Using YouTube to listen to music is nothing new. Search for a song you want to hear, and you're very likely to find it, even if there's no official music video. YouTube isn't built to listen to music though, and that's where TubeRadio.fm comes in. It's a slick music player that lets you create playlists from YouTube, and can even find entire albums at once, using track listings and album art from Last.fm. The TubeRadio homepage describes the service as "iTunes meets YouTube meets Spotify," and that's not much of exaggeration.

TubeRadio.fm puts more emphasis on the "radio" than the "tube": the videos themselves take up very little space in the UI. More space is devoted to the tabbed info box at the bottom of the screen, which automatically pulls up lyrics and artist bios. TubeRadio does a good job of getting the album versions of songs when you use 'Discography Mode' to grab whole albums, but occasionally it will find a live version instead. Fortunately, there's another mode that searches all of YouTube, and you can manually add the version you want, if it exists.

Creating playlists can be tedious, and every bit of information can help. While some people maintain the ID3 tags in their MP3 files in excruciating detail, others (like me) can't seem to find the time. But when it comes to finding the tempo, no amount of manual ID3 tag maintenance will help.

If you're trying to put together a playlist that contains songs that are a similar speed, knowing the beats-per-minute of each song is immensely helpful. Luckily, there is a free download called BPM Analyzer from MixMeister that will analyze all of your MP3 tracks, and update the ID3 tags in them with exact BPM information. With that done, it's a simple matter of sorting your music library by the beats-per-minute field.

Now you can put together an upbeat energy-boosting playlist full of fast songs, a mellow playlist with slower songs, or pretty much anything you desire. And for the nerds like me, it's just another piece of information to sort and group your music by.

BPM Analyzer is available on both the Windows and Mac operating system.

[via Lifehacker]

HypeTape is a new site that combines the simple streaming-playlist abilities of the old MuxTape with the music discovery powers of The Hype Machine. In case you're not familiar, The Hype Machine indexes posts from top music blogs, allowing you to find and read about new music with ease. Although HypeTape doesn't actually use Hype Machine search results, and isn't affiliated with either Muxtape or Hype Machine, the name is a convenient shorthand to describe what it does: it lets you make playlists out of songs uploaded by Mp3 bloggers.

Most of the basic features you'd expect are there: you can rereorder your playlists, add songs from other people's list, and rename your lists and tracks. What you won't find is the ability to download any of the audio files in your playlist. That's no big deal if you're used to the original Muxtape and its various offspring, though, and it also covers the developers' butts (to some extent) in case of takedown notices.

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.

Drop.io is known for having one of the best, most simple file storage interfaces out there. They've already expanded into file sending (usend.io) and tweeting (tweet.io), and music playlists are the next thing on the hit list. Enter playlist.io. It gives you 102mb of space to upload audio files into a playlist that you can play or redownload from anywhere.

Once your music is uploaded, you can customize the look of your playlist, or subscribe to it in RSS. Possibly the coolest feature is Dropcast, which lets you subscribe to your playlist as a podcast in iTunes. Forget turning Playlist.io into the next Megaupload or Rapidshare, though. It's not searchable, and they have a one-click takedown policy.

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.

YouTubeReloaded is a quick and easy way to generate YouTube playlists to embed in your own site. It features a few different skins, the ability to add a logo, and a number of ways to get playlists.

Sure, you could just paste video URLs yourself for a custom playlist, but YouTubeReloaded also offers search-based and predefined options you can use to generate a playlist automatically.

The search-based function is probably the coolest thing about YouTubeReloaded. If you want a player with, for example, episodes of your favorite web show, it's way faster to add them via search than it is to pick them out and paste them all in by hand.

Other handy options include autostart, shuffle and different player sizes.

I have fond memories of Muxtape, which briefly reigned last year as the online music sharing method of choice for hipsters everywhere. Well, Muxtape is finally back, after shutting down for a while due to problems landing an affordable licensing deal for the music that was getting passed around on the service. It's a different kind of service now, although the interface looks the same. Now bands can sign up to add their songs to the site's library, and anybody can make a mixtape out of what's available.

Yes, this sounds a lot lamer than the old Muxtape, at first blush. It's not that bleak, though, as the first dozen or so artists helping to kick off the new service rock pretty hard. Perhaps you've heard of Of Montreal? Amanda Palmer? How about the golden boy of mashups, Girl Talk? Well, they're on the new Muxtape, and the future looks bright for Internet indie kids if the service keeps growing in that direction.

So you have a nice playlist growing in your iTunes library, but what happens when you're out on the road and all you have with you is your mobile phone? nuTsie is here to help.

nuTsie is a music client that streams in your iTunes library. Well, as our friends at EngadgetMobile have pointed out, the nuTsie system actually reads the names of your tracks and matches them to whats on nuTsie's server. With this in mind, your main computer does not have to be left on, and the nuTsie application does not require you to upload music anywhere. All you have to do to get started is upload your iTunes Library.xml file to nuTsie's server under your account.

Performance for this service is said to be pretty good, with extremely good connection speeds. Just watch out when you close your clamshell phone, some have been reported to shut the nuTsie applications right off. The service is free to use during the public beta period, but the list of compatible mobile devices is pretty slim at the moment.

One of the things that technology should be able to help us with is to figure out what we really want, and give it to us. While that may sound like a tall order when you think about the entirety of it, when applied to specific scenarios, it makes sense. For example, Amazon can give you some pretty good ideas about books you might like to read based on your previous buying habits.

Along with book selection, another area that is ripe for picking with respect to automated selection is in the generation of music playlists. And while it's easy to have iTunes to create a playlist consisting of your favorite music, it's not so easy to have it automatically create a playlist of music that suits your mood, be it melancholy, neutral, or ecstatic.

If this is something you've wished was easier to do, check out Moody. Moody is a little utility that allows you to tag your songs very quickly and easily based a two dimensional grid of 16 squares. You simply choose the square that best represents the mood of the song you are listening to. The y axis of the grid represents the intensity of the music, from calm at the bottom to intense at the top. The x axis represents the emotion of the music, from sad at the left to happy at the right. Each axis has 4 possible positions, for a total of 16 squares.

You can tag songs as you listen normally, or turn on a QuickTag mode which will start playing each song from a position you choose (say, 40 seconds into the song), and jump to the next song as soon as you make a mood selection. This allows you to tag a lot of music very quickly.

While at first it can seem overly simplistic to try to pick one square that best represents a song, the choice of 16 squares appears to be a perfect amount to cover the majority of your music. The playlists that you can then generate using Moody are quite consistent in terms of the mood of the music, since you were the one that decided how that music made you feel. It can be very comforting to be able to choose a selection of music that suits your current frame of mind, without having to think too much about it.

Moody is a free Mac download, and one that we are happy to heartily recommend. We just wish it had a square for snarky blogging music.

The Filter boasts quite a lot. Its tagline is "creates perfect playlists from your iTunes library," and its web site says it's "better than your shuffle button!" What The Filter is is a plugin for iTunes (Windows version only for now, Mac coming soon) that generates playlists when you select a few songs and click on the big black "F" button. Like many programs, The Filter claims to excel at building playlists based on your mood. I gave The Filter a try and found that it's actually not too shabby. I selected a few songs that I thought would go well together in a playlist and it filled out the rest of the playlist with songs that fit in pretty well. While not every one was one that I would have picked myself, none of them seemed out of place, and after all, The Filter touts its ability to help you rediscover music that you'd all but forgotten you had. Like Pandora and other services, The Filter learns from your listening habits and tweaks your playlist based on which tracks you skip and which ones you listen to all the way through. I've tried a number of products that claim to do what The Filter does, but most of them either didn't work very well or were far too complex. The Filter is the first one that really seems both smart enough and simple enough to really give a shot.

I used MoodLogic for awhile to create playlists tailored to my moods, and it performed pretty well, but I wasn't really satisfied with the limitations of the free version. MusicIP Mixer is a free Windows app in the same vein. You choose a song from your collection and it will generate a playlist of songs that it deems similar. While you can start generating playlists as soon as it's installed, the initial algorithm, though fast, seemed wanting to me, and the subsequent (and presumably more accurate) algorithm takes a long time to analyze your songs. It does have some nice features, though, like integration with other players so you send generated playlists to Winamp or iTunes, and compatability with portable devices. It also has a built-in music-recommender that will query the web for new music you might like. Though I haven't been using it long enough to really judge the quality of its algorithms, MusicIP Mixer has a nice polished feel and is worth checking out if you're sick of assembling playlists by hand.

[Thanks, Tim!]

As in everything else, the blogosphere is well ahead of the media-at-large when it comes ot music, so the best way to stay on the cutting edge of music (or at least appear that way) is to watch the music blogs. It turns out they're chock-full of great MP3s, but if you're like me you don't have much time for reading music blogs and downloading song files. Enter the Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator. It watches all of the best music blogs and gives you their MP3s in easy-to-digest formats: Podcast, .m3u playlist, or a pop-up Flash player for listening in your browser. I'm partial to the Flash player because it has links to the original blog posts as well as albums for purchase at Amazon.com. There's also a handy search feature, so the next time a friend tells you, "You've got to check out Avant Garde Dark Cabaret Harmonium Quintet of Love!" there's a good chance you find some of their tracks as well as some informative blog commentary.

Our pal Todd Carter over at PVR Wire points us to TiViTunes, a nice little Windows app that lets you access your iTunes playlists from your PC-connected TiVo. It works by shuffling the playlists around on your hard drive so they're somewhere TiVo Desktop can see them. It's shareware, so until you pay $5 it's limited to the first five songs in each playlist.

Thanks, Todd!

Sometimes we want to let the whole world know what we're up to. I mean everything. We have blogs, webcams, chat rooms, and tons of other things to let us communicate with people. A lot of people take pride in what music they listen to and like to share it with others. Whether for just the public eye or to see if anyone else likes the same kind of music, you still need a way of getting it on the web easily. iTunes Publisher does just that. Currently at 4.3.3, it's a great little program that let's you export your iTunes library in a number of ways. You can customize it by font and look, what columns you want shown (Artist, Album, Song, etc.), and how you want your data exported. The best way is probably via a webpage. It's listed nice and neat with tables so that everyone can just scroll away. Plus it's one file and you can easily upload it and update it anywhere. I highly reccomend checking it out if sharing your musical tastes with the world is your sorta thing.