Grooveshark is an excellent streaming audio service, and one of our favorites here at Download Squad. Yesterday, they announced early access to a redesigned Grooveshark 2.0 for VIP users.

The interface has been revamped, and long gone are the days where I had to upload missing tracks. Grooveshark's library is massive, and I've been able to find bands that I once dug out of the Camelot Music sale bin. My long-lost Mind Bomb CD, missing since high school? No problem, Grooveshark's got it now.

Songs you locate via search can now be added to your library with a simple click (instead of having to upload them yourself). Drag-and-drop playlist editing makes re-ordering tracks a breeze. The player itself has been improved as well, with better caching and the ability to seek - just click the spot you want to skip to. Sorting options have also been added, and they make finding tracks and organizing your library and playlists even easier.

Currently there are four shiny, new skins available to choose from. The chalkboardish Tutorial provides helpful pointers for new users, though the new Grooveshark is intuitive enough to use that you probably won't need any help.

And it's still a great deal - $30 per year gets you a VIP account with no commercial interruptions, and even us geotarded Canadians can enjoy the goodness.

Slacker the internet radio for people who are, uh slackers, or too weary to create playlists for their tunes, has just released a desktop app in beta. You can now manage your entire music library and create playlists. (Gasp!) This goes without saying, but only if you want to. You can still be the slacker you were before you downloaded the desktop app.

Some neat features of the desktop app are a mini-player, large album art and groovy visualizations, and of course the playlist thing ability (no pressure though).

Here are the system requirements:

1. Windows XP + SP2 or Vista
   
2. Flash player 8.0 or higher
3. Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
4. Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
5. Broadband Internet connection

Sorry Mac users - Mac is not supported at this time (and we're not happy about it).

When the Slacker portable player becomes available sometime in June, you can use the desktop app to sync your custom Slacker stations and music collection to it.

Here's the link for the Slacker's desktop download.

[via Digg]

Our previous iTunes tip for creating playlists involved manually tagging each song you listen to based on the mood you feel it represents. If you're too lazy for that, maybe you'd prefer AutoRate. The concept of Autorate is simple; look at your listening habits, and rate your iTunes / iPod music based on how often you listen to a song, and how often you skip it.

While we tend to be way too control-freaky to use an approach like this to rate our entire playlist, we did test it on small subsets (albums that hadn't previously been rated), and it's surprisingly good in that context. It's unclear how well it would work on a very large music library where many songs rarely ever play, but for specific applications like rating specific albums it works quite well, although you do have to manually create a playlist of all of the songs on the album first.

AutoRate is a free Mac download.

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.

Back in early January I wrote a post called Exporting iTunes playlists to non-iPods? - Ask DLS. At the time, it turned out that there wasn't a good replacement for the tool I had been using to move both playlists and the actual sound files to my non iPod MP3 player. Now there is.

Many readers suggested iTunes Export as the tool I ought to use to accomplish my task, but at the time it didn't support copying files. However Eric Daugherty, the author of iTunes Export, was monitoring our discussion and decided to add the functionality I'd requested. He requested a more complete description of the features I was looking for, then allowed me to test a beta version once he had it working. I have to say that although the beta version was not feature complete, it worked perfectly for my purposes straight away.

Now Eric has released a new version of iTunes Export that allows you to choose between the original functionality (simply copying playlists) and now the opportunity to copy playlists including all of the song files. It works great. Thanks Eric!

It seems like there are quite a number of utilities popping up that are intended to make creating playlists in iTunes easier. Each takes a different tack, and one of the new ones, beaTunes, is worth noting. beaTunes is a completely separate interface that mimics iTunes to a certain extent. It does file analysis on your non-DRM music files (MP3s) to provide two primary pieces of information: the speed of the music in BPM (beats per minute), and the "color" of the music. Songs with similar color have mathematical similarities that make them more likely to sound similar to other similarly colored songs.

You select some or all of your tracks for analysis, and as beaTunes performs the analysis, it saves the results back to the file in the meta data fields. The color information is stored in a coded manner (non-readable) in the comments field for each song.

Once you've analyzed your music, you can filter your music based on song speed, or use the beaTunes interface to find songs of a similar color to group together into playlists.

beaTunes is free for 7 days, and costs $19.95 to purchase a license.

A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled How to Fix iTunes. One of the utilities I pointed to in that article is called idleTunes, and I used it to keep my iTunes library tuned up, and to export playlists of podcasts to my non-iPod MP3 player. While I still love idleTunes, it stopped working with iTunes back when Apple updated to iTunes version 6, and has not been updated since last summer. So, I finally went looking for a suitable replacement, but I'm having very little luck.

The only utility I can find that is supposed to do what I'm looking to do is called iTunes Agent, and unfortunately for me it does not seem to want to play nicely on my computer. Once started, it takes over 30 seconds to respond to any command, and has become totally unusable to me. I'm fully willing to consider the fact that the problem could be my PC, given the number of downloads I test. But a reinstallation is not on the cards right now, considering that otherwise my system is working fine. So I need to find an alternative solution.

Here are my needs:

• Needs to be able to export any playlist from iTunes to any specified folder or drive
  
• Needs to generate an M3U playlist to keep the audio files in the correct order

And here are my "nice to have's":

• It would be nice if it could optionally delete the tracks from iTunes (and the hard drive) upon successfully syncing to a folder / device
• It would be nice if it could add new tracks and delete dead tracks from the iTunes library

So, based on these requirements, do you know of a utility that I should be trying? I realize Apple probably doesn't look too kindly on people writing this sort of software, since they try so hard to push you into buying an iPod. And while I'd love an iPod, I can't currently justify the purchase of one. So I'll leave it to you, dear readers, to point me in the right direction.

Bloglines has just pushed out an update that adds a tab to its interface called Playlists. Here's how they describe Playlists:

Playlists lets you create short groupings of feeds to access from your main list. Create as many as you like, and use them to personalize your Bloglines experience that much more. Create them, change them, even delete them--all without changing your original "tree" of feeds. What song playlists are to your MP3 library, Bloglines Playlists are to your Bloglines blogs & feeds.

I'm not certain that I understand the need for yet another level of organization to my feed list, particularly when I feel overwhelmed with attempting to keep the main list in order. I suppose for people that maintain thousands of feeds, most of which they rarely visit, this could be a useful way to keep an eye on lesser-visited feeds.