Music

At WWDC, Apple's big annual show, the company finally announces iTunes Radio, a service rumored and bandied about around the internet for some time. Apple, as it is known to do, builds this up to be the be-all and end-all of everything that came before. Is it?

To answer that we must first delve into what iTunes Radio is. According to Apple, customers "have access to Featured Stations, stations inspired by the music you already listen to, and more than 200 genre-focused stations — including everything from Hard Rock to Doo Wop. Your stations evolve based on the music you play and download".

Pandora, which has long been my music app of choice, is part of many set-top boxes and smart TV's -- it is even built into my DVR. Today the music service introduces an all new big screen experience, launching its official TV service -- another step towards making the radio app available virtually everywhere.

TV.Pandora.com hits the market aiming at Xbox 360, smart TVs, set-top boxes and more. According to Tom Conrad from Pandora, "The next generation of Pandora for the living room is an entirely new experience designed from the ground up for your television and remote control. This new initiative is standards-based and embraces next generation TV, game console, and set top box architectures that support open web standard".

On Monday, Finnish maker Nokia rolls out an update for its Music Windows Phone 8 app which now allows users to pay for the optional premium service using the mobile operator bill. The feature is currently offered for a select number of carriers.

The company says that mobile operator billing is available only when the "service provider and the content publisher support this payment method". This implies that, at least for now, users in certain regions might be stuck with the traditional purchasing option -- either a credit or debit card which must be added to their Nokia account.

On Thursday, music discovery service Shazam released an update for its Windows Phone app which introduces support for the latest version of the tiled operating system. In addition to finally playing well with Windows Phone 8, the app also comes with a refreshed user interface and a couple of new features and improvements.

"We are incredibly excited about this launch as it brings so many of Shazam's key features to Windows Phone 8 fans", says Shazam's Daniel Danker. "Windows Phone 8 users now have access to a great smartphone experience, from faster tagging and a new interactive map, where users can discover the music people are listening to around them. This is more than just the music that's already popular; these are often songs people are discovering for the first time".

Today, one of the best music streaming services (excuse the opinion) gets just a bit better. Pandora has been around since 2000, offering customers free and paid solutions for creating custom stations and discovering new music. Now the streaming service wishes to offer more to its customers.

Pandora founder Tim Westergram announces the debut of Pandora Premieres, a new station that brings unreleased music to customers a week in advance.

On Friday, Finnish handset maker Nokia announced that the Play To app for Windows Phone 8 made the grade from experimental to stable version and is now publicly available to download from the Store. Previously, the DLNA app could only be installed through Nokia' Beta Labs.

According to the company, Play To brings DLNA to all of Nokia's Windows Phone 8 handsets available today like Lumia 920, 720 and 520, among others. Compared to the experimental version that I detailed little over two weeks ago, the stable Play To app ships with a number of bug fixes but without any new features onboard.

Are you a music fan? If so, then you have no shortage of solutions for both computer and mobile device. Everywhere from Pandora to Spotify offers an alternative for your PC or mobile device. Plus there are even apps that can identify a track you hear on the radio in a matter of seconds. Shazam is one of the ones that fall in the latter category.

Shazam, like SoundHound, identifies songs, while Rdio plays them for you. The two entities are joining forces in more locations now. "Now anyone with the Shazam app for iOS or Android can listen to entire songs after tagging them by clicking the 'Listen Free on Rdio' link", the music discovery service tells us.

Spotify is the world’s most popular streaming music service with some 24 million active uses, around 6 million of those paying a subscription for premium services. I use Spotify all the time; it’s a great way of finding and sampling new music, and the company’s deals with major labels go a long way to legitimizing the streaming model.

Yesterday though, Spotify acted to change its website player after a Dutch developer released a Chrome extension that allowed MP3s to be downloaded from the site. Google removed the Downloadify plug-in from its site before Spotify applied the fix to the player, which now uses an encrypted format.

Oct. 10, 2007 is the day I threw off the chains locking my music. I purged the last DRM-protected file from my personal catalog -- and not by stealing. I purchased every track, and getting them Digital Rights Management-free wasn't easy six years ago. The base collection started from CDs. The problem: Songs purchased from iTunes, starting in April 2003. Later, Apple offered facility to remove copyright restrictions. Meanwhile, I repurchased some tunes, or just did without them.

But chains remain. Every video purchased or rented for download is DRM-protected. Far worse are ebooks. There, the unsung hero -- your advocate and champion -- is JK Rowling. In late April 2012, she released the entire Harry Potter series as ebooks, DRM-free, baby. Rowling is more than a hugely successful writer; she stands up for readers, too.

I used to think my iPod touch was the bee’s knees when it came to digital music players. Exposure to true audiophile-friendly models from the likes of Cowon and Colorfly, coupled with listening to FLAC tracks on my budget Sony Xperia phone taught me better, and for a while I was incredibly frustrated with the shortcomings of Apple’s supposedly market-leading player.

I’ve since discovered that most of that frustration can be targeted at the frankly rubbish Music app that ships with iOS. And now I’m ready to embrace decent sounding music on my iPod touch thanks to a fabulous app called Accudio Free 1.0.0.

A decade ago yesterday, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store and changed how we buy music. For those of you too young to remember or so old to have forgotten, Microsoft and Apple engaged in an epic struggle to dominate the fledgling legal digital music market -- all while trading in ripped files soared, despite Napster's closure. You remember it, right?

I was all too glad to pay for music, if only given the opportunity, as clearly were others. iTunes Music Store launched with 200,000 tracks -- a gigantic number at the time -- from five labels: BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner. Singles priced at 99 cents, albums at $9.99, hit the sweet spot for what consumers would pay, while undercutting physical media prices. Of course, the real competition was free, pirated stuff.

If you have followed me for anytime now then you probably already know that I am a happy Pandora customer. The music app gets me through my days in my lonely office of one. It turns out, I am not the only fan of the streaming service as I have 200 million friends joining me.

Pandora announces that it has passed that milestone after eight years in the market. While the personalized radio service came online back in 2005, it took until July of 2011 to reach the first 100 million users, but growth has obviously expanded exponentially since then.

The cloud is now used for many things, from simply storing documents, to create and editing files online. Google Play, in addition to many other things, offers a place to store up to 20,000 tracks that can then be listened to online or with a range of mobile devices. This number relates only to songs from your "personal collection" and is in addition to any purchases you make. Google Play Music Manager is the tool you need to get everything up and running.

Install and launch the app, sign into your Google account and you’ll be asked where you current music collection is stored. There is support for iTunes and Windows Media Player, but there’s also the option of just opting to work with files stored in My Music, or any other folder for that matter. If you have your music scattered across multiple folders, you can add them all to your Google library.

Twenty-second in a series. It has been a busy week filled with announcements and updates regarding Windows Store. The core applications Windows 8 Mail, Calendar and People got updated. Calendar users were in for a surprise if they used to sync their data with Google Calendar, as that does not work anymore after the update. The Mail app received significant improvements, including the ability to create, rename and delete folders inside the application and options to flag emails as important.

The People app got a new feature that lets you post messages to the Facebook Wall of friends, and the Calendar app received an interface makeover. Microsoft updated Xbox Music, too -- a new volume control option now acts independently from system volume and there are several other features, including the ability to make songs added to Xbox Music available on all compatible devices.

In theory, every time you import MP3 files to a PC you should rename them to follow consistent rules, then save them in an appropriate folder where they’ll be easy to find, later. In practice, of course, life’s too short -- so it’s just as well that MusicZen can handle all this for you.

The program is available as a tiny (627KB) executable, and it really couldn’t be much easier to use. At a minimum all you have to do is download and run it, choose the folder where your MP3s are right now, and a destination folder where the finished results will be stored. Then click “Organize”, and watch as the program goes to work.