Music

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Owners of Sonos devices were disappointed when they were told by the company that as of May 2020, there would be no more software updates released for older equipment. Sonos offered customers two options for "legacy products": keep using them without updates, or brick them by putting them in Recycle Mode in return for a 30 percent discount on a future purchase.

There was an understandable backlash from Sonos' userbase, and now the company's CEO has been forced to pen a letter in which he assures customers that devices will work for "as long as possible". Patrick Spence concedes that "we did not get this right from the start". He continues: "My apologies for that and I wanted to personally assure you of the path forward".

There are many music streaming services these days, such as Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music to name a few. Believe it or not, Google has two such services -- Play Music and YouTube Music.  It is very confusing to have one company offering two competing options, but they will eventually be merged into one under the YouTube Music brand.

The problem? As of today, YouTube Music simply isn't up to par with any competitors -- it has a messy interface that can be confusing. While it is slowly getting better all the time, it simply cannot compete with Spotify or Apple Music -- the gold standards. Today, however, YouTube Music is gaining a pretty cool new feature -- personalized mixes.

With more than one Nest device or Google Home speaker in the house, it can be a pain to manually switch music streaming from one speaker to another as you move from room to room.

But now Google has introduced a new feature that makes the process much, much easier. The "stream transfer" option can be accessed with your voice via Google Assistant, or using apps.

I recently canceled Amazon Prime, as I found the subscription to be deficient -- especially at $129 per year. What was wrong with Prime? Many things, such as the video library being atrocious and the included Amazon Music service having a very small library (two million songs). Amazon makes you pony up even more money to have a larger music library (50 million songs). Not to mention, the Amazon Music interface is nothing to write home about -- overall, die hard music fans should look elsewhere, such as Apple Music or Spotify.

But OK, let's say you are a casual music listener that takes advantage of either Amazon Music or the pricier Amazon Music Unlimited. If that is you, I have good news -- your music service is now available on some Garmin smartwatches!

Ask Google what the lyrics to a particular song are and the chances are that the search results will display them in an info pane as well as links to lyrics sites. But where does Google get these lyrics from? Have Googlers sat and manually transcribed the words to songs ready or when people search for them?

No. Actually, there's a high chance that Google has simply scraped the lyrics from other sites, and one lyrics website says it caught the company red-handed. Genius.com used "Morse code" to catch the company lifting content directly from its lyric database.

When, meteorologically speaking, the calendar hasn’t yet flipped to summer, it may be tough to switch your mind and consider an event that takes place in some distant future known as autumn.  But, hey, music has no season, right?

For the past several years internet music darling iHeartRadio has held a huge multi-day music festival in Las Vegas. 2019 will be no exception, and now the online giant is announcing some of the performers that are lined up for this go-around..