Archive for: itunes
Today when we hear about cool gadgets probably the word “iPad” will come up next, but we should not forget about that little thing that started this big bang a while ago: The iPod. Almost 10 years about the first appearance of this Apple MP3 player the results are amazing.
Here’s a pretty complete image about all the facts we need to know about iPod’s Revolution.
- Born in October of 2001
- 225 million iPods sold at this date.
- Apple owns de 74% of the MP3 player market share.
- 10 billion songs downloaded with iTunes.
- You need to spend U$S10.000 in iTunes songs to fill 25% capacity of 160GB iPod Classic.
Want more? Check it out:
How many of you have created your iTunes playlists and feel like your list is never complete unless you’ve got everything you need for every song including album art? If you’re one of those types, then I’m right there with you. Nothing frustrates me more than playing music on my MP3 player and seeing no album art with a song. Perhaps I’m OCD, perhaps it’s just the huge music fan in me, but Album Art Search has been a holy land of sorts for all the album art I need.
The site offers up the album art of some of the most sought after albums, straight from the homepage, but digging deeper you’re able to find what you’re missing after a search for a specific album. The categories give you a broad based idea of what you’ll find, and by clicking on the image you can go to Amazon if you’d like to buy the physical media. You can also bookmark and save the images for your own use.
So now there’s no reason for any of your playlists to be without album art. Dig in, find what you need and let us know what you think. There are other competitors out that I think do it better, but I like the ease of finding what I need on this platform.
Today finding the music you want, when you want it has been channeled to using sites like the Amazon store or iTunes. Sometimes, when looming for an obscure song that is not mainstream, you’d be lucky to find it. This frustrating experience paired with the perceived greedines of corporate music labels has forced many of us to find our music on peer to peer networks or bitorrent sites such the Pirate Bay.
Songbeat360.com is an amazingly innovative way of integrating a music player with a music search. Now you can listen to your favorite songs while searching for more. You are essentially still building your own station, much like Pandora or Last.fm, but on this music player you have the ability to download your music immediately.
Bypassing the need to go to the likes of Amazon or iTunes may please some, but does the pricing compare? Based on the site, the application is an Adobe Air app, and comes with 25 free credits. Credits are used when a search is done, and searches are supposedly capable of returning up to 500 results, ensuring you will fond what you need. For further credits, those can be purchased via a stored credit card. For $15 you receive 1000 credits for more music, which breaks down to a whole lot less than $.99 per song on the iTunes store. This is of course assuming you find what you want in one search.
Is the next revolution to your music search? I’d say know, but it’s definitely interesting. The pricing alone is attractive, and if the quality is the same, I can see this web app becoming extremely successful.
Most people im sure would probably agree that Apple’s iTunes software isnt a lightweight application. I was wanting to put together a great list of free alternatives to iTunes that are actually worth checking out.
Foobar 2000 – A digital music management program for Windows users. It works with Windows 2000, Windows Vists , Windows XP and Windows XP 64 bit edition. To use this program you will need 32 MB of RAM and a display with at least an 800 X 600 resolution. This program is compatible with MP1-4, MPC, AAC, WAV, SND, WMA, Ogg Valis, WavPack, AIFF, CDDA, FIAC/Ogs FLAC and AU. It also supports full Unicode and Replay Gain. Other great features include third party development potential and keyboard shortcut that are fully customizable.
Froddle Pod – Froddle is not as feature rich as iTunes but it provides access to the main features that iPod owners need: It can copy music and videos from and to an iPod which is definitely the main feature that any iTunes alternative should support. The software can also backup and restore all data that is stored on an iPod. Another feature is music normalization for all or selected music on the iPod.
Songbird – Built on the Firefox platform and works with iPods and other media players. In addition to many great features, Songbird has a plenty of add-ons, and because it’s open source, clever programmers will be adding more as time goes on.
YamiPod An interesting iTunes alternative, because you don’t have to install it on your computer at all. Just copy it to your iPod’s hard disk and then you can manage your songs from any computer running Mac OS X, Windows or Linux.
Winamp – Sometimes called the grandfather of Windows music players, Winamp is a full featured music manager, with integrated iPod support and will even play iTunes protected files if QuickTime is installed.
Amarok – A great iTunes alternative for Linux and Unix users. It works with a wide variety of portable music players including: iPod, Creative Zen players, iRiver iFP and T players, Nomad players, generic MTP players and generic USB players. Some of the features that this program has that you are going to love include: album covers, wikipedia integration, last.fm integration, superior visual effects, lyrics support and music tracking capabilities.
Banshee – Linux users are going to enjoy what Banshee has to offer. This free download allows you to do everything that you want to do with your digital music. You can import music, organize music, play it back, share it and rip it on a CD. This is a great program for people who love their music and who want to actively manage it.
Cog – Most people using Mac OSX feel that iTunes is the best option because it was designed for this platform. However, Cog is worth a look for Mac users, because it addresses many of the limitations that iTunes has. It can be used with the following file types: Ogg vorbis, Monkeys Audio, MP3, Wavpack, Apple Lossless, FLAC, Musepack, AAC and WAV/AIFF. Some of the features that make it a worthy alternative to iTunes include: gapless playback, auto updating, preferences, Growl support, global hot keys, seeking, feedback forms, last.fm support, and smart shuffle.
Apple’s has more news for us, and they are going to make it official this Wednesday, September 9 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. So, what’s going to be? New versions for iPod Touch with cameras included (maybe including iPod nano) and new features for iTunes.
There are a lot of rumors, which unfortunately are only that, just rumors. Marco Arment made a few guesses around all those and here’s a quick review about what he said:
- New iPod touch version with the following features: camera, double the storage capacities, and new pricing: 8 GB for u$s149, 16 GB for u$s199, 32 GB for u$s249, 64 GB for u$s349.
- New iPod nano version with camera. But they will offer only one model: 8gb for u$s99
- iPod classic out of the market.
- New pricing for the iPod shuffle: u$s59.
You want more? iTunes will include new social network features; and this event will possibly have a special guest: Steve Jobs.
Yes, I didn’t mention anything about the Apple Tablet. Seems that there’s not going to be any announce around that, and they could possibly wait until next year to say something official about it.
We all like music. Rock, rap, R&B, metal, rave, trance. What ever your taste sometimes talking about music with other fans is really cool. Discussing favourite songs, artists, concerts or the industry news is what music fans do. iLike is a platform that allows you to do just that.
It’s is about to be purchased by the floundering MySpace – perhaps in some desperation to heal their wounds. Anyway, I’ll give you a quick run down on what iLike has to offer.
Firstly, it combines all of the great music facilities into one profile from across loads of different social networks such as Bebo, Hi5 and FaceBook. So instead of flying around all the different social networking sites to discuss music you can simply go to iLike.
They’re also in tune with the music scene with tons of news and song updates. iLike will also detect what city you’re in and inform you of upcoming concerts and festivals in your area.
And, as expected you can get songs their (well, iTunes). On the homepage there are free Mp3 songs from lesser-known artists that you can download for free. They also have popular songs that you can buy.
iLike also has different arrangements with many different singers and bands. For example, at the time of writing this article they were promoting Creed’s upcoming tour. The smaller things include loads of applications for download and cool pictures and videos for your enjoyment.
A great service for the chatty music fan.
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Shovel – Digg App
Author: Scott Fitzhugh
Price: Free
Ratings: 147 Reviews – 
(at the time of writing)
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu
iTunes Description:
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Personal Review:
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
- Popular Stories
- Top Stories
- Movers & Shakers
- Brand New Stories
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Overview
Pros
- Easy to use
- Clean interface
- Ability to access all Digg content
Cons
- Free of charge
- Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
- No Digg account profile/community features or functionality
iReddit
Author: CondeNet
Price: $1.99
Ratings: 41 Reviews 
(at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2
iTunes Description:
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
Personal Review:
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
- Programming
- Funny
- Science
- Tech
- World News
- Entertainment
- Business
- Comics
- Gaming
- Best Of
- Economics
- Cappuccino
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Overview
Pros
- Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
- Save links to view/read later
- Comment participation
- Customization of footer subreddits
Cons
- Most expensive Reddit app
- Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Open Source Reddit
Author: Joseph Pintozzi
Price: Free
Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj
iTunes Description:
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
Personal Review:
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
- reddit.com
- bacon
- politics
- pics
- WTF
- funny
- technology
- programming
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Overview
Pros
Cons
- No commenting
- No voting
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Satellite Reddit
Author: 3Cube Technologies
Price: $0.99
Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec
iTunes Description:
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
- Greatly improved performance
- New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
- An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
- The subreddit list is reorderable
- A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
- New lower pricing.
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
- Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
- Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
- Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
- Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
- Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!
Personal Review:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Overview
Pros
- Personalized
- Nice User-Interface
- Good functionality for voting and commenting
- All Reddit content accessible through this app
Cons
- Isn’t free
- Can’t see your karma points
- No search functionality
HAPPY BROWSING WITH THESE SOCIAL MEDIA APPS!
Too often music information is ignored once it’s been put into a player. For casual listeners, information like song title, track number, or even album art seems irrelevant in light of the actual song playing. For those of us that truly love our music, enthusiasts of digital music if you will, ensuring that all of our music is organized, labeled, tagged, and played correctly is like an art form.
In the old days music was catalogued by hand, hours spent finding names, album art, and meta-information that music needs in order to show correctly on the player. Those days are long gone, and many small plugins to iTunes, Winamp, and the other major players have come out to assist users with this tedious but necessary task. For those of us that still hang out onto iTunes, TuneUp has finally made its way to the Mac, and it’s really making an impact.
TuneUp uses the Gracenote database of over 90 million songs to correct the information. The interface is simple and offers a bevy of choices for taking care of your digital music library. With simple drag and drops, your music is referenced against the Gracenote library, but information such as release date and genre is even included for all of your tracks to give you the most depth for your query.
The application also plugs you into other social sites like YouTube. By clicking the “Now Playing” tab you are offered other media that is associated with the track you are playing. If the band has any videos, or fans have done something related to the song your listening to, you will be notified through this feature. To offer even more incentive, the “Now Playing” selection will also provide you concert information for your favorite artists, current, concise, and useful.
Now all of this does come at a small price. Installing the plugin will allow you 500 song corrections and 50 album art updates, but afterwards there is a pay model to keep the application funded. For $12 you can get full access to the application for 1 year, but for $20 you get a lifetime membership that will allow you for correct your entire digital library for life.
Critics will say that paying for this service would be useless especially when most users only adjust their library once or twice in a lifetime. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but nevertheless, even if that were true, the addition of the “Now Playing” features is reason enough to keep this little application handy.
In recent weeks there has been a lot said regarding the possible rate hike for distributed music. Sites like iTunes, Amazon, and Napster to name a few, are all music distribution sites with business models that would have been greatly affected by this possible increase.
The Copyright Royalty Board was to meet to discuss a rate increase of almost 60%, which would hit deep into the profits that distribution sites make. Apple, so angered by this possibility threatened to shut down iTunes if the board passed the rate increase. Apple, who currently owns the largest margin of mp3 players on the market, the iPods, would have shut down their site? A part of me says no, perhaps an idle threat. All in all, the board has decided to keep rates the same, 9 cents per song. You can read more about the decision here.
Still, Apple may not have come out of this situation without egg on their face. The reality of one of the largest music distribution markets completely shutting down, with an mp3 player that is connected to propriety software, iTunes, may scare people into moving towards a more functional player that is not directly tied to any one site. Could Apple have shown it’s own weakness? Or is Apple relying on its millions of dedicated fans to stick with the “in” platform of choice?
For now iTunes is safe.
Apple fans generally sit on the edge of their seats days before Apple makes announcements regarding new products, new updates, or a new direction. More often than not Apple never fails to wow the crowds in taking the lead with innovation and design, but for some reason a large number of reports are saying that today’s announcements at the “Let’s Rock” event were nothing more than a yawner.
Personally I feel that fans have become accustomed to drastic announcements, or for lack of a better word, world changing technology, but sometimes its the little things that make what we already have just that much better. Here’s a run down of the announcements from today:
- For starters the iTunes application received a nice upgrade. The biggest is the addition of the Apple Genius. No, not the guy at the Apple store, but rather back end programming that serves as a personal DJ for your iPod. Genius uses data loaded on the Apple server and in turn working with the iTunes on your computer to find great matches to your already expanding playlist. Let Genius do the audio matching and see how accurate to your taste it really is.
- Apple has also made up with NBC, and now the two are best friends…for now. NBC is re-releasing their material for now with hits like The Office and 30 Rock available in HD for only $2.99 per episode. Other shows and networks will soon follow, but having HD quality on the iPod is an interesting addition, better get those lines ready for downloading overload!
- The iPod Touch got a much needed update along with a decent price drop. Sleek, new design, similar to the iPhone 3G now makes the iPod Touch more curvy and easier to handle. It’s new thinner design makes it easy to carry and comes with built in Nike+ software for the runner in you. The pricing for the new iPod Touch is as follows, $229 (8GB), $299 (16GB), and $399 (32GB)
- Finally the Nano got a new design. I admit when the Nano went short and squat I did not think I would be a fan of that version, and when I got my wife one I found myself using it more than her. The design grew on me and I became accustomed to it. I’m not sure what happened behind the scenes, but apparently there was enough of an uprising that the Nano has gone back to it’s long narrower design, but kept the same screen real estate. Like it’s larger counterpart, the new Nano comes with it’s own built-in accelerometer. They also come in much more bolder colors which reminds me of a pack of Now or Laters.
According to reports stock fell just over 3% after the announcements were over providing support that investors as a whole were underwhelmed by Apple’s announcements. Sad really, while expecting ground breaking news, Apple delivered some solid additions to iTunes, and price drops and re-designs for other products. I think this holiday season will see an increase in iPod Touch sales, and don’t be surprised when you see those brightly colored Nanos flying around either.
Photo Credit, Apple, Inc.
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