Articles about Music

If you’d like to edit an audio file then there’s plenty of free tools around to help, however most of them are prone to altering your files in unexpected ways. To test this yourself, just open any file, save it with a different name, and compare that file with the original. Even though you’ve not performed any operations on the second file at all, you’ll still often find there are differences, and inevitably that’s going to mean some compromise in sound quality.

WaveShop takes an alternative approach. The program is specifically designed to be bit-perfect, only altering your audio when it’s absolutely necessary. So if you open a file and then save it immediately, there will be no changes. And if you carry out some editing task on one area of the file -- fade it out at the end, say -- everything else remains exactly as it was.

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Debate is fierce about whether smartphones and tablets cannibalize PC sales. Surely, we can all agree that these device subsume dedicated MP3 players. Top-selling iPod is product in declining demand, while today NPD puts hard numbers behind changing music-listening habits. Which reminds me, I promised to set up my wife's Rdio account over the weekend. We got a family plan a few days back. She'll stream on Google Nexus 4 or 10 and download some tracks for offline ear-banging.

She's not alone. Fifty-six of U.S. smartphone users listen to music on the device -- 40 percent for tablets, according to NPD. I'm in the latter category on Nexus 7. Consumption is up, with 54 percent of smartphone music listeners doing more than a year ago and 39 percent tuning in at least once a day.

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The timing could not be better. Yesterday my wife received her shiny new Nokia Lumia 822 and today she can now use it to play music from the streaming service Spotify. Oh, she probably will not because, not her thing, but she could, and that is the important thing because the option was not available to her, or any other Windows Phone 8 customers, yesterday.

Today Microsoft's Michael Stroh proudly announces that Spotify has now found a home in the Windows Phone Store. The app is still in beta, which means users may experience a bit of a hiccup here and there, but customers can "instantly increases the size of your music library by millions of tracks, making it easy to discover new songs and artists. You can create your own playlists, or browse and indulge in the ones your friends put together". It also features the ability to download playlists to your handset for listening at times when you are not within range of a connection. Tracks added from the phone app also show on your computer.

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In a move that aims to consolidate the company's branded app selection on Lumia Windows Phones, Nokia has unveiled a new, subscription-based premium service dubbed Nokia Music+, that builds atop of the established Nokia Music platform. A "+" sign can make quite the difference.

Music+ is not designed to replace currently available free services such as Mix Radio, but rather to offer Lumia owners the paid option for "unlimited music discovery". The Finnish manufacturer says that Music+ is aimed at "people who care enough about music to pay something for more quality and choice" and, depending on the user's location, will run for around EUR3.99 or $3.99 per month. But what are the advantages?

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Eleventh in a series. Microsoft has updated two of the native apps that Windows 8 ships with this week. The News and Finance apps have received updates that enhance performance, improve network connectivity and add support for additional regional sources.

A total of 24,749 apps are listed in the US Windows 8 store this Friday. Of those, 20,019 are free to download and install, while 4,730 are paid applications. That's an increase of 961 apps this week.

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The most important tech news this week isn't from the Consumer Electronics Show. Amazon earns distinction, with a new service that, if rightly executed, could change how everyone buys digital content. Not since Apple licensed digital tracks for the iTunes Store in early 2003 and later secured deals allowing consumers to buy a single and get the rest of the album for appropriately-reduced cost is a music service so provocative. Amazon AutoRip is as big as DRM-free and looms over Apple's iTunes Match -- and both transform music licensing and consumption.

Can you feel it? The Earth shook today, and nothing will be the same because of it.

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Exstream Software Development, the team responsible for Android four-track app Audio Evolution Mobile, has released an app called USB Audio Recorder Pro which lets users attach USB microphones and other USB audio interfaces to Android 3.1+ devices that support USB host mode.

Musicians, podcasters, and filmmakers alike can now attach microphones to their Android tablet or smartphone and record mono or stereo 16- or 24-bit audio, and also play back over their USB device. Many of the recording variables depend upon the audio interface and Android device that are being used, but the maximum sample rate the app supports is 192 kHz, and files can be saved as wav/flacc/ogg on internal or removable storage.

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The SZ Development released Free Music Downloader 1.30, the latest edition of its MP3 download tool, and the update is mainly about extending its list of supported sites.

The program provides a simple, free and portable way to search a number of sources for music. This update adds support for BandCamp, Hypem and Xiami to the existing list of sites and services, which also includes www.last.fm, vkontakte.ru, goear.com, GrooveShark.com, SoundCloud.com, mixcloud.com, ProstoPleer.com and 8Tracks.com. Elsewhere, a bug fix sees LastFM searches and downloads working again.

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Remember that Googlezon video from a few years ago? The one that predicted Google and Amazon would take over the world with, perhaps, apocalyptic results? Well, none of that has come to pass, but both companies continue to grow and expand. Amazon, increasingly becoming as much of a content delivery system as a product retailer, made several bold moves to get its media out to even more platforms, today.

For starters, Amazon moved to bring its Cloud Player music service to both Samsung Smart TV's and Roku set-top boxes and made its Instant Video service available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Both services are essentially cloud interfaces for your media.

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Sixth in a series. Every seven days we look at some of the best new app releases for Windows 8. This week's releases include Amazon and Nascar official applications, as well as a selection of mostly media-orientated offerings.

Microsoft has added a top-paid category to select localized stores that displays top-rated paid applications. It is likely that this will be rolled out eventually to all stores.

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Creating a great music player is a tricky business. You’ll need to provide plenty of features, but also make sure the interface is simple, unobtrusive, lightweight, and never gets in the user’s way. Very few players get this balance right, in our view, but Winyl is one of the exceptions.

The program arrives as a compact download (under 3MB), and installs quickly, with no browser add-ons or other extras to worry about (you won’t even see as much as a “Donate” button, unless you view the Winyl “About” box).

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Do you remember Napster? Not the paid streaming music service sold last year to Rhapsody, but the original peer-to-peer music sharing service that was hugely popular from 1999-2001 when it went down in a legal ball of flames over copyright infringement. Well something Napster-like is emerging from Amoeba Music, the huge pre-owned music and video stores in Berkeley, San Francisco and Los Angeles and some musicians and vinyl junkies are up in arms about it, though I can’t understand why.

Napster was a peer-to-peer service that allowed people to share their music collections online. Amoeba's Vinyl Vaults service is similar in that the company rips tracks from old records as they come into the stores then throws them up on a webpage where they can be downloaded, but not for free. Amoeba charges money.

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Social audio-sharing site SoundCloud announced on Tuesday that the beta of its redesign is complete and that "Next SoundCloud" is now welcoming users from the public.

The redesign was first rolled out in private beta last May, and SoundCloud says it has helped increase user engagement by as much as 30 percent over the previous version.

What does that mean? For musicians, podcasters, and audio creators, it means quite a bit, actually. When a user navigates to one of the redesigned SoundCloud sites, they listen to 30 percent more sound (music, audio, whatever) than they did on the classic sites. Generally speaking, it's an update to the aesthetic of the site that propels increased usage.

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Apple has released the long-awaited iTunes 11 and boy does it look different. The brand new, easier to navigate interface provides a simplified view of your media. The default view shows a grid of albums and you can expand each one to see the songs it contains. There’s a pop-up menu on the left to browse your libraries (Music, Films, TV Programs and Apps) and a button on the right to open the iTunes Store. The Playlists button is located in the bar at the top of the screen. The familiar sidebar on the left is no more.

When you connect an iPhone, iPod or iPad to your computer, a button for it will appear and you can add content to the device by dragging and dropping.

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If you want to download music for free then the Internet isn’t exactly short of options, so discovering that we now had another, in the shape of the new MP3jam, didn’t exactly fill us with excitement.

But then we actually tried the program. And it turned out to be a real surprise.

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