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.

KissTunes is an online service that makes it easy to play and record music using your computer's keyboard. It offers three different instruments, and all the home row keys (and a few from the row above) represent notes. You can save your song, along with any comments from friends, as a .kiss file that will open from the KissTunes on any computer.

The "kiss" in KissTunes probably refers to a show of affection, but it could also very well stand for "Keep it Simple, Stupid!" KissTunes isn't a complex compositional tool, and it's not aimed at professionals. It's more akin to a greeting card, except instead of sending cheesy canned music, you play and send the music yourself. Obviously, this isn't going to revolutionize the Internet, but it's a fun idea.

Wax MP3 is a web based music player for that plays songs from Magnatune's catalog of Creative Commons-licensed tracks from independent musicians.

When you launch the website, you're greeted with a basic music player that gives you information about the song that's currently playing, download links, and the ability to skip to the next track. You can also choose a genre from a drop-down menu in the top left corner if you'd rather hear classical, folk, ambient, or another style of music. There's a pretty eclectic mix of genres, including medieval, Middle Eastern, and metal. And that's just in the M section.

You can also grab URL links that will take you directly to a song if you want to share tracks with friends. Overall, Wax MP3 provides a pretty nifty interface for finding music you might not otherwise have known about.

[via Boing Boing]

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.

Royalties have been a bone of contention between major record labels and Internet radio stations for years, and now it looks like the two sides only have 30 more days to iron out an agreement. After they failed to agree by the February 2009 deadline that Congress set last year, Congress took action to extend the deadline to 30 days from last Wednesday.

Until last year, the Copyright Royalty Board had the authority to determine the rates webcasters would have to pay for songs, but a 2008 bill called for negotiation on the issue instead. What's missing from all the coverage of this extension is what happens if an agreement can't be reached by the new deadline. According to the bill -- which was passed without amendment -- after the 30 day period passes, no agreement can be reached under the existing provisions, which means the rules of the game could change again at Congress' whim.

[via AppScout]

I'm a big fan of the streaming music site Grooveshark. It's a great way to listen to practically any song and share new music with friends. EMI doesn't have any love for Grooveshark, though: the label is suing the service. It's not clear what the claims in the suit are, yet, but Grooveshark's side of the story is that they were negotiating some kind of licensing deal with the major labels, and EMI sued as a negotiating tactic.

I can see why a label would want to sue Grooveshark. According to one small label that's done business with them, Grooveshark just uses the labels' content to pay its bills, and offers little to nothing in advertising revenue in return. On the other hand, I don't know too many people who use Grooveshark as a replacement for buying a legitimate digital download of a song. You need to be online to listen, and you can't put streaming tracks on your iPod, so it hardly seems like an equivalent product.

I selfishly hope Grooveshark survives this lawsuit, because I enjoy being able to preview full tracks before I buy them. I also enjoy sharing music with my friends by embedding Grooveshark widgets or using the Facebook plugin, and maybe those friends will hear something they like and go buy an album. If I were the music industry right now, I might take those sales where I could get them.

[via AllThingsD]

If you've been looking for a way to stream music from your iTunes library on the web that "just works," you should give pulpTunes a look. With pulpTunes, it's extremely easy to set up a stream at a private URL, and even password protect it. Even better, it's available on all platforms.

The basic premise of a web server for your music is pretty cool, but pulpTunes throws in a lot of other iTunes-ish perks, including AAC support, album art, and iTunes DJ support. You can also download songs from your iTunes, or share a direct link to a song or playlist with your friends. That's a lot of features for an app that's so simple to set up.

[via AppScout]

Grooveshark is my favorite quick way to listen to a particular song online. With an extensive library, easy sharing and embeddable widgets, it's a powerhouse in the music sharing arena. It's only getting better, too, with the recent addition of a Facebook application and a Wordpress plugin. The Facebook app lets you share songs directly to your wall, and the Wordpress plugin lets you quickly put together a playlist widget for your Wordpress blog.

The Facebook app, in particular, is the easiest way to share music on FB that I've run across so far. In addition to publishing a song to your profile, you can also select individual friends to share it with. With over 10 million songs in Grooveshark's database, it's likely you'll find whatever song you're looking for.

The visualizer that is built in to the latest versions of iTunes used to be called Magnetosphere before Apple bought it and rebranded it simply "iTunes Visualizer". Strangely, the number of visualizers that iTunes ships with now is very small, probably in accordance with Apple's declaration that their new visualizer is the last visualizer you will ever need. While I like looking at Magnetosphere, for my tastes it isn't responsive enough to the actual music that is playing.

If you're also left a little cold by the iTunes Visualizer, you might want to check out UsingMac's list of "funtastic" iTunes visualizers. In particular take a look at Fountain Music and Cubism as examples of visualizers that really respond to the music that is actually playing.

Making the right workout mix is all about tempo. If you're going for a run and you want to bring music that matches your personal pace, Beatscanner can help. It automatically detects the beats per minute of songs in your music library, and makes playlists of songs at the pace you want. It was originally built in 2007, and the developer just started updating his blog again earlier this year, so the app's design is still a little bit old-school, to put it politely.

If you're not satisfied with the songs you have, there's also a premium version of sorts, called Repacer. Instead of just finding songs that are the right tempo, it changes the pace of your existing songs to match the BPM you're looking for. That way, you don't have to worry about your favorite songs being too fast or too slow to work out to.

With all the buzz about the new Wolfram Alpha search engine, it's easy to forget that Wolfram works on other projects, too. The developers who brought you Mathematica also put their algorithmic muscle to work to create WolframTones, a music composition engine. It turns programs from within Wolfram's "computational universe" into midi musical compositions of all different styles and pitches.

There are several variations for each musical style, ranging from hip-hop to classical. User-configurable options include picking the scale the composition will use, setting the midi instrument for each part, and adjusting the tempo. When you find a composition you like, you can download it as a midi, or have it delivered to your phone as a ringtone. I suspect Brian Eno would approve.

Last week "twitter for music" service Blip.fm announced that most of its music would be streaming from imeem. This week, the company added YouTube music videos, which not only greatly expands Blip.fm's music library, it also gives users a reason to hang out on the web site rather than using third party clients like Blipster. Well, a tleast until someone develops a good desktop client that will let you send and receive updates, listen to music, and watch videos.

You can now use Blip.fm as a sort of music video search engine, whether you want to share songs with friends or not. If you do want to let people know what you're watching or listening to, you can send messages with links to songs or videos with just a click. You can also link Blip.fm to your Twitter account so that your friends don't even need to be signed up for Blip.fm to know that you harbor a secret Def Leppard addiction.

[via GigaOm]

Since pundits started speculating last year that expensive royalty fees for streaming music would kill Pandora, it seems the company has consistently rolled out more creative, money-making features.

Now premium subscribers can get access to better stream quality, the new Pandora One desktop app, and an ad-free experience for $36/year. That fee will also get rid of one of the most annoying restraints on the free version of Pandora, the limit of 12 skips per day.

Pandora One looks like a pretty cool app, with a mini version of the player to save screen real estate, and 8 different skins to choose from. It also doesn't require you to interact with it as often as the free version does to keep the music going. Instead, you only have to click over once every five hours.

All of this sounds like a pretty good deal for what comes out to be about $3/mo, but it's not clear how far it will go toward keeping Pandora up and running.

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]

Blip.fm is sort of like Twitter for music. Instead of telling people what you're doing or thinking about in 140 characters or less, you can tell your contacts what you're listening to. Oh yeah, the site also features an integrated music search engine and media player that lets you find and listen to the songs you're talking about or listen to your friends' playlists.

In other words, like 90% of the other web based music startups (that's a totally made up figure, by the way), Blip.fm was kind of lawsuit-bait. So it shouldn't be surprising to see that the company has made a few changes, including a partnership with music social netowrking site imeem.

Starting this week, all music available through Blip.fm is actually streaming from imeem. And that means you only get access to free and legal music. Unless you're outside of the US, in which case you probably won't be able to stream songs at all. International users can still let people know what they're listening to via short messages, but they won't be able to use Blip.fm as a music player.

It also means that old blips will be replaced with content available from imeem where possible. But if you were sharing links to music from artists that aren't in the imeem catalog, those blips will stop working.

Blip.fm is working on additional partnerships, so the media catalog could grow in time, and there may be hope for international users. But for now, it sounds like Blip.fm is going through a pretty rocky period.

[via Techcrunch]