music

There was a time not so long ago when MP3 players were a hot and essential technology, and Apple's best-selling product was the iPod. Now with smartphones and tablets, though, there are many other devices that make great music players. But even if the MP3 player's best days are waning, there are still a number of great products available. Here are our top picks.

Apple's iPod Touch has been CNET's top-rated MP3 player for five years running. With a base model that starts at $229, it is not an inexpensive product, but the breadth … Read more

Rocket Music Player combines cool features with an attractive layout and fantastic audio quality. It's a near-perfect blend of style and substance. Since it gives you most of its great features for free, there's no question that you should try it.

This app is one of the rare apps that sounds better without headphones than it does with them. It sounds great even on mediocre speakers. It has some advanced audio-tweaking settings like limiters, fading, and gapless playback. There's an equalizer, but you need to pay $4 to unlock all of its features. You can only tweak … Read more

More than a year after Microsoft announced its Xbox Music service, the company has finally brought it to the Web.

Microsoft's Xbox Music platform is now available for users in the browser. Customers can head over to its page and stream "millions of songs" from within the browser. Microsoft last week told CNET that the subscription, storage, and track-purchasing service would be coming to the Web, and it has officially made good on that promise.

Microsoft claims to offer "millions of songs" through Xbox Music and allows users to download tracks they purchase to a … Read more

Member of the London band Moones embrace a rock 'n' roll lifestyle. And they don't just let fans share in it, they want them to be able to control just how rock 'n' roll they get in their latest music video.

The YouTube video for the band's song "Better Energy" takes advantage of YouTube annotations to allow viewers to determine how drunk the band is at any point in the performance. … Read more

QR Photo to Video Converter is an effective tool for transferring images into videos with slideshow settings--including various transition effects, soundtracks, and pan/zoom options. The result is a useful tool that takes some time to set up and start using due to a poorly-labeled interface, but ultimately creates decent videos for use online or on your mobile device.

The installation process is a little longer than we normally like, and the interface is not particularly intuitive, with numerous menus and tabs that make it unnecessarily complicated to perform some of the easier functions that the software supports; but once … Read more

Twitter is now helping guide users of its music service to the types of music they want to hear.

Thursday, Twitter Music, the 2-month-old Web and mobile streaming service powered by Twitter activity, was updated with a discovery feature called charts, which offers people a genre-based approach to music listening.

With charts, Twitter Music users can now select from Twitter-generated playlists based on music genre and find special types of charts, such as "Popular" for new music trending on Twitter or "Superstars" for new tracks from hit artists. Following the Twitter Music formula, tracks are featured … Read more

A future version of Apple's iTunes Radio could let you reveal why you liked or disliked a certain song in your playlist.

Published Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an Apple patent application called "Playlist Configuration and Preview," describes some handy ways to customize and manage your playlist of streaming songs.

Most streaming music services let you vote thumb's up or thumb's down on a certain song to gauge your musical tastes. But they don't give you the ability to explain why you voted the way you did.

The service described … Read more

Pandora struck back against critics Wednesday, calling accusations that the streaming radio service is trying to shortchange musicians "a lie."

In a blog post Wednesday, Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren accused the Recording Industry Association of America, the organization charged with defending the interests of musicians, of orchestrating and funding a "misinformation campaign" involving well-known artists. The RIAA believes artists should be paid more than they currently receive for their songs being played on the streaming service and has accused Pandora of trying to persuade musicians to accept a substantial reduction in royalties.

While saying he bore … Read more