN TO STOP!). You can't download songs directly from other people's Muxtapes, which keeps the focus on finding good new artists to support. Justin says RSS feeds and m4a support are already in the works, so Muxtape should just keep getting easier.
In an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sony BMG CEO Rolf Schmid-Holtz explained that the music studio is considering launching an all-you-can-eat style subscription music service. There aren't a ton of details at this point, and it's not even clear if this subscription plan will ever materialize, but here are a few highlights from the interview:
The service would probably cost between 6 and 8 Euros per month (or $9 to $12).
This isn't just idle talk. Sony BMG has conducted at least enough market research to set what theybelieve is a fair price.
Sony will continue to sell music through Apple's iTunes Store.
Now for the confusing part. Tracks would play on all MP3 players, including the iPod. We assume this means the music would have to be DRM-free, but Schmid-Holtz also explains that most of the music would no longer play if you stop paying your monthly subscription bill. Huh? [via Engadget]
Remember when you put together mix tapes on cassettes and lovingly wrote the song titles in microscopic script on the tape label, maybe even including artistic doodles? Remember the recorded intro you did for the recipient? Remember the songs you selected? Each one chosen for its particular meaning - a special code for you and the receiver's relationship. Yeah, we don't remember that sappy stuff either.
Well *cough,* not that anyone would do that, but Mixwit is a site where you could if you wanted to theoretically speaking, do something kind of, sort of, like that, if you were into that type of thing, which you're definitely probably not.
Making a mix tape with Mixwit is super easy. You can upload your own artwork for the tape skin, search for songs online and drag and drop them on the playlist you're creating, share by publishing it on Mixwit or even embedding on your blog or website. It's absolutely free too. We think you'll love it.
