Rapidshare.com the popular file hoster is currently unreachable if you use the url. Rumors began to spread like wildfire claiming that Rapidshare servers were taken down by court order, that the police seized Rapidshare servers which was the reason for the unavailability.

These rumors are most likely false. You can still reach Rapidshare.com if you use a Rapidshare IP like 80.239.151.250 instead. The connection is rather slow at the moment and a Rapidshare technican (unconfirmed though) posted a message saying that servers would be back online around midnight GMT.

We will see if the outage is really hardware related or does have other reasons. It is in my opinion unlikely that the police will raid servers on a Saturday instead of a weekday. Still it could be possible. Here is the message posted at the Round Views website.

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Global Pandora was a great service while it did last. Users from outside the United States where able to listen to Pandora, the Internet Radio that would create music stations based on artists or songs that you like. The Music Industry made the decision to block access to Pandora for all users from outside the United States although most users reported that they discovered new music that they found interesting and that the majority actually bought music they discovered at Pandora.

You are not the only one who thinks that something is not right here. Still, Global Pandora uploaded an announcement to their website that all US IPs of Global Pandora have been banned by Pandora so that access is currently not possible anymore. They ask users to use Jango, imeem, Spotify, Songza or SHOUTcast in the interim period.

It remains unknown if Global Pandora will make a comeback because new IPs will most likely get banned after a while as well. They are looking for U.S. servers and shells nevertheless to bring the service back to life.

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Just got word that Yahoo Search has started integrating information from Del.icio.us into their search result pages. Yahoo aquired Del.icio.us some years ago and I was wondering since then when they would start to combine the two online services to offer their visitors additional information.

If a site has been bookmarked at Delicious it is shown in the Yahoo Search Results pages. The number of users who have bookmarked it as well as the main tags that have been used to bookmark it are shown. A click on the number of users who bookmarked a link using Delicious leads to the bookmark at Delicious while a click on any of the tags mentioned opens the tag listing at Delicious which does not necessarily mean that the website is listed on that website.

I think that this is a nice idea to integrate Delicious into Yahoo. It could give users confidence that the website that they are going to visit has been useful for other users because of the bookmarks at Delicious. I would not like to see a integration of the amount of bookmarks in the search results because it is not a huge problem to get hundreds of bookmarks at Delicious for a small amount of money.

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Once a music video is released it makes it way pretty fast on Youtube where everybody can watch it. This is actually a really nice way to grab the latest music because it is very easy to rip the music from the Youtube video, almost to easy. It depends if the video is still at Youtube or already on your hard drive. The method is faster if the music videos are already on your hard drive, if they are not you have the option to download them first or use a script to extract the music online.

I’m using the excellent cover of Lil Red Riding Hood by The Brooke to explain how this is done. If you do not want to download the video you can use the online converter at Vixy.net to rip the music from the file. Just copy the url of the Youtube movie and paste it into the url field of the Vixy website. Now select MP3 (audio only) from the pulldown menu and click Start.

Ripping the music from the url takes much longer than using a program that is installed on your computer. The video or videos have to be on your hard drive as well. You can use a program like FLV Extract to extract the audio from flv files, the files that all Youtube videos are saved in.

continue reading "Grab the latest music from Youtube"

If you are looking for a Google-like search engine - in terms of simplicity and quality - when it comes to searching for, listening to and downloading mp3 music files from the Internet then mp3zy could be just what you are looking for. The interface is as basic as it can get, just a search mask that waits for user input and a search button.

You may enter song names, artist names or albums. The search results page looks always alike though. Song names on the left, listen and download links to the right and the number of pages with additional hits below. If you click on Listen a new page (or tab in Firefox) opens with a basic player with play and stop functions.

A click on Download immediately opens a Save As window where you can save the download. Download speeds can vary greatly since no files are hosted on the mp3zy server and depend solely on the server where the music is hosted.

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