Grooveshark is an application that was reviewed here on Crenk sometime ago. At the time, I didn’t see the relevance of
Grooveshark awarded CNET's Top 100 Webware Award
the application, though it had some good aspects, I just did not feel comfortable with the entire package. It was not long after that post that officials from Grooveshark contacted me for a dialogue encouraging me to take a look at the offerings again, highlighting features I had not really seen the first time around. In the year that I’ve had with Grooveshark, I’m impressed with the continued efforts it’s making to establish itself as a viable music service for users.
CNET was obviously impressed enough to award it the 2009 Webware Winner for Audio and Music. Grooveshark has indeed come a long way and its user base has grown significantly. With this announcement comes features that again make Grooveshark heads above the rest. For starters their partnership with Ping.fm to build Tinysong API, which allows users to take the code and develop webapps that provide access to Groovesharks extensive library of music. It will be interesting to see what developers come up with as we’ve seen with various other online applications, the opening of the API makes it easy for supplementary apps to proliferate the net.
The second feature that was announced deals specifically with the blogging community. Grooveshark has announced that is now has a WordPress plugin that allows integration into blog posts for users to set up their favorite songs for specific posts. You can set up just one song, or a playlist of songs for your readers on your site. An interesting option, at the very least you could create a small station of songs on your, possibly with a widget.
Grooveshark is definitely expanding its platform and appeal, and it should be interesting to see how much further they go in 2009!
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
With the RIAA already suing teenagers for downloading pirated music, it’s time you move to the safer side and try another alternative. And yes, that ‘other’ alternative can be free and legal.
Tunerec is a web based service, that ‘records’ songs off internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience. Since it has to ‘record’ the streams first, it takes some time to save them in your database. But the patience is eventually rewarded. It has an iTunes like interface, where you can search for artists, songs and albums; Make playlists and also share them with friends.
Although I don’t understand why it has to ‘record’ songs for each user, and not just once for all its users, it probably doesn’t take much time as the number of songs i had last week jumped a whopping 100K this week, taking the total, as of now, to 1 Million.
It may not have all the songs you want, and likely demands patience even for those it has, the audio quality is commendable with very less buffering interuptions. As for the ‘legal’ thing you may be wondering about, the site mentions that it is completely legal and RWW also notes that Tunerec “ has worked out an agreement with the Swedish songwriters association STIM and the musicians (or at least the labels) get paid for every every song played on the service. ”
You can also invite your friends to the service and share your playlists with them.
Tunerec is currently in currently in closed beta but i was able to get into the service right away after i signed up. People living in Europe have a better option than Tunerec and that is Spotify. But sadly, Spotify is only available in Europe and will take some time untill it opens up to the U.S and rest of the world. Untill then, you have Tunerec. If you don’t like it, go buy your own CDs
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
Microsoft has created what is undoubtedly the worst promotional piece for an application in their arsenal. While promoting Songtastic, they somehow find ways to hurt us visually by impersonating an Apple laptop as a PC with stickers, and audibly with the horrible singing done by these less than average performers. Either way it was payday for those actors, but I truly hope Microsoft does some reconsideration before releasing this video on to the masses.
If you can make it through this entire video, you might already be dead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
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.
The concept of cloud computing has had its champions, but also its critics. Many believe cloud computing will be the future of information where nothing is stored locally. The critics feel that if the “cloud” goes down, so does all of our information.
Still, with the ability to access your documents, spreadsheets, pictures, and other media through various storage sites, you can now access your music anywhere, from any location as long as there is an internet connection. Welcome to the concept of blueTunes, where you can take your music to the cloud. The site allows you to upload and store your music to not only free up your personal storage space, but to allow free and clear access where ever you are.
The site is in beta right now, so invites are by email only, but sign up on their site and enjoy!
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?
After reviewing MySpace music, I thought I had found the definitive way to market your music and gain exposure within a target fan base. I could not have been further from the truth. A recent discovery led me to RouteNote, a music platform that allows artists to enter a non-exclusive agreement to share their music over some of the hottest music networks.
This amazing service allow independent artists to not only market themselves and their music, but gain notoriety across more than one network. RouteNote provide exposure on iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, and PumpAudio to name a few. By partnering with some of the biggest and hottest music distributing networks, RouteNote looks to establish themselves as the home for indie artists. This idea coming from the ever expanding shift of listeners moving towards digital distribution as opposed to traditional CD sales. RouteNote remains cutting edge and looks to expanding their partnerships to offer more for the artists.
Making money is easy with this well connected service. As soon as the online artists uploads their song or songs onto the network, and once they’ve selected which partner sites they want to carry their product, the music will earn money almost instantly thanks to RouteNotes world wide distribution model.
Users can keep up with their blog in order to find out what RouteNote is doing, and who their latest partners are. If you’re an indie artists I definitely recommend you check out RouteNote as a way to gain further exposure.
MySpace is known as one of the, if not the biggest social networks on the market. With millions and millions of users, advertisers get the attention of a lot of eyes, but it’s grown even bigger than that. MySpace has long been known to be the launching pad for music artists, knowing that the MySpace market is a target they just could not ignore. Users are able to listen, stream, and even “friend” artists and stay informed.
It just seems like a natural progression for MySpace to enter the music foray with their own MySpace Music site. Just 24 hours old and already MySpace Music has a huge following, and an interesting model that looks to beat out all other music sites. Four major labels on board (Universal, Warner, Sony, EMI), several major publishers, and even the largest independent music provider look to make MySpace Music stand out on its own merit.
Users are able to stream any of the music on the site for free, create playlists of up to 100 songs, share their lists, their streams, and even participate in ranking and viewing other users music selection. All of this creates a music social network that is bound to grow just as fast at their social network specific site, MySpace. New music is also introduced exposing users to new artists and up-can-comers, with the added ability to purchase music which is done through Amazon’s music download service. You want a ringtone? No worries, via Jamster any song on MySpace music can also be yours to carry on your mobile.
The flexibility of MySpace music is unheard of, and I look forward to seeing its growth.
Records, 8-track tapes, cassettes, CD’s, physical media has been a constant in the world of music. Just recently within the last ten years, music has begun the transition from physical to streaming/download acquisition. When I try to think back on the last time I actually entered a music store, I’m almost shocked at how out dated the concept of buying a CD really is. Today with access to iTunes, Amazon Music Store, and other outlets to purchase your media, I was shocked when I read that SanDisk was able to convince music labels that the future was in MicroSD.
Big labels bought into this idea after what had to be an amazing presentation, and to make it even more amazing was the fact that they convinced Walmart and Best Buy to carry the product. Quite honestly this idea may have been approved, but it’s dead before it’s even started. Pricing is not bad, with SD cards looking at a retail value of about $7-$10 apiece, but of course that’s before markup, and any other additions they plan on adding to the sale.
Just looking around my house I don’t know where I would put my MicroSD card, my phone maybe, but I don’t use it as a media player nor would I want to. I’d like to know what mind numbing, hypnotic method they used to get anyone on board with this idea. If you want a taste of this market, I suggest by early, because the MicroSD idea will almost certainly be dead by next year.
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