Articles about Music

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Back when Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8, in late-October last year, the company promised that Pandora would arrive on the smartphone operating system sometime in early 2013, bringing along with it a year's worth of free music with no ads.

Today, Microsoft has kept its promise and delivered the popular app on the Windows Phone store. On Twitter, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore announced: "Oh heck, been dying to share PANDORA! Totally free, no ads through 2013. Best Pandora on any phone, IMO".

And the app, indeed, touts "no ads and no monthly streaming limit...for FREE". On Windows Phone 8, Pandora allows users to pin favorite stations on the homescreen and see what is playing by looking at the Pandora live tile. Other exclusive features include filtering explicit content using Kid's Corner to keep the youngsters away from sensitive music and the ability to access a recent stations page and look at the current favorites.

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Social sharing and video-editing service Givit gets more musical, in an announcement made during SXSW in Austin today. The Givit app is exclusive to iOS and seeks to be to videos what Instagram is to photos.

The new focus is all about music videos or setting moments to music, and iPad, iPhone or iPod touch users shooting, editing and sharing the creations -- straight from the device. "Anyone can now create an amazing music video or reimagine their favorite moments right from their iPhone, adding new clips, sound or transitions and share socially however they choose", Givit CEO Greg Kostello says.

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Nineteenth in a series. Welcome to this week's episode of our ongoing series about some of the best new apps that released this week for the Windows 8 operating system.

The app count grew to 31,448 apps in the US Windows Store, which is an increase of 1,149 apps in total; 824 of those apps are listed as free in the store while the remaining 325 apps are listed commercial applications or desktop programs listed in Store.

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It is the one year anniversary of Google Play store -- or at least the renaming of the Android market. Google loves to celebrate these kinds of occasions with a sale. This one is no exception, as the company has kicked off with deals on music, books, magazines, videos and, of course, apps.

Jamie Rosenberg, the vice president of Digital Content at Google Play announced the deals today, saying that "since no birthday is complete without presents, we’re celebrating with a bunch of special offers across the store on songs, TV shows, movies and books. We’re even offering a collection of games with some fun birthday surprises created by developers".

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Remember how last year the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) managed to persuade the UK High Court to order ISPs to block the Pirate Bay, in order to completely eradicate piracy and save the music industry?

Well as it turns out, that didn’t quite do the trick, so the BPI has returned to the High Court and this time it’s Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy which are being blocked. A move which, of course, will definitely stop piracy this time. A bit like how, when Jessops went bust in the UK, no one was able to buy cameras any more.

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