Music Software

Subscription music pioneer Rhapsody was spun out from joint owners RealNetworks and Viacom in April, and it immediately declared its independence by dropping the price of its mobile service from $15 to $10 per month. Since then, the service has introduced offline playback to its iPhone application--critical, if you want to be able to get the most out of your subscription while on AT&T's notoriously flaky 3G network--and successfully launched an Android version, which will be getting offline playback shortly.

Tomorrow, the company is set to announce that it's moving its streaming service from several data … Read more

Streaming music from your PC to your phone is a nice alternative to music locker services like MP3Tunes and mSpot, which require you to upload your music to a server on the Internet before you can access it on your phone. Simplify Media had a great iPhone app that performed this function, but Google bought the company earlier this year--presumably to integrate it into some sort of future music service for Android--and discontinued the iPhone app. I've been looking for a viable replacement ever since.

Today, I found it: ZumoCast. It's brought to you by the folks who … Read more

Music Hack Day is a recurring event in which developers take 24 hours to write music applications based on various open APIs. This weekend, Music Hack Day took place London, and a few of the results have been made available online for the general public. Most offer a minute or two of interesting musical distraction, like 7x7, a Web page that lets you create chords from notes in a matrix, and Soundwheel (warning: audio will begin playing as soon as the page loads), which warbles bass tones as you drag points around a color wheel.

But one hack seemed truly … Read more

After I expressed my disappointment with Ping yesterday, a helpful reader pointed me to Like.fm as an example of the promise of social music.

Here's how it works. First, download and install the free plug-in for iTunes. (There's also a WinAmp version for you holdouts.) Whenever you play a song from iTunes, Like.fm posts the title and artist on a public Web page. Other users can then click on the "play" button on that page and if a video of the song exists on YouTube, it'll start playing. If you link Like.fm … Read more

commentary I downloaded iTunes 10 this morning to test Ping with a fellow Directions analyst and I'm completely underwhelmed. What was Apple thinking? The company made its name designing delightful user interfaces that just work, and while iTunes has always seemed like a bit of an afterthought--especially on Windows--compared with Apple hardware, Ping seems particularly rushed and half-finished. Especially in comparison with the last major music-related feature addition, Genius in iTunes 8, which had a pretty strong "wow" factor at launch.

When you sign up for Ping, it asks you to create a profile and by default … Read more

If you're bored with building playlists in iTunes or other music players, a simple free application called Playlost displays all the MP3s in your music library as a randomized hexagonal grid in your Web browser. Then, you can create playlists by connecting adjacent nodes.

The app comes in a ZIP file with two components. First you have to run the Library Scanner, a Java application. It took about 30 seconds to scan my entire library, and found about 400 MP3 files. One word of caution: if you rip your CDs in iTunes, they're probably in the MPEG-4 (.m4a) … Read more

I've been testing the iPhone version of MOG, a subscription on-demand music service that I blogged about in December, for the last few days. While it performs adequately, I haven't seen anything that really makes it stand out from the other competitors I've looked at recently, like Rhapsody, Thumbplay, and the still-in-beta Rdio.

First, the positives. Sound quality was excellent when streaming over a 3G connection and you can download any song to store in a local cache, so you can play it even when you're offline (like Rhapsody and the BlackBerry version of Thumbplay). You … Read more

This week, at Microsoft's annual conference for the partners who sell most of the company's products, Microsoft once again showed off its upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform and made a couple of interesting announcements that got me thinking. Microsoft has all the pieces in place to create the ultimate cloud-based music service for Windows Phone 7. All it has to do is stitch them together.

First, Microsoft confirmed that Windows Phone 7 devices, like the last couple generations of Zune players, will be able to sync music, video, and large images with a user's PC over a … Read more

Music locker service MP3Tunes lets you make your music collection available on any Internet-connected device, but first you have to upload your music to MP3Tunes Web servers. This is no problem if all your music is on your computer--just use the free MP3Tunes LockerSync app. But what about songs that you bought on your phone? Until now, you've had to find a way to get those songs back to your PC, then upload them from there.

Not anymore, as long as you're using an Android phone. On Monday, MP3Tunes updated its free Android client so that you can … Read more