I think it is really fascinating that Coca Cola is doing another major promotion in Europe teaming up once again with iTunes and giving away 2 billion songs on iTunes along with other goodies such as tickets to concerts and iPods for codes that can be found in Coca Cola bottles. You had to use four codes to be able to download one song from iTunes in the last promotion and the new one will surely use the system as well. It should be noted that only selected songs could be downloaded in the last promotion.

When I first saw the Vpod.tv homepage I thought I was seeing a Joost light version on the web. A fullscreen video of the infamous nunchuck guy was shown followed by several others. A menu would appear when I moved the mouse cursor over the lower region of the website showing the next videos on line and giving me some options to switch channels, skip videos and to open a secondary menu with more options.

Specialized Youtube clones are appearing every day. Some are relatively weak while some offer videos targeted only at a certain niche that is grateful for not having to search Youtube for the videos that they would like to watch. TeacherTube is one of the better Youtube clones. It concentrates solely on the teaching aspect of videos which means that you will only find videos on TeacherTube that “teach something” to the viewer.

If you are looking for a online music player that is finding a lot of artists you might want to take a look at Spool.fm. You may search for and listen to songs even without registration which is a really nice feature. Registration adds more functionality like playlists for instance that can be saved. The Web 2.0 interface is doing everything it can to make searching and using Spool.fm as comfortable as possible. A search is conducted as soon as you enter the first letter of a song title or artist name and you can drag and drop those to and from your playlist.

I have heard about Musicmesh before but did not find the time to take a closer look at their service until now. The website is one of those web 2.0 sites who all look and feel the same. Musicmesh offers a related music search engine which connects music albums that are somehow related. One album is always centered and other music albums that float around it. If you move the mouse above one of them you can read the title and artist. A click centers this album and displays new related albums. This means that you can explore new albums by simply clicking on them to find more albums that you might like.

You surely now what has happened during the last week. The AACS send some cease and desist letters to bloggers and website owners requesting the takedown of the so called HD-DVD processing key. The story more or less exploded on the web. The main reason for this was probably the way the admins of digg.com handled the affair. Their first decided to pull all articles posted to digg containing the key which lead to a furious reaction of the digg community who submitted so many articles about the key to digg that the founder of digg decided to follow the lead of his community and let it happen.

Internet users from outside the United States are officially excluded from using Pandora to create their own radio stations with songs similar to the ones they have entered at the creation of the music station. Aggrega will surely profit from Pandora’s move although it does not offer the same service. By signing up with Aggrega you can create so called custom channels which are created automatically after assigning a name and a group, artist or genre to them. All videos seem to be taken from Youtube as of now which should not be a problem because I think they are added manually to the database.

If you like to think about the unexplainable, the mysterious, the paranormal you are one of the users who might find Disclose.tv very interesting. Like Mulder and Scully from X-Files you can delve into this site and take a look at the videos that they offer. On the technical site Disclose.tv is a pretty good Youtube clone serving only their niche. The site does offer videos and pictures as well as a forum and other ways to communicate with the community. The biggest video category so far is the Aliens & Ufology category with 234 videos followed by Paranormal with 80 videos and Spirituality with 31.

Pandora stopped their Music Genome Project from streaming to clients that would access the Pandora website from outside the United States yesterday. They are now checking the IP of every visitor and depending on his location he is either presented with the normal Pandora website or a letter which explains the situation that he is not allowed to use Pandora due to licensing difficulties. Internet Radio should be accessible from anywhere, just like normal radio that does not know boundaries as well.

Pandora.com made the decision to stop streaming music to users who are not living in the United States. To be able to do this they implemented a script that checks the IP address of every user connecting to the server and if that IP happens to be located outside of the United Stats of America you will not be able to connect to the streaming client anymore. Pandora already updated their FAQ section to reflect this changes, here is what the entry said:

Maybe you are one of the unfortunate who is not near a TV when AC Milan battles it out with Manchester United today or the matches Werder Bremen versus Espanyol Barcelona and Sevilla against Osasuna in the UEFA Cup. Even if your team did not make it this far you probably would like to watch these exciting matches. There is a way to watch Champions League and UEFA Cup live on the Internet by using Internet TV clients that stream the matches right to your computer.

Mixere is a great open-source audio application that lets you mix different audio tracks. It supports many formats including mp3, ogg and wav and can be used at parties for instance to mix the music live. It is possible to fade in, fade out of tracks, loop and auto-trigger audio and change the volume of the audio on the fly. All songs are loaded right into the main interface of Mixere with each audio file filling one track in the software. Any number of audio files can be then played simultaneously as well limited only by the operating system and sound device.

The guys at Joost are serious about going live as soon as possible. They announced today that beta members will receive unlimited invites to give all of their friends the possibility to get a glimpse at Joost before it goes live. I’m a little bit concerned about their move to go live at this point because the content that is currently available would be considered B-Content by many. Sure there are some channels that will attract fans like the World Poker Tour channel which will not be available in the United States by the way.

You can’t say that the guys from the Pirate Bay are full of ideas and surprises. Their latest project is called Playble, a website that offers free music to the visitors while still paying the artists directly. This is the biggest difference to the dominating music portals such as iTunes that do not pay the artists but the record labels who in turn pay their artists. This concept eliminates the need for a man in the middle who collects the money and distributes it to the artists.

Music recommendation services like Audiobaba exist for a while now. Some like Pandora search and stream music using Internet radio, others like Musicovery use a interactive website to play music of a certain period in time. Both are great services and I’m still using them from time to time to find new songs and artists that I never heard of before. I used to get my recommendations from terrestrial radio before but since they began to only play the same top 100 songs over and over again I had to shift my attention to a new medium that was better suited to discover new music.

NiN – Nine Inch Nails – added a new announcement on their website stating: “As a reward for stealing Year Zero, We’ve prepared the next batch of multitrack audio files for you to download”. Beneath the announcement are links to three of their songs, Capital G, My Violent Heart and Me, I’m not in Garageband / Logic Format for the Macintosh and a generic format for other applications. The interesting aspect of the generic format is that the links are actually torrent files that point to the Piratebay.

Audiobooks become increasingly popular and there are many pay sites that offer downloads of Audiobooks after you paid for them. It is however possible to download free Audiobooks from various sites from the Internet. The main problem with finding those free sites is that many pay sites offer free samples of the Audiobooks as well but you have to pay when you want to listen to the complete book.

I like to move many applications that are currently running in the background into the system tray instead of the task bar to avoid that the task bar gets cluttered with applications that I do not need to access. One of the programs that I like in the system tray is Winamp. I listen to Internet radio most of the time which means I just let it play all day long without having to load playlists or song into Winamp. There is no need to have it open at all in the task bar.

IPTV guides are rare on the Internet. You can access dozens of Internet TV guides which recommend services like Joost, Bablegum or those Asian P2P Internet TV clients such as Sopcast or TVUPlayer. The difference between IPTV and Internet TV is that IPTV is normally supplied by a broadband operator using a closed network structure. The most popular IPTV service that got worldwide coverage last year was ABC’s IPTV service that streamed popular TV shows such as Lost or Alias to United States citizens.

If you are living in the United Kingdom, have a broadband Internet connection and are at least 16 years of age you can apply to become a beta tester for the BBC Archive. The BBC is looking for 20000 testers that use the system for a period of six months exploring the vast archive that will be available for download (probably mean streaming). Testers will have to take surveys from time to time to improve the service during the test.

The following website contains links to 17992 tv show episodes, 5151 cartoon series, 2582 movies, 12235 anime shows, 5741 music videos and 957 sports clips. It is called Alluc and could be described as a link aggregator for video websites. All it does is that it offers the users of the website a opportunity to post new links to videos that they found on various social video websites such as youtube or dailymotion.

It seems that someone found out a way to create download links to the mp3 files that one can listen to on the profile pages of the bands that have a myspace website. The script to decode the myspace url and extract the mp3 links is working well and uses Ajax for ease of use.

I was contacted by the creators of the famous Democracy Player to test drive the upcoming Democracy Player 0.9.5 which is scheduled for release this wednesday. The most important features that will be introduced in this new version are pausing and resuming of downloads, submit buttons to digg, del.icio.us and reddit, proxy support and an interface redesign.

One of the blogs that I’m regularly visiting is Connected Internet created by my friend Everton Blair. He writes mainly about the same topics that I write about (with a slight British touch) and once in a while I find a interesting story that I would like to write about at ghacks as well. He discovered a automatic playlist generator for iTunes called The Filter.

Open Pandora is a freeware application that adds features to Pandora, the famous music service that finds new music of similar taste for you. Pandora itself is designed to function in your browser making it rather uncomfortable to listen to the music. Enter Open Pandora:

Freeculture.org held a drm video contest earlier this year and announced the winners of this contest today. All videos had to be uploaded to a public video site to make sure they would spread pretty fast around the global community. I decided to post all videos from youtube right away here at deny but you could also visit freeculture to see them at their website or bookmark their site. (do it)

I’m currently taking part in the tvu player beta program and would like to write a few words about it and offer some invites for the beta program. The tvu player beta has the version number 2.2.1 and the only changes that I discovered were the updated channels list which seems to hold some more channels and the log file which seems to hold more information than before. The beta page recommends to upgrade the media player to windows media player 10 for best results and i suggest everyone who is having troubles with the picture quality to upgrade the media player.

When I bought my first mp3 player years ago I had to somehow transfer the music from my cd collection to my computer. I was lucky enough to find CDex pretty fast and I stick with it since then. It offers everything that I demand from an CD ripper, it´s fast, it checks CDDB for album and title information and is able to save the music in many formats including mp3 and wav. All you need is the program itself and the dll lame_enc.dll which you can download from rarewares.

The multimedia player Bsplayer has been released as version 2.0 today. I was using previous versions of bsplayer and was really satisfied with it. It had some minor problems and I made the switch to VLC media player and plan on using that one even though the new version of bsplayer has been released.

I think this is worth an article. A guy running the website digg drop found more than 900 complete cartoons and animations on youtube and listed them all on his website. I have no idea about the time that it must have taken to collect that many youtube links. I do know that I would not like to do something like this..

Jamendo is a community website that lets you discover a growing collection of currently 1010 free music albums released under Creative Commons using latest p2p technology.That´s right, you are free to download everything using bittorrent. But that´s not all Jamendo is about. They have a very active community that reviews albums, rates and tags them and offers personal recommendations.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using it’s built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs). It´s a great way to create demonstrations for instance or record video tutorials. Besides that you could also record gameplay footage to show your gaming skills or create movies using the recorded footage.

I wrote an article about living without the music industry a month ago. In this article I added some good sites that offered free musik downloads. Lots of people replied to this article and added more sites that they used to get free music. Free, meaning free of charges and free to download without breaking the law.

Well this is no big news to the internet community. We, more than everyone else, are keen on using new media devices and like to be among the first when it comes to technology in general. A survey among canadian music retailers now found out what we actually now for a very long time: Copy protection is bad for business. Customers are more frequently than before returning cds which they could not play in their personal computer or copy to their mobile player. Retailers also observe that customers tend to put cds down when they spot the copy protected logo.

Still having last years Oscar controversy in mind, where one judge handed out copies to a person he thought was another film buff. This person unfortunately decided to copy and spread the films on the internet.

The DVD screeners that Disney will send to the groups that vote on the awards will be encrypted and will only run on dvd players made by Cinea, who are specially designed to thwart copying the screeners.