It never fails that sometimes when I try to import my music CD’s that I don’t have the right album art to show in my music player. When it comes to music I’m picky, and I like my music to be labeled correctly, ratings, rankings, album names, and definitely album art.
If you’re like me, then All CD Covers might be the place to stop in order to fill the missing void of album art you might have in your playlist. With over 100,000 album art and growing, there is a good chance you’ll find what you need.
As an added bonus they also offer movie and game cover art for all of your media. It’s a nice one stop shop to get yourself caught up and make your file listings attractive and cataloged just right.
For the last two years we have been developing RouteNote at Insomnia Media, and in that time have been closely keeping an eye on digital music news and where the shift is going. I thought I would write a quick post and let everyone know my favourite digital music blogs to follow.
Hypebot – Hypebot is written by Bruce Houghton and is a daily report on the last news in the digital music space. Bruce is also the founder and president of Skyline Music (booking agency) and Skyline Consultancy in which he is a music and technology consultant to many music startups.
Digital Music News – Digital Music News is the news and information authority for music industry and technology executives. Digital Music News is founded and edited by Paul Resnikoff. Paul writes daily posts on Digital Music News and also send out a dialy newsletter to industry executives called the Daily Snapshot.
Billboard.biz – Billboard.biz is the digital music arm of the Billboard website. Billboard.biz discusses digital music news with normally at least 10 articles per day. Articles on Billboard.biz don’t just come straight from the USA they as encompass International digital music news, so that you get the full picture.
Digital Audio Insider – Digital Audio Insider is written by David Harrell, who writes digital music news from an artists perspective. David is in a band based in the UK and they use all kinds of different digital music stores and partners to sell/stream their music, and David’s writings are a great insight into what the average artist is thinking and what they are looking for.
Coolfer – Glenn Peoples has worked in the music industry for over eight years and founded Coolfer.com while working and living in New York City. Coolfer was a total ad free blog which is pretty unheard of these days. A week or so ago Glenn announced on his site that he would stop writing because he was offered a new job over at Billboard.biz asSenior Editorial Analyst, so you can now read his work over there.
Last week I ran into a small problem when trying to put an audio book onto my iPod. The audio book was in .wma, or Windows Media Audio format, my iPod doesn’t like that format. A quick Google searches lead me to one of the simplest pieces of conversion software that I’ve used in some time.
Switch is a multi-platform dead simple program to use. Simply tell it where the directory of files lives that you want to convert, point it to the directory where you want them to end up (or the same one), along with what format you want them converted into and click a button. I seriously wish more software was this easy to use.
On my core 2 duo Macbook with 2GB of RAM it took about 4 hours to convert 12 .wma files into 192 kb/s .mp3’s. This isn’t a five-minute job to do, and I fully expected it to take some time, so plan ahead.
Sound quality, to my untrained ears was identical.
Ease of use for this multi-platform software, being able to handle dozens of file formats and being free means this small app will stay installed for some time.
RouteNote has just signed a deal to provide our content on Audio Lunchbox. Audio Lunchbox will sell our content on their sites and services for the next three years. Audio Lunchbox has a licensed catalog of over 2 million songs in 79 sub-genres. Audio Lunchbox is the only service on the web to offer both a la carte and permanent subscription downloads side by side. Well thats what they claim.
