albums

Five fun photo apps for the iPad 2

Given its size, the iPad 2 is a better photo viewer than photo taker (unless it's acting as a photo booth). And as a photo viewer, it's fantastic. Flipping through photos on the iPad's touch screen pulls you closer to the images than clicking through photos on a laptop or desktop with a keyboard. I recently tried out three photo-browsing apps, a photo-processing app, and a photo-booth app on the iPad. I offer you my thoughts on each.

First up, two apps for browsing Instagram images. My favorite of the duo is Instagallery, which lets you view … Read more

Did Steve Jobs help or hurt music?

Perhaps the question should be, "Did Steve Jobs help or hurt the sound of music?" He did not invent digital music or MP3 players, but that didn't stop him from redefining the way people buy and listen to music.

Then again, Napster was around before iPods and iTunes, and it allowed people to amass gigantic music collections at zero cost, which I don't see as something to be proud of. Having 10,000+ songs on an iPod is one thing, but do people ever really listen to all of that music? Record labels could not compete … Read more

App turns iPad into Facebook photo album

While iPad owners still await the arrival of a Facebook app, your choices for Facebooking on the iPad boil down to using third-party apps or accessing the site through Safari. For the specific purpose of viewing and commenting on Facebook photos, there's a new app that lets you browse your or your friends' photos as if you were flipping through an old photo album. Let's take a quick spin through the free and appropriately named Facebook Photo Album app, which was released only last week.… Read more

5 great uses for an HP TouchPad

If you're one of the thousands who snapped up the HP TouchPad during its brief $99 liquidation sale (or one of the unfortunate hundreds that paid full price), I've got some good news and some bad news.

First, the bad news. If the tablet market were a horse race, you just bet on a steed that's been carted off to the glue factory. Abandon any expectations of software updates, or of exciting games and apps filtering their way into the WebOS store. What you see now is what you're stuck with.

The good news is that … Read more

Poll: Do you buy albums or songs?

Not every album is a song cycle or designed to be listened to as a complete work of art. But the songs were more or less recorded in the same time frame, and someone tried to create a musical flow, from one song to the next.

Some musicologists cite Frank Sinatra's 1958 album, "Only the Lonely," as the first "concept" album, for its sustained theme of late-night moods and melancholy. There were probably earlier pop song cycles, but it was definitely the Beatles' "Sgt Pepper" and the Who's "Tommy" that … Read more

The 404 878: Where we don't give a truck about freeze (podcast)

Jay-Z and Kanye West unleashed their collaborative album "Watch The Throne" yesterday, but how did they keep it from leaking before the release? We'll tell you on today's episode of The 404 Podcast.

We'll also tell you where the new Star Trek amusement park is being built, why parents should download the first iOS app built by the FBI, and who's to blame for the four-car pileup that included Google's first driverless vehicle.

The 404 Digest for Episode 878

Duh: Facebook use and narcissism correlate in teens. How Jay-Z and Kanye West kept their new album from leaking. There's going to be a Star Trek amusement park--guess where? FBI releases child ID iPhone app. Finally, the first Google autonomous-car crash. Has Starbucks had enough of laptop loungers?

Episode 878 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Music database and player

We can tell that the developers who came up with Soundbase are more into coding and music than PR since they call their freeware "a single executable that runs from any location" instead of a powerful, versatile, and highly flexible music database, player, and tag editor that can store, sort, edit, and play more than 100,000 songs, search for album art, and even play Web radio. It was created as an alternative to the large commercial MP3 players and organizers. It's based on Microsoft's DirectShow architecture and supports most popular formats, including MP3, OGG, APE, … Read more

How to create an iPhoto Smart Album for your Hipstamatic pics

Smart Albums are among the most powerful features of iPhoto. Last week, I wrote about creating a Smart Album to separate out the videos in your iPhoto library. In the process of writing that post, I discovered a Hipstamatic filter hidden within the conditions for creating a Smart Album. It's a great way to isolate the shots taken with the iPhone's Hipstamatic app that you've imported to your iPhoto library.

… Read more

Use an iPhoto Smart Album to separate out videos

When you import videos to iPhoto from, say, an iPhone, the videos get dumped in with all the snapshots you've taken. Thankfully, there is an easy way to separate out the videos by using a Smart Album.… Read more