The free web service Chromus could change that again. The service combines Last.fm’s music database with the music found on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte. The result? A player that knows and plays nearly every song and album on the planet.

Here is how it works. You visit the Chromus website over at Github. Now type in a band name, artist, song or album after clicking on the search icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

Tracks and albums are displayed on a result’s page afterwards. You can now click on an album or track to start playing it right away on the site. If you select an album, all tracks of the album are queued in a playlist. This lets you listen to all songs of an album in full length online. All without a Last.fm or Vkontakte account.

You can select individual tracks with a click on the playlist entry. The player supports all basic controls from pausing and changing the volume to seeking and repeating the playlist.

Last.fm or Vkontakte users can sign in to their accounts to make use of scrobbling and music playback more reliable.

Chromus looks like a spin-off of the popular Google Chrome extension Last.fm free music player which provides more or less the same functionality. It is not clear if the two are linked in any way or if the author of Chromus has used the Chrome extension for inspiration only.

It is interesting to note that many non-English and non-Russian songs can be played as well. If you are looking for a free web music player that does not require you to register, and that does not limit your music listening experience, then you may have found it in Chromus. (via Caschy)

Why am I telling you this? Because Audiobooks has just launched an audiobook flatrate service that lets you listen to as many audiobooks as you like for $24.95 per month. The store features more than 10,000 audiobooks right now, with new books being added on a regular basis.

How does it work? You visit the website and sign-up for a free trial account. You now have seven days to test the site and its functionality.

The homescreen displays the books that you are currently reading, recommendations based on your preferences, new arrivals, and staff picks.

When you hover the mouse over a listing, a short description is displayed. A click takes you to the audiobook’s profile page that features a larger description as well as information about the play time, narrators, version, genre and publication date. You may also see user comments and ratings on the page which can further aid you in determining whether you’d like to start listening to that particular audiobook.

You can preview audiobooks here, which may be useful to get a feeling for the quality of the audiobook, or start playing the full version right away.

Audiobooks open in a new window with basic controls that allow you to stop and pause the playback, rewind or forward 30 seconds, and to add bookmarks which is useful if you want to continue from a specific position the next time you play the audiobook.

The player was developed using HTML5 which ensures that it is not only compatible with desktop PCs but also with many mobile devices that support HTML5 audio.

The site features a search that you can use to find specific books, authors or narrators. You can alternatively browse the audiobook collection by genre in case you are interested in a specific topic. Categories include history, non-fiction, comedy, politics and science & technology among others.

Tastes differ but it is not difficulty to find audiobooks that suite your taste. From Steve Jobs’ biography over Russian language instructions to marketing audiobooks and bestsellers such as Dan Brown’s Deception Point or Bond Girl: A Novel by Robin Gwyne.

There is also a bestseller listing of 50 bestselling audiobooks for fast access.

The Good

As many audiobooks as you can listen to for $24.95. If you are buying at least one audiobook a month, you will certainly enjoy the service as it gives you access to thousands over thousands of books for the price of one. Plus, you can listen to the audio books not only on your desktop PC, but on mobile devices like tablets or the iPhone.

You can browse and search the selection of books prior to signing up, which can be useful to make sure that the books you are interested in are offered on the site.

The bitrate is rather low, but still acceptable, and it means that less data needs to be transferred to the computer.

The Bad

You need to keep in mind that all audiobooks are streamed which means that you cannot make use of the service in situations where you do not have Internet or only limited Internet connectivity. If you like to listen to an audiobook during travel for instance, you may not be able to make use of the service in that situation. And since there is no way to download an audiobook to your computer, you still may need to purchase some audiobooks in CD format.

The service is also only offered to users from the United States at this point in time.

There is also no option to listen to audiobooks while offline.

Verdict

If you are living in the United States and purchasing audiobooks regularly, you may be interested to try out the new Audiobooks.com service. This service is mainly for computer and smartphone users who listen to audiobooks on their devices though.

I personally like the idea of an audiobook flatrate, and would welcome it if the developers would add offline listening capabilities to their service.

The scary part is actually what makes the application that good: Facebook seems to know your music taste pretty well. The application displays up and down vote buttons on the radio page that you can use to further finetune the music listening experience.

Basic playback controls are displayed on the page as well. Here you can change the volume of the music, pause, stop and play songs or skip ahead to the next song if you do not really like the one that is currently playing.

Mentor.fm displays the artist or band, and the genre of the music on the page as well. It feels rather strange that the name of the song is not among the information displayed there.

If the playlist is not what you are looking for, you can let the radio station load a new playlist with different songs.

The surprise me mode finally lets you look beyond your music taste to discover a different kind of music. When I first used surprise me the radio started to play songs from artists such as Emilio Santiago, Jazzkantine or Renata Tebaldi, music that I would not listen to at all otherwise.

The site is a music experiment, that will be online for about 2 months before the makers will take it offline again. One of the interesting aspects of the site is that you can just turn on the radio and start listening, without having to perform searches or songs first. The service uses a user’s likes on Facebook and generates the playlist from those information. (via Freeware Genius)

You see, YouTube made the decision to move the easily accessible inbox from the front page behind the account name in the top right corner of the screen. To reach the YouTube inbox, you need to first click on the name and then on Inbox to be taken there. Once there you still may need to select a different entry, e.g. comments instead of personal messages which means yet another click before you land there.

The free userscript YouTube startpage inbox changes this by adding the inbox and all of its links back to YouTube’s homepage.

Once installed, you will see direct links to all inbox entries on the homepage again. The script adds them to the right sisdebar just above the recommended video section there. The links point to personal messages, shared with you, comments, contact suggestions and video responses. Each entry lists the number of unread messages which makes the feature that more convenient as you can now see directly if you have new messages or notifications waiting for you in your inbox.

The inbox at the top lists the total of unread messages and notifications.

Please note that the inbox is only displayed on the frontpage and not on other pages of YouTube.

The script has been tested in the Firefox web browser with the Scriptish extension. It likely works in other browsers such as Google Chrome as well.

Most YouTube users do not know that there is an option to reset the page to the old layout. This can be achieved by writing a cookie to the local system that tells the video hosting site that the old layout needs to be loaded and not the new page design.

Please note that this may cease to work at any time as YouTube may simply remove the old page design from their servers. Setting the cookie would have no effect then. For now though, it works splendid.

You can revert the YouTube homepage to its former self with the help of a userscript or by writing the cookie directly on the system. The userscript appears to be working in Firefox, with Greasemonkey or Scriptish installed, Google Chrome and Opera. The developer notes that Opera users need to import the script manually in the browser though. Instructions on how to do that are offered on the userscript page.

Take a look at the following two screenshots to see the difference. First the new YouTube page (no idea why the big header is showing up blank)

and then the old YouTube page.

All you need to do is to install the userscript to set the cookie. Please note that the homepage layout will stick even if you uninstall the userscript again. You need to clear the cookie that it writes on your system to get the new YouTube homepage layout again.

As I mentioned before, you can also set the cookie manually.

Open the YouTube website.
In Chrome, press Ctrl-Shift-j to open the Developer Tools
In Firefox, press Ctrl-Shift-k to open the web console
Enter document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=tYJElFX0sZI”; in the console tab and press Enter.
Reload the YouTube page.

If you are visiting YouTube regularly, which design do you prefer? (Thanks Odio for the tip)

YouTube is taking that concept a step further with YouTube Slam, a new feature where videos are battling it out against each other.

The idea is simple: Promote talented video makers on YouTube with the help of Slam. Three different games are currently offered, comedy, cute and bizarre slam.

Two videos are displayed on the same page to the user. YouTube users now watch both videos and vote for one that they like more. The video they like gets a vote which moves it up on the overall leaderboard.

A question like “which one’s funnier” is displayed on the battle page. Videos are not obviously played at the same time, even though that’s possible by clicking play on both at the same time.

Users can also click on the skip button to skip the decision and load two new videos that they can watch and vote for.

Videos are exchanged on a weekly basis with about a thousand videos to watch in each category each week. That’s 3000 videos per week and 12000 per month.

YouTube users who do not want to vote can visit the leaderboard pages right away to watch the top videos of the current week and past weeks. A play all button is available too.

YouTube Slam serves a number of purposes. It provides users with an never ending wave of upcoming videos to watch, and video makers with an opportunity to gain extra exposure if their videos are selected by YouTube to participate in a weekly battle.

The most popular category by far currently is Comedy Slam with about four times the number of total votes.

YouTube Slam could become highly popular with the “funny” or “cute” video crowd. What’s your take on the new service?

Please note that this is being tested right now by Google. This new test homepage may or may not become the new YouTube homepage in the future. For now, YouTube visitors can enable it in the following way:

• Open the YouTube website.
• In Chrome, press Ctrl-Shift-j to open the Developer Tools
• In Firefox, press Ctrl-Shift-k to open the web console
• Enter document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU"; in the console tab and press Enter.
• Reload the YouTube page.

It is likely that this is working in other web browsers as well. I could not get it to work in the latest Opera web browser though.

The YouTube homepage looks like this after a reload.

YouTube users find their channel information prominently displayed on the left side. Listed here are links to the channel videos, likes, history and watch later groups, subscription information, YouTube specific information like trending or what’s popular as well as suggested channels to subscribe to.

The middle column is filled with updates from a user’s subscriptions. The right column finally displays recommended videos based on past videos that have been watched and activities on YouTube.

The new design seems to only affect the homepage and no other parts of the site. Several users seem to confuse the new YouTube homepage design with the previously released Cosmic Panda update. They are not the same and can in fact be run at the same time. I would suggest to first enable the new homepage design and then enable Cosmic Panda via the link above.

What I do not like about the new homepage is that it uses a fixed width for the content. If you have a widescreen monitor you end up with lots of whitespace there.

Have you tried the new homepage? If so, what is your opinion? I’m not sure where this all started, but one of the first, if not the first, to point it out was Moritz Tolxdorff on Google+.

And while we are at it. If you want to try out the new YouTube video uploader, you need to open the following web address: http://upload.youtube.com/my_videos_upload?forceui=4.

Update: You can remove the new YouTube homepage again by repeating the steps and changing the cookie command to this one: document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=0";

And now Google Music with its big announcement on November 16. Google Music gets rid of the beta status and remains a free service for all users (from the United States, and those who know how to use a proxy). Users can store up to 20,000 songs on Google servers.

The Google Music store offers a library of 13 million songs which can be purchased on the Android Market. Songs cost 99 cent and are provided in 320 Kbit quality. Users can download songs or stream them to other devices. Google Music users who make purchases can share their purchases on Google+. This allows others to listen to the song once on Google’s social networking platform.

Payments are currently limited to T-Mobile US customers which benefit from carrier billing support. This basically means that Google Music purchases will appear on the monthly cellphone bill which improves the buying experience significantly. T-Mobile customers will get exclusive contents for free until the end of the year as part of the promotion to establish the service in the United States.

Artists can create their own space on Google Music where they can sell their music directly. The initial fee to setup an artist page is $25 US Dollars. It is likely – but not confirmed – that artists will have to share their earnings with Google.

When you look at both Google Music and iTunes Match, you will notice that they are both US-only at this point in time. Google Music is even more limited as the store is currently only available to T-Mobile USA customers.

What’s your take on the recent development? If you are living in the US, will you be using one of the services?

YouTube Charts, which you can access here, offers various top listings. This includes the most viewed videos, most liked or most discussed videos. If you open the YouTube video charts page for the first time you will notice that it offers several filter menus to change what is shown on the page.

This begins with the All Categories pulldown menu at the top. Charts are displayed from all categories by default. You can change this to display the charts from one category only, for instance gaming, science & technology or sports only.

Two additional menus with filtering options are displayed right beneath that. The “most viewed videos” menu can be changed to display the most discussed, most liked, most viewed HD or top favorited videos instead. The Today menu to display the top videos of the week, month or even all time instead.

Each video is listed on the page with a large thumbnail, its title, uploader and the views that it has received. You can play individual videos or click on the Play All button to watch all videos in a playlist one after the other.

If you thought that was all then you are wrong. YouTube by default filters the videos it displays on the page by country. If you are from the US you may see different videos as someone from the UK, Germany or France.

You can change your location at the very bottom of the page. Here you can select one of the support countries or a worldwide listing.

If you ever wanted to know what’s hot in Israel, Australia or Taiwan then here is your chance to do just that. It is however likely that you will encounter many foreign language videos if you do that.

The charts on YouTube can be used to find out the next hot music gig, upcoming games that everyone is talking about or the latest gadgets. The charts are on the other hand mainstream charts which becomes especially apparent in the music category.

Game resolutions can differ a lot. I recently recorded the first few levels of the Tower Defense game iBomber Defense which I purchased on Steam. The game has a maximum resolution of 1600×1200. The problem was that my desktop resolution is set to 1920×200. This meant ugly black bars on the left and right side of the video.

I first tried to remove the black bars using VirtualDub, the program that I normally use for video editing. This somehow did not work for me, even though I used the correct filter and selected the Cropping option there.

An alternative is Avidemux. The free open source software offers a similar functionality as VirtualDub. You can load one or multiple source videos into the program, convert them into a different format and apply filters to the resulting video. Among the available filters is the Crop tool which can be used to remove left, right, top or bottom space. This can be used to remove black borders from a video for instance.

Cropping Video

Download the free Avidemux software from the project website over at Sourceforge. The program is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Install the software and load your video files via the file menu into the application. You load the first file via File > Open, and additional files via File > Append. You then have to replace the Copy action under Video with another codec. I have selected MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid) for instance.

Click on the Filters button afterwards and selected Transform > Crop from the selection.

Click on the Configure button afterwards. This opens a preview image of the video. Enter pixels in the left, right, top or bottom fields to crop the video. The values are immediately shown on the preview image so that it is easy to fine tune them. You can also try the auto crop button which picked up the black bars in my test video nicely.

Click on the OK button to accept the changes. You can then click on Preview in the previous configuration screen to see how the cropped video will look like. If you are satisfied close the window.

All you need to do know is to save the video via File > Save > Save Video or with the Ctrl-S shortcut. The process may take some time depending on the performance of your computer and the length of the video.

And that’s all there is to it. This is without doubt one of the easiest way to crop a video.

Google yesterday announced on the official YouTube blog that they have added editing options on YouTube. These editing options become available for all users and all uploaded videos of a particular user on the site.

When you open one of your videos on YouTube, you see a new Edit Video link at the top next to Edit Info there.

A click on that link opens an edit video screen on Youtube that auto-plays the original video and the edited video on the screen. Video editing options are displayed in tabs on the page. The Quick Fixes tab for instance can be used to trim and stabilize the video, to rotate it left or right, to auto-correct lighting and color, and to make changes to lighting, coloring and saturation of the video.Each change is highlighted directly in the preview area.

The Effect tabs offers access to filters that can be applied to the video. This includes a Black and White effect, Sepia or a cartoon effect. It is unlikely that many YouTube video uploaders will make use of those effects. They do not really add anything to the video, but make them harder to watch. Still, there may be users that will make use of the Neon Pink or Green filters, and if it is only to annoy the hell out of their friends.

The Audio tab finally offers to add or exchange the audio track of the video. There is unfortunately still no option to use multiple songs for a video. That’s a issue if the selected audio track is shorter than the video play time.

Here is a quick video that Google made to demonstrate the functionality. Please note that the video is not showing the right interface.

Most video uploaders will still use third party software for their video editing needs. The options on YouTube are nice for quick limited edits though.

Back then it was not clear if and how embedded players would benefit from the design change. A post on Friday revealed that YouTube plans to roll our a dark player design for YouTube embeds from August 10 on. From that day on, all embedded YouTube videos will sport a new dark player design.

The design change can be problematic on websites that use a lighter theme. YouTube for exactly this situation has added two new player parameters to the YouTube embedded player.

The new theme parameter defines the overall theme of the embedded player. Available options are dark or light. The color parameter on the other hand defines the color of the time bar which can either be red or white.

The default theme and color is set to dark and red. A total of three additional designs are available.

If you do not want the default dark themed played to show up on your site, you need to modify the player code manually. This could be problematic for webmasters who have embedded lots of YouTube videos on their web properties. Probably the best option for those webmasters is to create a script that modifies all embedded YouTube scripts on the website automatically.

The code to embed YouTube videos looks like this. Take notice of the parameters theme and color in the video url.

<iframe width="560" height="349"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9h1swNWgP8Q?theme=light&color=red"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here you define the theme and color that you want to be displayed on your website. What’s your take on the new YouTube layout and embedded player layout? Good change, bad change?

The release is a one year worldwide pilot of the service and in addition to a subscription at €6.99 a month or €49.99 a year, programmes will be preceded by advertisements, something the BBC is not allowed to do in the UK.

At the time of launch there will be 1,500 hours of content available and this will include content from some other British broadcasters including ITV and Channel 4.  The BBC has been very keen to work with other broadcasters in the UK to provide integrated IPTV services.

BBC.com’s managing director, Luke Bradley-Jones is keen to stress “[it] is not a catch-up service: this is a video-on-demand service. We will have content from the last month, but also the best from the catalogue stretching back 50 to 60 years.”

The delay in bringing the app to the USA has apparently been caused by legal issues with the BBC saying they needed to “jump through a few more of those commercial and legal hoops” before releasing it there.  As for a price in the US, a monthly figure of $7.99 has been mentioned which is excellent value compared to the European editions.  The US price is set at a level to make the service competitive with NetFlix and Hulu.

At launch the app will feature some facilities that aren’t available to UK television licence-fee payers.  These include the streaming of shows via 3G.  As with their UK counterparts however, people will also be able to download programs to watch later.

Users who would like to switch can open the Cosmic Panda page to do so. And if they do not like the new theme they can switch back to the default design.

So what is in store for users who make the switch? A new look and feel everywhere, more designs and tools and the option to watch videos in Chrome while navigating on YouTube. You will see many of the changes once you open a video page on YouTube.

The new video page has a wider, clearer design. Especially the comment, description and video suggestion section has been overhauled. Video suggestions have been moved down to make room for the video and an ad that is showing up on the right side of the video. The video is automatically moved to the left of the screen if an ad is loaded.

That’s probably the biggest point of criticism that I personally have. Especially if the ad on the right is not static. That’s a lot of ads next to or on the video.

What I like is the ability to change video sizes on the fly, the wider video previews on the same page and the new suggested videos page which is now making use of the full width of the space below the video.

YouTube Channels are looking a lot better, cleaner and more professional than before.

The bigger video thumbnails on the other hand add to the vertical size of the page which means that users need to scroll more to see the same amount of videos.

Everything is a lot clearer on the channel page. Chrome users will benefit from the new “keep watching” feature. The video that is currently playing is displayed at the top of the screen if the user navigates in Chrome to another page while playing a video.

That’s handy to add more items to a playlist or navigate the video portal while listening and watching (albeit in a tiny screen) to the current video.

Is the new YouTube a step in the right direction. The site looks more professional and cleaner now. Google did away with the old templates and added four modern, but very similar looking, templates to the site of which the channel owner can select one. It is furthermore possible to change the background color of a channel’s page and upload a logo for branding purposes.

One of the new features that has not been mentioned yet are avatars that users can upload. It is likely that many userscripts and some browser extensions will stop working if the new design is activated. It will however be only a matter of time until the developers publish updates that work with the new YouTube design.

Have you played around with the new YouTube design yet? If so, what is your impression of it so far? (via)

Before you dive into this how-to with a bunch of old pictures, take a moment to go out and get a new set of images. The changes between each image should be minimal. You might just want to do this by taking a quick walk around the block – if so, take a fresh image at least every few steps if not on every single step.

Windows Movie Maker still comes bundled with many systems, so before you go out and download anything take a quick peek and make sure you do not already have it. If you find it under start, go ahead and fire it up. If you do not, follow this link to Microsoft’s website. There you will be able to download a copy of Windows Live Movie Maker – the process for creating stop motion videos from images should be pretty close to the same as this traditional method.

If you have not done so already, take a moment and move your images from your digital camera and onto your computer. Then, click on Import Media in the top left corner of Media Maker. This will open up a new window that will allow you to find the images you have taken from your digital camera. Once you have located them all, simply highlight them all and click Import. They should now all be found on the main interface of the program.

Next, go to Edit and locate the Duration parameter in the menu. Here you need to drop down the picture duration considerably from the default seven seconds per image, changing it to something around .175 to .250 seconds. This will allow your images to play in rapid succession. Make sure you mark all of your pictures before you change the speed setting. Click OK.

The latest version of Windows Live Movie Maker adds all imported photos directly to the animation. You can rearrange the photos and images if you like if they appear out of order.

Once you have everything in order, take a moment to review your video by clicking the large play button. The video should play in the large video box. If anything seems out of order, change the order on the right and replay the video. If everything seems correct, click the Save Movie button under the Home tab and pat yourself on the back. You have just created a stop motion video!

YouTube has added commands to the video hosting platform to correct the aspect ratio of already uploaded videos. While the end result won’t be as pretty as re-processing the video, it will save the director the troubles of doing that.

Take a look at the following two screenshots. The first shows a video that I have recently uploaded to YouTube. It has black bars on the right and left. The second screenshot shows the same video after making the changes on YouTube. It is now stretched. The bars are gone.

YouTube some time ago has added commands that are executed when added to a video’s tags. Commands are available to get rid of black bars on videos. Here are all commands that you can utilize.

• yt:crop=16:9 – This tag crops the video. It basically means that the player zooms in on the video so that contents at the borders may be not visible anymore.
• yt:stretch=16:9 – Stretches the video into a 16:9 format. This is the tag I have used for the video. Depending on the size of the black bars, it may make the video look distorted.
• yt:stretch=4:3 – Another stretch command. This stretches the video into a 4:3 format instead.
• yt:quality=high – Sets the video to play in high quality, if a hq version of the video has been uploaded by the owner.

You can apply tags by clicking on the Edit button next to the video in your YouTube videos listing.

Just copy and paste the commands into the tags text box and click Save Changes afterwards. Re-open the video on YouTube and watch how the tag modified the aspect ratio. You may need to reload it once or twice for that. If you are not happy with the result go back and use another tag or remove the existing one.

The options to crop or stretch videos will usually not result in optimal videos. Videos may look to stretched or important parts of the video may be missing if you have selected to crop it. In that case, you may have no other choice but to process it again on your local computer.

The main advantage of those video tags is the fact that you do not have to process and upload the video again to YouTube.

Here is a video that demonstrates use of the video tags.

As a content creator. How do you handle black bars in videos? As a user on YouTube: Do you prefer black bars over stretched videos?

The site clearly has been created by people who love video games. The organization goes so far as to claim that they are “dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form.” Up in the right hand corner you will notice a mascot. That mascot will change with every page reload and you can click on them for more information. They come from a myriad of games and are undiscriminating of systems, as does the music within the site.

There are several ways to reach the music within the site. The latest songs are listed on the right. Random songs are listed towards the bottom of the page. You can search for games that may have remixes by name. Typically, games for the NES, SNES, and Sega will a few good songs to choose from, but new games have a growing number of remixes as well. You can list songs by game alphabetically or by number of remixes from the Music menu at the top of the page. You can also go to the torrent page.

Torrents are often associated with illegal downloading, but this is an example of legal file sharing. In fact, using the torrents will help the site. How can it do that? Simple: torrents save the site bandwidth costs. The files in the torrents are the same ones that you can download from the site. By using the torrents, the bandwidth comes from fellow users rather than traditional web servers. The torrents have a lot of content. At the time of writing, you can download the first thousand songs, the next nine hundred songs, and twenty nine albums. The albums often come in both MP3 and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) formats, so the quality of the tracks is high.

Here are some recommendations. I tried to represent a variety of tastes and systems. The one thing these songs have in common, besides being based on video games, is good sound quality. Keep in mind that any assertions made are my opinion and subjective. (I make no claims to be a music expert.)

• Chrono Trigger – The Frog Dance : A fast paced, chipper tune (probably house or club genre). It is suitable for a workout playlist.
• Final Fantasy 11 Online – A Cinematic Heaven : An example of an orchestral song. The sampling may be noticeable to experienced ears, but it still pleasant.
• Final Fantasy 13 – Blue Skies : An example of a song with vocals, but distinctly techno. Trance influences soften its edges.
• Super Metroid – In Your Prime : This composition starts off very dark but steadily increases the tempo to a climax. An interesting work.
• Sonic the Hedgehog – April Rain : A whimsical tune that will evoke nostalgic memories within seconds. The style is a blend of orchestral and techno music.

The web site and community there encourage others to try their hand at creating new remixes. They have a variety of tutorials and avenues for feedback. There is a list of software on the Links page (see “Music-Making Software”), but the tutorials are general enough to accommodate various types software and tools. If you wanted to learn how to make music on a computer, this is not a bad community to learn from.

If you are interested in contributing and not just consuming, I would encourage you to read the Content Policy. While it does not claim ownership to the uploaded music or anything alarming, they outright specify that they typically do not take down content. Once you post something on the site, it is expected to stay there. While this makes sense for fans, it may not for composers. In general, it is good to be aware of rules like this.

With thousands of songs, and several sources to download from, most people should be able to find something to add to their MP3 collection. Enjoy the music. Let us know in the comments if you find a song worth downloading.

But fear not, we take a look at all three services, highlight their advantages and disadvantages so that you can make an educated decision after reading the article. Before we start we should probably take a look at cloud storage and syncing in general. The first question that you need to ask yourself is whether you need such a service at all.

Do you need your music in the cloud? You may answer that question with yes if you work on multiple computer systems or use smartphones and other mobile devices. The main advantage of cloud based music services is that you get access to your music on all devices that you can connect to the service. No more copying of songs or playlists, all songs that you have stored online are available on all compatible devices at all time, provided that you have a net connection and a good mobile subscription with enough free bandwidth.

Lets take a look at the services and some of their features:

Apple iCloud

Apple’s new service is tied to its iTunes software as expected. Users can use it to store up to 25,000 songs they have not purchased on iTunes, an unlimited number of songs they purchased on iTunes and an additional 5 Gigabyte of other data.

Users can pay $24.99 annually for iTunes Match which matches any song on iTunes and makes it available in the cloud as well taken directly from the iTunes store.

It appears as if iTunes Match is required to store music not purchased on iTunes in the cloud.

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

Apple iCloud requires iTunes to be installed. It is compatible with Apple’s mobile device lineup and limits access to ten authorized devices.

The main downside of the service is that it does not support streaming, and that users need to subscribe to iTunes Match if they want to have access to their non-iTunes purchases, like CD rips, on iCloud.

Google Music

Google Music is in Beta currently. During beta, users can upload a maximum of 20,000 songs to the service. Google has not revealed anything yet about pricing. Music is uploaded with the help of the Music Manager software that is available for PC and Mac (appears to be running with the help of Wine under Linux as well).

The service is currently restricted to the United States. It is also the only service without online store integration. Users need to keep in mind that the service is labeled as beta at this point in time. While that is typical of Google, it means that it is possible that Google will make changes to the final product. The company has already announced that the service will only be free during beta. It is therefor likely that a pricing structure similar to that of Amazon’s Cloud Drive is introduced after the beta.

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon users get 5 Gigabytes of free space, and an unlimited amount of space for their Amazon mp3 purchases. It is the only service where users can purchase additional storage, at $1 per Gigabyte per year.

Like Google Music, Amazon supports web streaming of music. It is possible to store other media and documents on the cloud drive as well, which is similar to iCloud’s offering. Music is uploaded via Amazon’s Cloud Player or a compatible web browser.

Closing Words

Every service has its advantages and disadvantages. Apple’s iCloud is tied to iTunes, and you need to pay if you want all of your music to be available in the cloud and not only your music purchased on iTunes. Google Music is currently in beta and it is not clear how much it will cost when it comes out. Amazon’s Cloud Drive feels like a mix of the two other services. It can be used to store more than just music just like Apple’s iCloud offers and supports web streaming like Google Music.

What’s your take on the three services and music in the cloud in general?

Google Music Beta is exciting with a great user interface which is simple but multi-functional. The service at the same time is limited to users from the United States only. It has other quirks, like no music shop integration, no downloading and the fact that it will turn into a paid service after the beta.

There appear to be a few music service providers already available on the web that can give Google Music Beta a run for its money.

Spotify

This application is launched in the UK, France, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, and not available in US, but it will soon make its appearance in the US. Spotify a new desktop application which streams music files from the web instantly for listening. This application also makes music available offline. It provides higher quality of bitrates than most of the streaming applications, up to 320kbps. Spotify has integrated sharing features to share music on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

YouTube

To every one’s amazement YouTube also provides music video streaming services. Almost all the official music players use Youtube to access their videos from any part of the world using any portable device. These videos can be added to a personal playlist, which can be accessed while listening to the music.

Amazon Cloud Drive:

Amazon Cloud Drive is one of the strongest competitors to Google Music Beta. Amazon not only offers to stream music but allows uploading of all types of documents to its Cloud Drive. The Cloud Drive later provides a music player called the Cloud player through which all the uploaded music can be played-back on the cloud from anywhere while on the run using different portable devices. The main drawback to Amazon Cloud Drive is that it provides limited storage space of only 5GB which can be used to store any type of data. This storage space permits only 1000 music files compared to Google’s 20,000. Extra storage space can be purchased at a rate of $1 per GB if required. Amazon also provides offline streaming of the videos, music and all the uploaded files.

Pandora:

Pandora is a music streaming application which has been available on internet for the past few years. It is more like a digital radio available on the internet. Users cannot build a playlist or upload the music that they have with them. Instead it uses musical preferences and creates its own channels from which the user can select the favorite music. Two versions are available, one free and a second paid option. The free version allows only 40 hours of monthly usage while paid version for $36/year gives access to unlimited hours of high quality music at speeds of 192 kbps.

Google Music Beta in its current stage offers storage space in the cloud to store up to 20,000 songs. Plans are to turn the service into a paid service after the beta. Google did not comment on pricing at all, or if they will be offering a free basic plan next to the paid Music beta plans. They could design the service similar to how Picase is offering free limited space for all users, and more space and options for paying customers. For now, Music Beta is free, but you should keep in mind that this might change in the future.

Music Beta currently is all about hosting and streaming of music. You wont find an integrated music shop on Music Beta, mostly because there have not been any agreements with record labels as of yet. Google mentioned that they are in talks with major record labels. For now, if you use the Shop for Artist feature you are taken to a media portal on the Google website instead. That’s a step backwards compared to Amazon’s offering which offers access to a complete mp3 store on their site.

On the music side of things, mp3, aac, flac and wma files are supported. All other music formats are not supported, which may be especially problematic for Apple users who may have part of their music collection in m4p and m4a format. Flac users need to know that Google will re-encode their files to 320 kbps mp3s.

Computers and Android devices can currently be connected to Google Music. There is an eight device limit for streaming in place though, which means that you may need to de-authorize devices regularly if you got more than eight devices, or devices in the authorization list that you no longer posses.

How do you get music on Music Beta?

PC users need to download Music Manager, a proprietary software that can import music from iTunes, the music folder or any other folder on the computer’s storage devices. The software can sync music that you add to your iTunes library with Music Beta automatically.

One severe limitation is that you cannot customize the music selection. Say you have 10,000 songs on iTunes. You cannot pick songs that you want uploaded to Music Beta. If you select iTunes in the Music Manager, all songs will be uploaded. Your only option is to use the other folder option during start up and pick each folder manually. That’s uncomfortable especially if the music library is large.

Another limitation is that music cannot be played in Music Manager. That’s bad if you need to check out songs before you sync them with Music Beta.

I cannot say for sure, but it appears as if the Music Manager is the only way to transfer music to Google Music Beta. Apps are available for Android and tablet PCs but those appear to miss uploading options (correct me if I’m wrong please).

Music that is online can be streamed to any connected and supported device. Caching is used on Android so that recently played music becomes available offline as well.

There is no option to download or share music.

Music Beta Invite Only

Music Beta is an invite only service currently. Users from the United States can request an invite here. Users from outside the country can use proxy or vpn connections to outsmart the country detection on site.

Still, you need to wait until you receive an invitation to Google Music Beta before you can make actual use of the service.

Verdict

Music Beta in its current stage has several limitations that will keep many users from signing up for the service. Among them the restriction to US-only users, no music shop integration, the mediocre Music Manager, streaming only and the prospect that the service will turn commercial after beta.

Especially the concentration on streaming may be seen negatively, considering that many cell phone data plans are not exactly generous in the free Megabyte department.

Have you watched the keynote or received an invite yet? What’s your take on the service in its current form?