September 24th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 
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It’s a gamble we all take when we sign up for a digital music service: Will it still be around in a year or two?
The latest digital music store to go belly up is Virgin Digital, which its owner, Virgin, is in the process of shutting down in the US and UK. Once the store goes dark Oct. 19, customers will not be able to play their songs due to digital rights management (DRM) limitations.
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September 17th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 26 Comments
Rest at ease, iTunes. SpiralFrog is no prince.
SpiralFrog is an ad-supported free-music download site that launched today after nearly five years of development and a year of beta testing. It boasts 800,000 songs and 3,500 videos available for download … free of charge.
The catch, of course, is that you must view advertising in order to download DRM-protected music and video. SpiralFrog is built on a revenue-sharing agreement with participating labels, and your eyeballs pay for the music.
In addition to viewing ads while searching for and downloading music, SpiralFrog requires you to log in to the site and view ads at least once every 30 days, or the downloaded music for the account becomes disabled.
Tracks from SpiralFrog also cannot be burned to a CD or transfered to an iPod, the top-selling digital music player, although files can be sent to two Windows Media Player-compatible devices or cell phones. (FAQ.)
While getting free music is compelling, I doubt SpiralFrog will knock the iTunes Music Store off its perch because, at least for me, the site was frustratingly slow (chalk this up to a lot of interest on launch day) and the interface to browse and download made me feel like I was querying a database and not thumbing through a digital record bin like iTunes.
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September 17th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 3 Comments
eMusic has revealed plans to start selling audiobooks, which, like the company’s existing digital music offerings, will utilize the DRM-free and ubiquitous mp3 format — the first time that major book publishers have offered their audio content for download without copy-protection.
Customers will be given the choice of various download-to-own subscriptions packages, starting at $9.99 for one audiobook download per-month. The service will initially launch with around 1,000 titles from various publishers including: Random House Audio, Hachette Audio, and Penguin Audio — with “hundreds more” added each week, according to Macworld UK.
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September 17th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Review | 29 Comments
Winamp, that staple of media players, will soon turn 10! And its not letting it pass without a bang. On the 10th of October at 10:10am, Winamp 5.5 (PC-only) will be released sporting two new and potentially controversial features: support for mp3 blogs and the ability to stream your music collection over the Internet (a Beta version is available here).
Cashing in on the growing popularity of mp3 blogs, and the lack of tools to take advantage of them, Winamp’s Media Monitor can be used in conjunction with the software’s built-in browser to access any mp3s linked to on a blog page, presented as a playlist or even downloaded to your library. Winamp also includes handy links to a dozen or so music blogs to get you started.
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September 12th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 1 Comment
As the music industry continues to search for an answer to dwindling sales and the continual proliferation of illegal file-sharing, an old idea looks to have resurfaced.
Digital Music News reports that Universl Music Group (UMG) is exploring the possibility of introducing an ISP music file-sharing tax. Called “TotalMusic”, the idea is to charge the customers of ISPs and cellphone carriers a flat-rate fee as part of their data service plan, in exchange for the right to download and share the label’s music over the ISP’s network.
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September 11th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 1 Comment
I have a question for you. How do you like your music?
Do you want to own it?
Do you want to rent it?
Or do you prefer getting it in some back alley on the Web?
The reason I ask is because Vodafone, a leading international mobile telecommunications carrier, will launch Omnifone’s MusicStation in the UK on three handsets in time for Christmas. Omniphone is a mobile music provider, and its MusicStation offers an all-you-can-eat subscription for a small weekly fee.
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September 10th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 1 Comment
“I’ve seen the future and it’s ringtones”.
Faced with the near-death of the CD single and a year-on-year decline in physical music sales, Sony BMG has invented a new format which aims to cash in on the popularity of mobile phone ringtones. The CD “ringle”, reports Billboard, will contain three tracks — a new release and an older song or remix, along with one ringtone.
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September 6th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Net TV, Other | 1 Comment
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
In classic Microsoft-fashion, the company is taking yet another stab at solving the PC-to-TV problem (the “last100 feet”), with the introduction of its Extenders for Windows Media platform. This time round, Microsoft’s partners include Cisco Systems’ Linksys division, D-Link and Niveus Media, each of which will bring to market devices “in a variety of innovative form factors and price points”, capable of streaming photos, music, video and live television from a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate to a wide-screen TV.
Microsoft is re-entering a crowded market for “media extenders” which is already littered with its own previous failures along with those of its partners, and competing products such as the fledgling AppleTV, DivX’s newly announced “connected” platform, and Sony’s PlayStation 3. In addition, Microsoft already makes one of the more successful “extenders”, in the company’s XBox 360.
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September 5th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 7 Comments
What has made Apple’s iPod so difficult for competitors to beat over the past few years is vision and product planning. Today we saw both in action as Apple completely revamped its market-leading line of music and video entertainment devices, just in time for the 2007 holiday.
From the beginning Apple has carefully orchestrated the iPod’s ecosystem, evolving the hardware, software, and online presence carefully as technology has improved and consumers have gotten more comfortable living a digital lifestyle. It’s almost as if the past five years has led to this moment — Apple’s most evolved iPod ecosystem to date.
At “The Beat Goes On” event in San Francisco, Apple’s Steve Jobs presented a clearly-defined line of iPods, including the new iPod Touch, and introduced capability that iPod owners have been clamoring for — the ability to download music from the Internet directly into their devices. This is now possible on the iPod Touch and the iPhone through the new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.
Apple’s iPod line now looks like this:
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August 30th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 10 Comments
As Sony executives must have said recently, out with the old, in with the new.
Sony is ditching its proprietary audio format, ATRAC, in favor of a variety of formats, including Windows Media Audio, MP3, and advanced audio coding (AAC). Sony immediately announced new Walkman models, all of which support WMA, MP3, and AAC formats. Two players, the NWZ-A810 and the NWZ-S610, are the first U.S. units to also play video (MPEG-4 and AVC) and display photographs.
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