Apple Music is the best streaming music service. Yes, it is much better than Spotify. This is fact. I know this to be true, as I have used both and found Apple's offering to be superior. Apple Music isn't limited to the company's own devices like iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV either -- it can also be accessed on Android and the web, for instance.

Today, Apple Music comes to yet another platform -- Roku. Yes, whether you have a Roku media box or TV with Roku integrated, you can now access Apple Music with it. How cool is that?

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For the past month, I have been updating a story on the Russia-Ukraine war from a tech perspective, covering the many online entities being blocked by Russia and the ways groups like Anonymous have been feverishly working to cause Putin, his government, and the Russian military as many headaches as it can. I've even looked at the ways that have sprung up to track things like weapons and Oligarch private jets. Those updates are officially over now, as the number passed twenty, and the page became too much to reasonably expect a person to scroll. 

The end of the daily updates does not, unfortunately, mean an end to war and the deaths and displacements it is causing. So, we'll continue to bring you the important news as it happens. 

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when you wanted to play your music publicly, you had to lug around a huge boombox powered by C or D batteries. It was a costly and tiring ordeal, but it was well worth the effort; it allowed friends to simultaneously enjoy music on the street, at the beach, or in the park. The boombox became a big part of Hip-Hop culture too and was immortalized by fictional character Radio Raheem in the classic Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing.

These days though, kids don't really need a big boombox anymore. Smartphone speakers can get pretty loud, and if you need some extra volume, a small Bluetooth speaker can often get the job done. But what if you really want to blast your music? Like, maybe you want to play some Hip-Hop music at a basketball court or crank some rock and roll loudly at a party. Well, the all-new "Blaster 3.0" Bluetooth boombox from Monster should hit the mark.

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For most of one day last week, a majority of Amazon Music and Ring customers suffered a catastrophic outage when Amazon’s own Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down for hours. Whether you were missing music or vital security, it was a long day for many people. 

The system came back up gradually; here and there a site or app would work, but sometimes only briefly. By that evening, US east coast (EST) time, everything was back up and running as normal. 

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Following the release of her latest album, 30, Adele has had a greater impact on Spotify than the artist -- or anyone else -- expected. The new LP has already been streamed millions of times, and this is hardly surprising for Adele's first album in six years. But the singer has also managed to convince Spotify to make a big change to the platform.

The streaming music service has stopped shuffling albums by default, in recognition of the fact that bands and artists craft albums with a great deal of attention to detail, carefully curating track order to create a narrative or mood.

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If your stereo receiver or speaker system lacks Bluetooth connectivity, what should you do? Throw your existing stereo gear in the trash and buy something new with the wireless standard? I mean, I suppose you could, but that would be idiotic. Instead, you can simply add Bluetooth with a dongle.

Yes, such adapters exist, allowing you to add Bluetooth connectivity to wired speakers and stereos. Best of all, they are typically very simple to use. Today, StarTech.com launches a new such dongle, and it looks to be rather premium. Called "Bluetooth 5.0 Audio Receiver with NFC," not only does it offer analog connectivity, but optical output too. It even features 48KHz/24 bit sample rate support.

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Kodi is a wonderful open source media player that provides users with an immersive experience that is optimized for the living room. While the software gets a bad reputation because some (most?) people use it for piracy, many strictly use it for legal media consumption. As more and more illegal Kodi add-on maintainers face legal trouble, and streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+ remain competitively priced, fewer folks are seeking pirated content nowadays.

LibreELEC is a Linux distribution that exists solely to run the aforementioned Kodi. It supports many hardware configurations, including traditional x86_64 for PC and some ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi 4. And now, a stable version of LibreELEC 10 becomes available for download. Sadly, support for the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 is now discontinued.

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Audio company Sonos is well known for its speakers and soundbars, and last year the company filed a patent that showed it had wireless headphones in development too.

That's not the only product in the pipeline though as Sonos is also reportedly working on earbuds. Development is in early stages however, so things could change or perhaps the product never sees the light of day.

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Spotify has announced a series of upgrades and additions to its Collaborative Playlists feature, making it easier than ever to compile playlists with friends and family.

The changes simplify the process of adding new contributors to a playlist so they can start adding songs, as well as making it easy to see who is working with you on a particular playlist. Spotify says the changes are being introduced to help people feel closer together during the current climate.

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If you’re in the market for new speakers then you have a lot of choices, but some brands stand out more than others. And one of those has two new models out today.

KEF is launching the LS50 Meta (pictured above on the left) and LS50 Wireless II (on the right), depending on whether you want to go for wired or wireless. It is nice to not have to string speaker wires, something we’ve probably all done many times.

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Spotify revolutionized how we consume music, and although it faces strong competition from the likes of Pandora, Apple and Amazon, it remains the number one audio streaming service by some margin, with 286 million active users a month.

That doesn’t mean it’s perfect though. Personally I’m not a lover of Spotify’s look, and I think the mobile experience could certainly be a lot better. I’m definitely not alone here.

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There are many music streaming services these days, such as Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube Music. My favorite, however, is Apple Music. Why? Well, besides the excellent mobile interface, it has a very large library of music. Not to mention, the human-curated playlists are second to none. Plus, Apple Music finally has a web player now -- a much desired feature.

Another cool aspect of Apple Music is time-synced lyrics. When you are listening to some songs (not all), you can have the lyrics display on your device's screen -- timed to the music. It works great, and it is even an option on Apple TV, enabling you to have a karaoke-like sing-along with friends and family. Apple Music is no longer just an Apple-only affair though, as it is available on Android devices and some smart televisions too. Today, Samsung announces that the aforementioned Apple Music time-synced lyrics feature is finally available on its smart TVs.

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Spotify has announced that it is lifting the content cap that previously limited the number of songs, albums and podcasts that could be added to a library.

Until today is was only high-profile Spotify Rockstars who were able to store more than 10,000 items in their Spotify libraries, but now you'll no longer see the message "Epic collection my friend. There's no more room in Your Library. To save more, you'll need to remove some songs or albums" when you reach this number.

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If you've been looking for one more reason to cough up for a Spotify Premium subscription, the ability to hide songs in playlists could be it.

You may well have found a number of near-perfect playlists that other people have created, but there's a reasonable chance that there's at least one song you can't stand. Now, rather than having to skip the track -- or manually recreate the playlist yourself with the offending song removed -- you can simply tell Spotify to hide it.

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If the phrase "it really whips the llama's ass" means anything to you, you clearly remember the heady days of WinAmp. Now media server and management company Plex has come up with its own take on the classic software.

Called -- slightly uninspiringly -- Plexamp, the player is available for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. The company has also released a new app for managing Plex media servers: Plex Dash. This is great news for Plex users, but there's a slight catch in both cases.

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