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]

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]

Popular streaming video provider Mogulus has released a free desktop broadcasting app called Procaster, designed for use with its service. The featureset looks pretty amazing: it promises to broadcast anything from a webcam or from your screen -- or both, side-by-side -- with synced audio and no lag in framerate. There's also a game broadcasting mode that seems explicitly targeted at World of Warcraft players, and audience interaction features, like live chat, that work automatically with any broadcast.

One big advantage of Procaster is that it's free, and so is the Mogulus service, so you the startup costs to create your own web show are extremely low. You can browse and play video clips for your audience in real time, as well, which helps if demos are part of your plan. If Mogulus' service and bandwidth can keep up with the potential popularity of Procaster, I see this app becoming a standard tool of the social web trade. It's only available for Windows right now, but the site says a Mac version is on the way.

I'm a huge fan of Twitter, and I'm also a huge fan of the music site Grooveshark. Grooveshark has become the main way I share streaming music with friends, and it's handy for embedding in other sites. So, when I heard that some folks from Grooveshark had built a Twitter music mashup, I had to check it out. It's called Twisten.fm (rhymes with "listen") and it crawls Twitter for tweets about songs, and lets you listen to the songs people are talking about.

Twisten.fm is what would happen if every tweet about music had a play button next to it. It's not much more than that yet, but I'm already imagining features that would be make it even more awesome. I'd love to be able to see just what my friends are listening to, and maybe use Grooveshark's playlist generator directly from Twisten. A most-played chart for all of Twitter would be good, and a most-played chart for just the people you follow would be even better. There are plenty of pointless mashups out there, but Twisten.fm is one of the good ones.

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!

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.

Last.Fm is one of the better streaming music services around, but you're probably wishing you could save the tracks it plays. Brush up on your German (or just keep reading) and grab LastSharp, and you'll be downloading in no time flat.

The download link on the author's site is just below the Aktuelle Version text (to save hassles, it points to RapidShare or you can find mirrors on Rapidspread). LastSharp doesn't require installation, just extract the contents of the rar file. As you may have guessed from the name, you'll also need the .Net 2.0 runtimes to use it.

When you launch it the first time, the interface will be in German. To change it, click the tab marked Erweiterte Einstellungen. Click the dropdown marked Deutsh and change it to English, then close and restart the program.

Log in with your Last.Fm username and password, and enter your search text - results are displayed neatly in the "Tune In" box. Downloading is as simple as checking the songs you want and marking the Continue Downloading Automatically option (otherwise you'll be grabbing them one at a time).

LastSharp has a lot of useful options, including on-the-fly normalization with MP3gain, automatic scrobbling, cover downloading, and filtering. Downloads are automatically filed in a tidy Artist -> Album name folder structure.

This is a great app for music downloaders, and I hope it sticks around long enough after this post goes live for our DS readers to enjoy it.

[via gHacks]

Hulu Schmulu. Some TV networks have been providing streaming content for ages. You can watch live or recent news updates from the BBC or CNN, music videos, or even movies if you know where to look. But where's the fun in that? RevoluTV is a Windows app that comes preloaded with a long list of video channels that you can stream using the built-in Windows Media Player interface.

Unlike previously mentioned LiveStation, which is mostly focused on news channels, RevoluTV has a ton of streams divided into categories like News, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Music, Movies, Sports, and Kids. And most of the streams I tried actually played, which is more than I can say for some other programs I've used that promise to let you stream internet TV content from around the globe.

Of course, I've kind of gotten used to the video-on-demand feel of Hulu and similar sites, so I'm not really a big fan of watching live television anymore. But if you can't find anything worth watching on Hulu, YouTube, or whatever online video site you're addicted to these days, RevoluTV might be worth a look.

[via gHacks]

There are plenty of ways to share music, but most of them are slow or have clunky interfaces. SoundCloud aims to be the first player in the market to catch on in a big way, by making things easy for its users. Soundcloud works like an inbox, so new songs come in from your friends (or from artists and record labels) and you can handle them all in one convenient place. You can also put a dropbox on any site (including MySpace, Facebook, and your blog) where people can click to send you a track.

I love the idea of being able to play incoming tracks selectively before downloading them, and also the idea of letting them stream as one big playlist. Sending music looks to be just as easy. You can send to an email address or another SoundCloud account, and the result looks a heck of a lot better than MySpace Music. Also, there are no file size limits!

If you're a musician, SoundCloud looks like a good place to post your new tracks. Each song gets its own URL and its own privacy settings, so you can decide who's allowed to listen to or download it. Create Digital Music says SoundCloud could be the Flickr of music, and after testing it out, I'm inclined to agree.

[via Create Digital Music]

It's official. We're one step closer to a point where you can throw out your cable box. Not only can you find virtually any TV program you'd ever want to see online thanks to BitTorrent, but legit web sites like Hulu and TheWB.com, and Fancast are making huge libraries of legal, full-length streaming TV episodes available. And now Hulu is prepared to take the next step by streaming tonight's presidential debate (and the October 15th debate) live.

Granted, a live stream of the presidential debate isn't quite as exciting as real-time streaming of popular, network-owned programs like Heroes or 24. But if enough people tune in to watch the debate on Hulu tonight, it could be a powerful demonstration that there's a group of people who want to watch live TV online, not just video-on-demand a day or two after a TV program has already aired on television.

Of course, Hulu isn't the only site that will be streaming debate coverage tonight. As NewTeeVee points out, C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, FOX, Current, CNN, MSNBC, and MySpace will all be streaming tonight's debate. So maybe this isn't so much a first step toward the internet-based future of broadcasting as it is a way for companies to try to build an audience for their online video sites by streaming something that most major networks have access to anyway, and which a lot of Americans plan to watch.

It's been a while since we looked at Livestation, a video player that allows you to watch live streams of TV channels, with a heavy emphasis on news programming. While the channel selection was rather limited in February, there are now over a thousand channels to choose form, thanks to user submitted links to channels that stream live TV signals. Most are still news related, but there are also a handful of channels of music and other genres.

Another major change is that Livestation is now cross-platform. There are Windows, Mac, and Linux clients available. The Linux version works best on PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards, while the OS X version should run on any Mac with an Intel processor. The Windows version also no longer requires Silverlight to be installed.

The user interface has also been tweaked, making it simpler to search through the long list of channels or flip between channel presets. If the video window looks small in the screenshot, all you have to do is double click on any video to watch in full screen.

While Hulu, Joost, and other online video sites are focusing on offering video on demand, Livestation provides a decent way to watch live programming. And there are two things that most people would rather watch live than pre-recorded, news and sports. Since there's a lot more money involved in getting broadcast and webcast rights for live sporting events, I doubt we'll be seeing ESPN or similar channels on Livestation any time soon. But if you want to catch the latest BBC, CNN, or Bloomberg news, Livestation's got you covered.

[via MakeUseOf]