We had a look at how you use your medial player not long ago and I’ve taken a look at some of the ones you mentioned  I particularly liked Billy (thanks for the tip Xaro), a no-frills (but also no complications) music player, which does exactly what I want it to do. Play my music [...]

Downloading music is illegal, right? That’s what the Music Industry is telling us all the time. They sue people who download music and do everything in their might to keep up the image that music downloading is a major crime.This is however apparently not true in China where Google struck a deal with major players [...]

With always on broadband connections one does not really need music on his computer system to listen to music all day long. First there is Internet Radio which delivers music by genre. If a user wants to select the songs instead a music player like Muziic comes in handy. Muziic puts the entire Youtube library [...]

My wife and I became hooked on the TV show “Lost” recently. As we were way behind we caught up by renting seasons 1-4. But then we ran out and fell behind again because the current season was halfway through…and had yet to be released on DVD yet. My only recourse was to torrent the [...]

My favorite and default video player SMPlayer has been updated to version 0.6.7 today. SMPlayer is the complete video player solution for both the Windows and Linux operating system. It is basically a frontend for the much acclaimed MPlayer that is included in the distribution. SMPlayer comes both as a portable video player but also [...]

There are many naysayers out there who say Linux is not ready for the main stream desktop. For those naysayers I offer up for review one of the many applications that proves Linux is, in fact, ready for the main stream desktop. The application? Acidrip. What it does is rip DVDs (for backup purposes of [...]

The Internet can be an amazing resource for free ringtones. There are technical ways to obtain ringtones by using audio editing software programs or simpler by using ringtone search engines. One of easiest to use is Tonzr, a search engine for free ringtones that finds more than eight million different songs. The search works by [...]

Vastfm provides an interesting free of charge service that allows users to listen music online; Lots of music to be precise. The website uses mashups to provide their content as their servers are only hosting a few lines of code that power the site. What Vastfm is doing is to pull the selected artist’s discography [...]

iWOW is perhaps my favourite iTunes plug-in. It makes your sound, whether videos, podcasts or music, feel much more vibrant. To dramatically improve sound, the user must simply choose their form of speakers (surround, laptop speakers, headphones etc), the type of sound and if music its genre. This takes no audophile, but advanced options do [...]

gHacks suggested Spotify as an alternative to Pandora last year, and Spotify has recently gained a lot of attention in the British press. I thought it may be wise to discuss Spotify on here. Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently [...]

Recently I wrote a simple how-to for burning CDs in GNOME (Easy CD Burning in GNOME.) From that article a request came in to illustrate how to burn from the command line. This ability illustrates the flexibility of the Linux operating system. Not only can you burn CDs from an outstanding, and simple, GUI, you [...]

At the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Digital Entertainment Group released its figures for DVD spending in the United States in 2008. The results were a 5.5% decrease from the previous year. DEG’s figures aren’t just for outright sales of DVDs, but also include DVD rentals and Blu-Ray disc sales. Rental revenue stayed [...]

Catching up with the BBC’s iPlayer and Channel Four’s 4oD, British broadcaster ITV has released its own free video-on-demand service: ITV Player. ITV Player uses Microsoft’s Silverlight format to stream its media, which allows it to be played on Windows and Macs. Users report problems with it working under the Linux build of Silverlight. The [...]

You just downloaded the newest version of your favorite Linux distribution but you remembered the first time you did it you were in Windows where you had Nero (or some similar application) to help you burn the ISO image onto a CD or DVD. Now you’re in Linux…what do you do? Simple. You turn to [...]

animoto is a site which allows video presentations to be made in a minimal amount of time, claiming to be the killer of slideshows (although in reality they are slideshows!). The end result is an extremely slick slideshow. The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply [...]

Some would say the fact that Linux can even communicate with an iPod is remarkable. And the way Apple keeps everything secreted away, I could easily buy that sentiment where it not for an intimate understanding of the resolve of the typical developer. Although not open source, Floola typifies this resolve, and then some. At [...]

Like most people, I have a fairly large collection of music in a digital format. The only problem is that very often I get songs that are at different volume levels. This is irksome because then I have situations where one song is really loud and the next one is very soft. To solve this [...]

In my recent article I illustrated how to connect your iPod to the Linux application gtkpod. Gtkpod is fairly straightforward, but there can be issues. One of the issues is playback of files. And what good is a multimedia application if it can not play back the files it manages?  Configuring gtkpod is actually quite [...]

Instead of giving away free software on Christmas Day, Apple are giving away free media on iTunes in the UK and possibly other European countries. Apple’s 12 Days of Christmas’ Giveaway provides one free download every day between 26 Dec and 6 Jan. Yesterday, Apple were offering a music video of ‘That’s Not My Name’ [...]

You’re new to Linux. You have managed to figure your way around the desktop and you have become accustomed to the application installation process. Now it’s time to go about day to day business of using your newfound obsession. Of course one of the first issues you might come across is that of application abundance. [...]

One of more frustrating aspects of some modern Linux distributions is that they do not ship with mp3 support rolled in. This is, by design, done because of licensing issues. And granted using the ogg format is a much better solution in the end (as well as a much better sounding format) but for those [...]

Martin showed you an application for removing ID3 tags from MP3 files not long ago, so let me quickly add to that by introducing an application that does the opposite, allowing you to add and edit (and remove) the tags for your files. Mp3tag has always been my favorite, since it not only allows tag [...]

There is usually no need to remove the so called ID3 tags of audio files. Actually there are only two scenarios that do make sense. The first is if you encounter lots of audio files with wrong ID3 tags and the second if you want to remove either ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags from the audio [...]

With the popularity of mp3 players, and the frustrations of using DRM-crippled music, it is always nice to be able to rip your own mp3 files. There are plenty of Linux tools to handle this task. But what about the mp3 collection that you want to burn onto a playable CD? Although there are many [...]

There are so many possibilities on the Internet to search for and find the music that you are looking for that it is almost impossible not to find it unless you prefer to listen to local bands or rare stuff. Even then the chance is quite good to find what you are looking for online. [...]

In today’s world, owning a cell phone and/or a portable media player has practically become a necessity. The thing is I don’t own either. No, I do not live in a cave, I just took a conscious decision not to own one. Recently though, I’ve decided to invest in an mp3 player. I knew about [...]

Minitube is a Winamp plugin that unfortunately works only with Winamp and not with related music clients like AIMP2. The plugin searches Youtube automatically once a song starts playing grabbing the first result from the video portal and starting to play it on the desktop in its own window. It would be rather chaotic if [...]

The final version of the XBMC has been out for a while now. We covered an alpha release back in August and it is time to check on the final release and promote the product further. It may sound a bit biased but I’m using the XBMC for years on my old modded Microsoft Xbox [...]

Freezer is a small portable application that runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista computers. The tiny 73 Kilobyte software program listens on port 8800 and turns any streaming music request of the websites Imeem, Deezer or Jiwa into a download. The proxy setting has to be configured in the web browser so that all [...]

If you visit Youtube you might have noticed the “watch in high quality” link beneath some videos on the video portal. The high quality link leads to a video with a better resolution and quality that is more enjoyable to watch than the low quality versions. High quality videos on the other hand demand a [...]

The Internet can provide music fans with lots of information about their favorite artists including tour dates or upcoming albums. The website Muspy can help you with the latter by tracking the album releases of selected artists and sending out information whenever a new album release is announced. The service requires registration which is a [...]

How many times have you turned on the TV and thought ‘Hey, I can create better shows than what’s on’? If you’re one of those people with a penchant for creating your own videos, you now have a place to show them off. You can use UStream. Ustream is a live interactive video broadcast platform [...]

Last.fm is one of the largest music websites on the Internet. Users can listen to music on the site, discover related musicians and communicate with other users. The music portal provides access to a feature called Radio which essentially makes it possible to stream music that is related to artists, tags or users. This radio [...]

The iTunes software is performing a check when a user creates a new account to verify that the address of the user and his payment address are related. A credit card for instance would have to be from the United States as well if the user would select the United States as his country of [...]

When creating a presentation, a web design, a leaflet or a brochure, it is important to find suitable images to use. Whilst one option is to pay for stock photos to use under a restrictive licence, another option is to find free (gratis and libre) photos. Wikimedia Commons is the repository which Wikipedias and other [...]

A few ways of watching tv on a computer are available these days. There are movie streaming websites like Hulu that provide access to tv shows of certain TV networks to users from specific countries. Many TV stations offer streams of their contents on the Internet as well That’s the basic concept of RevoluTV which [...]

Esnips is a popular file sharing and storing service that offers its members 5 Gigabytes of online storage space that can be used to host videos, pictures and audio files. The audio hosting comes with a music player that recently got updated having the result that Esnips music downloaders were not working anymore. Esnips have [...]

The video portal Dailymotion added high definition video support back in February. High definition content is not for everybody especially not for those users who use a low bandwidth connection or hardware that is incapable of handling the load caused by the contents. That seems to have been a major concern for the developers over [...]

Youtube sits tightly on its spot as the number one video portal in the world. It’s extremely hard to compete Youtube, comparable to the problems that search engines have to compete with Google. One way of dealing with this challenge is to provide a specialized video service. 5Min is one of those specialized video portals. [...]

Regular readers already know that I recently switched from using XMPlay to AIMP2 which provides the better total package. One of the interesting functions of AIMP2 is to record Internet radio (yes XMPlay can do that as well). It took a while to find out how this function could be enabled in the player and [...]

The Internet is often a place where unlicensed television shows are easy to watch, albeit through websites offering streaming, torrents or USENET. Recently, many websites have started to show shows free online but do so in a legal fashion, paying for the shows using advertisements. Different websites seem to work in different jurisdiction but it [...]

Joost was previously only accessible by using a video player that had to be downloaded. That seemed to fail to bring in the desired user numbers and Joost decided to drop the software client and create a web based Flash portal with all their contents. The transition phase which ended yesterday required users to install [...]

If you look around and ask your friends which media player they prefer you will most likely come up with many different answers. Winamp, Windows Media Player and iTunes will surely be on the top of the list with lesser known players mentioned by some of the friends. Most are perfectly happy that they can [...]

Who would have projected this? Walmart decided to keep the DRM servers running for now after announcing that they would be shutting down the DRM servers of their mp3 online store which would essentially mean that customers would not be able to transfer the music to another computer or device anymore. It was actually very [...]

Till now, YouTube was a place only for watching videos. Still, with other sites getting their act together, it was only a matter of time before these guys pulled up their socks and took a look at the services they offer. What am I referring to? Well, the next time you’re watching a video and [...]

If anyone is not already convinced that DRM is bad for the customer after seeing major companies like Google, Yahoo or MSN pull the plug on their DRM servers then Walmart’s decision to do the same might convince you finally. Walmart started selling music back in August 2007. The music was protected by DRM for [...]

Did you ever come upon a news story that sounded interesting enough to pursue? It happened today with the Reuter’s story that the Amazon streaming movies service was flawed and allowed users to download the entire movie without paying for it. Amazon.com is offering a video streaming service for more than 40000 videos on their [...]

Video portals are immensely popular on the Internet.The sheer amount of videos makes them attractive to a large audience. The larger portals like Youtube or Dailymotion host millions of videos from daily news over music to tutorials on how to cook the perfect meal or learn a new language. While most users are perfectly happy [...]

Joost who have been offering a software client for Macintosh and Windows to watch (mostly) prerecorded TV shows have launched a website today that is offering everyone using Internet Explorer or Firefox the opportunity to watch the TV shows that have been previously only available to the software client users. The service currently requires a [...]

Setting up your own music server is an interesting way of connecting your music library to the Internet. A fast enough connection at home and Java are the only two requirements for setting up the music server which can then stream music to the same computer, a network or the Internet. Sockso is a multi-platform [...]