August 17th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 
1 Comment
The BBC reports that it was 25 years ago, to this day, that the world’s first compact disc was produced at a Philips factory in Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.
A joint project between Philips and Sony, designed to create a standard for an optical disc for storing and playing back music, the CD has since gone on to sell over 200 billion, and despite the rise of digital downloads, continues to dominate music sales. Continue reading »
August 17th, 2007 | Posted in Audio | 597 Comments
Nowadays there is much reported about the rise of illegally copied music being made available on the Internet. However, there is also plenty of music on the web that is free and legal. In this post we look at ten sites or services that offer free legal music to download.
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ArtistServer.com
ArtistServer has been around since 2001, albeit under the name ElectronicScene.com. In 2005 they transformed the site to widen their scope and incorporate social networking features. At its core is a database of over 7,000 songs that can be downloaded for free. An artist’s catalog also has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to like any other feed, allowing the user to keep up to date with any new additions. Photos, videos and blogs from artists complete this interesting site. Continue reading »
August 16th, 2007 | Posted in Net TV, Social | 4 Comments
NewTeeVee notes that “Facebook Diaries” launches tonight at about 9 p.m. on Comcast’s video on demand service. I am intrigued by user-generated content mixed together by a professional producer to create a television show unlike any we’ve seen so far.
The Web component for the eight-episode, weekly series is already in place as the pilot episode, “Who Am I,” is available on Facebook and on Comcast’s video sharing site Ziddio. The project was announced earlier this year and has Facebook users recording and submitting clips of their lives based on topics such as who am I, heartbreak, road trip, wild nights, and my memory.
The user clips are taken by R.J. Cutler of Actual Reality Pictures and weaved, with motion graphics and music, into a half-hour show based on a theme. Cutler is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning producer of TV shows, including “American High” and “30 Days,” and his touch will be crucial to the success and future of the “Facebook Diaries.”
August 16th, 2007 | Posted in Comms | 5 Comments
Skype has suffered an outage today, that still continues, meaning that web workers around the globe, like myself, have had an unusually quiet day — with far fewer IM interruptions but also a strange kind of isolation. What’s also made today standout is that in all the time that I’ve been a Skype user, I don’t remember it ever going down. Sure there has been poor connections and some odd behavior, where contacts disappear and reappear intermittently for no apparent reason, but never has the service been totally unavailable. As much as today’s outage has been an inconvenience, the fact that it’s been so noticeable is perhaps testament to Skype’s overall robustness. Continue reading »
August 15th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Other | 3 Comments
DRM-free music downloads. It’s all the rage, in one form or another.
Now P2P provider LimeWire is entering the fray, diving headfirst into digital music sales. The music will be DRM-free, in the “universally compatible MP3 format,” and encoded at a higher-quality 256Kbps bit rate.
The LimeWire Store is expected to launch sometime this fall as a stand-alone Website, with links accessible from within LimeWire’s free and Pro (paid-for) software. LimeWire said music lovers will be able to purchase music directly through LimeWire clients but a specific date was not announced. DRM-free MP3s will be available a la carte or through a monthly subscription. Continue reading »
August 15th, 2007 | Posted in Net TV, Review | 51 Comments
A few minutes ago an email dropped into my in-box from YouTubeDesktop.com — a product that I’d never heard of before — inviting me to try out their private beta. Claiming to be “something special”, that many developers had said was “programmatically impossible”, I willingly put down my coffee and fired up Firefox.
The idea behind YouTube Desktop is to bring a desktop application experience to navigating and viewing YouTube videos through a web browser. Continue reading »
August 15th, 2007 | Posted in Other | 7 Comments
When Microsoft launched the Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360, they introduced Microsoft Points to the world. Instead of exchanging money for items in the marketplace directly, you purchase points and redeem those for the content you want. A quick Internet search today for Microsoft Points will return a bunch of results related to the Xbox. That makes sense as the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune Marketplace are the only two places you can use the points right now. But will that always be the case? Could Microsoft have bigger things in mind for their points system? Let’s take a look. Continue reading »
August 14th, 2007 | Posted in Net TV | 2 Comments
A few months ago a columnist for the blog Reel Pop noticed three of the newest comedy shows on television all had their origin online or use the Web as a gimmick. VH1’s “Acceptable TV,” MTV’s “Human Giant,” and FUSE’s “The Whitest Kids U Know” are all web-to-TV success stories.
The New York Times noticed a similar phenomenon the other day at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, where the hottest topic of discussion was sketch comedy and the Internet, not who is scoring the best TV deal. Continue reading »
August 14th, 2007 | Posted in Net TV | 3 Comments
The planned protests against the BBC, which we reported on a few weeks back, took place today as supporters of the Free Software Foundation (FSC) — dressed in bright yellow Hazmat suits — gathered outside BBC Television Center in London and BBC headquarters in Manchester to demand that DRM be eliminated from the BBC’s iPlayer.
The FSC is accusing the BBC of “corruption” because of the iPlayer’s reliance on Microsoft’s technology and the fact that, prior to joining the public service broadcaster, the controller of the BBC’s Future Media and Technology Group worked for Microsoft as director of its Windows Digital Media division. Continue reading »
August 13th, 2007 | Posted in Audio, Other | 23 Comments
Note: this post is part of the R/WW Files on Online Music.
Universal Music Group (UMG) is teaming up with Google and a new start-up company called gBox, Inc., to sell DRM-free music on an experimental basis, in what many will interpret as a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS).
The way gBox is expected to work — it debuts August 21 and ends January 31, 2008 — is that the service will get referrals through ads that UMG purchases from Google at standard advertising rates. When users search for a band or a song using the Google search engine, ads will appear next to the results directing them to gBox. Continue reading »