Articles about Music

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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I had great hopes for Xbox Music when announced in October. It’s essentially the best of Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, and Google music services all wrapped up into one. But the sheer number of problems with this initial offering leaves myself and others in complete disappointment.

Xbox Music replaces Zune on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and the Xbox 360. The service includes the ability to purchase music a la carte, stream or download songs (via Xbox Music Pass subscription for $9.99 per month), sync playlists across devices, access a music locker, and more. Any tunes you purchase from the Xbox Music store, or playlists you create, sync across devices. Well, that's the idea, except, it’s not working for some people.

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Google Play Music launched last year, beginning its life known simply as Google Music, growing up quickly since its humble private beta beginning. The app and web service officially launched in late 2011 and have grown quickly since then. Now the latest update has just been pushed out today to Google Play. The search giant also recently announced availability of the store and also Nexus devices in Europe and Australia as well as in the United States directly from Google and T-Mobile.

First, as for the brand new Play Music update, Google has added several features that should enhance the user experience. The update rolled out quietly without any official press release or even a post to their Android blog where these announcements frequently appear. So what is new in version 4.4.811H you ask?

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Whether you think Microsoft wants to be Apple, or not, the company continues to roll out products designed to compete with its major rival. Today’s announcement is for Xbox Music, a digital music service for the Xbox games console, which will also appear as the default music player in Windows 8.

The service, which goes live tomorrow and will be available in 22 countries from launch, is a cross between Spotify and iTunes. Users will be able to listen to songs or full albums for free, create artist-based streaming radio stations, and put together music mixes and playlists. The iTunes element comes in the form of a music store, which will allow users to purchase and download tracks. The store will reportedly offer over 30 million songs, some four million more than Apple's store. There will also be over 70,000 music videos on offer.

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Music players are not exactly thin on the ground on the Android platform, and the battleground on which users are gained and lost is the user interface; noozy studio is a music app, which features a somewhat minimalistic look and feel, and bears more than something of a resemblance to Microsoft Zune. The interface is largely text driven, which helps to give the app a clean, modern look.

This is an app that can be used to listen to both locally stored and online content, and enables users to discover new music by browsing through what others have been listening to. Listening to music stored on your Android device is much as you would expect, with album art being displayed at the same time as playback controls. If you’re a music fan, the sound quality of what you listen to is going to be important – there are a number of processor effects included with the app that can be used to improve sound in various ways.

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This week one of my colleagues posted to group chat: "The CD player turns 30". To which I asked: "What's a CD?" And someone else took the question seriously: "Compact Disc". Duh, I know that. But does anyone younger than 10? It's a serious question given a prediction Nielsen makes.

The analyst firm expects record-breaking digital music tracks sales in 2012 -- that means in excess of last year's 1.3 billion. The number already exceeds 1 billion, and Nielsen forecasts digital album sales will grow 15 percent year over year. My, how times have changed.

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Music creation is now easier than ever, and while teenagers still gather together to practice in the basement, computer-based music from the bedroom continues to grow in strength. The idea behind MAGIX Music Maker 2013 is nothing new -- there are endless programs that let you use loops, samples in addition to your own recordings to create your own musical masterpieces -- but the latest version of the application gives you more tools and a better workflow than ever before.

Anyone who has used a previous version of the program will notice the redesigned interface, which can now be better customized to suit your workflow, and performance has also been improved so you can get things finished faster than ever. These changes are welcome, but the tools and options available are what really matter. The 2013 version of the program lets you work with up to 99 tracks and the sample selection has been expanded to the extent that a new search tool has been added.

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What the retailer gives, it also takes away. In what I can only call the mother of all customer-unfriendly emails, Amazon tells me, and presumably others, that music uploaded to Cloud Drive is gone. I got my email yesterday, without prior notice of major subscription change. I only knew because my job is covering tech news.

But the email still shocked: "If your Cloud Player library contained more than 250 imported songs when your subscription expired, you will be unable to access your previously-imported music". Oh yeah? What happened to that generous 20GB of storage Amazon gave a year ago? What about benefits attached to Prime membership?

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At 17, I hitchhiked with a friend from Maine to Boston, where was the regional Federal Communications Commission office. The agency heavily regulated radio, and I couldn't be a deejay without obtaining a Third Class license, which required a test and some math skills (yeah, just to spin vinyl). I flunked and thumbed rides a second time, passing the exam and getting a five-year license. My radio career started at college station WMEB.

Much has changed about music since the late 1970s, when punkers rebelled against their disco-loving Baby Boomer siblings. But surprisingly much is the same, too -- or so Nielsen's "Music 360" report reveals. Radio doesn't dominate music discovery like it once did (I partly blame canned broadcasts for taking the personality out of the airwaves), yet remains top source: 48 percent of people find out about new music from radio. Friend recommendations is distant second (10 percent) followed by YouTube (7 percent).

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Apple consistently reinvents iPod nano, rolling out new versions of its tiny player annually since 2005, with the exception of last year. It’s not too much of a stretch to assume we’ll see an updated version this year, out in time for Christmas, and according to Japanese blog Macotakara, it will be a return to the earlier, taller form factor, but with some notable differences.

The blog, which cites a "reliable Chinese source", reports that the new device will be three-quarters the height of the fifth-generation model, with a rectangular (presumably touchscreen) display, a home button like the one found on iPhone and iPad, and a "dedicated new iTunes service", suggesting it may have a working version of iOS onboard.

Macotakara also states that the clip that appears on the back of the current square design (for use during physical activity) will be abandoned, making the new 7th-gen nano much thinner.

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Amazon Cloud Player, a service that lets Amazon users stream their cloud-stored music collection to their mobile device over a regular data connection, has been available on Android for more than a year. Tuesday, Amazon finally released the iPhone and iPod touch version of the Cloud Player App.

Just like the Android version, users can stream their music, download songs, or manage their music in the cloud, with the included ability to share playlists created in iTunes with the user's cloud library.

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