After the fiasco that Microsoft experienced when they made the announcements that they would turn off the MSN Music servers one would have thought that other companies would not follow that lead and would have learned a lesson from it.

Microsoft backpedaled quickly after it became apparent that the public was not that pleased with their decision and decided to keep the servers up and running for another three year period. The huge problem that arises when DRM servers are taken off the Internet is that the verification process will fail which means that users who want to move the music from an old to a new computer - where they had to verify the music again - would realize that they could not do so because of the server being offline.

Yahoo apparently did not pay attention to the media fiasco and decided to close the Yahoo! Music Store and take the DRM servers offline on September 30, 2008.

continue reading "Yahoo Does A Microsoft"

Some of you will remember my post a little while back about favorite music players. For most people on Linux, Amarok rules hands down. In fact, Amarok has gained a reputation as ‘the player’ and made a lot of Windows users sit up and take notice, myself included.

The developers at Amarok have been working hard over the months to put forth a new version of the software. The result is Amarok 2.0. The new version is radically different from the previous version and includes a whole new bunch of features.

Amarok doesn’t just have a new look, it also has a new interface. Another new addition is the PopUp Dropper, which lets you add files to a playlist, copy them to an attached device or edit tags, all using simple drag and drop. Apart from that, you can also extract tags from filenames as well as integrate your online music into the player including Last.fm, Jamendo, Magnatunes, etc.

continue reading "Amarok 2.0 is Ready"

Recording Internet Radio for private use is legal in most countries. It is an excellent way to increase the own music collection legally in short time. You find several free and many paid applications on the Internet that offer to record Internet Radio but none that worked so well as the Stripper and Streamripper combination.

Stripper is a Java frontend for Streamripper that offers and easy to use interface with the option to add and record multiple Internet Radio stations simultaneously. Both applications are available for a variety of operating systems including Windows and Linux.

I would begin by installing Streamripper on the system. Stripper itself is a JAR file that can be executed without installation if the Java Runtime Environment is installed on the system. It asks for a few preferences at start, most notably the path to streamripper.exe and the path where the music should be saved in.

continue reading "Record Multiple Internet Radio Stations"

Animated Gifs are mostly a phenomenon of the past and one only comes occasionally upon a website that makes excessive use of them. Those are either websites that have been laid to rest for a very long time by their owner, forums where users post all kinds of images or social community websites like Myspace.

Some make great forum avatars on the other hand. I remember one that showed a bug crawling around that looked so real that I tried to get it off my monitor the first time I saw it.

Anyway, if you are into animated gifs you might like Gickr.com which offers a service to convert Youtube videos into animated gifs. All online with minimal user input. I have created one from videos that I found at Youtube, you see it below.

continue reading "Create Animated Gifs From Youtube Videos"

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is slowly getting out of company executive heads and several stores are successfully selling music that is DRM free. That’s a good thing for the customer who can transfer the songs that he bought to other devices and even burn them on CD if he likes. We are however not at the point where most users would like to be.

A current trend seems to be to include identifying tags into the downloaded music. While that is not a huge problem if you keep a close eye on your music collection you could run into troubles if someone would steal your computer, notebook or mp3 player. Besides that every single song is available on those networks anyway.

It’s a gray area legally in my opinion and I would suggest to everyone to remove the identifying information from those songs.

continue reading "Remove Identifying Information from Rhapsody MP3s"