YouScrobble brings the best of these two worlds together. Users who visit the music service can perform a search for an artist to be presented with the complete discography of that artist. The mashup now brings Youtube into the picture by allowing playback and downloads of the music found on Youtube.

The service makes use of three different user roles: Guests can search for and listen to music on the website. They are also allowed to download five songs every 24 hours. Registered users (still free) get ten additional downloads per day, a better download priority, playlist support and scrobble functionality to let Last.fm know about the music. Paid users finally get unlimited downloads and the highest priority in the download queue.

YouScrobble offers means to discover music in a different way. Users can also take a look at the categories or popular artists instead of searching for artists, albums, bands or songs.

Is the service legal? That’s a question that is better left to the lawyers in this case. The pay for downloads model that YouScrobble uses is certainly the most controversial aspect of the service. As Martin Bryant over at Read Write Web points out it is one thing to embed videos on a website that playback music and another to offer that music for download. But that’s something that the developer’s have to dell with eventually, not the users who are using the service.

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TubeRadio is another service that makes use of that principle. It offers an interface that resembles that of Apple’s iTunes software. Here is how it works. It begins by entering a song or artist into the form on the homepage of the service. It is alternatively possible to pick one of the artists or genres that are prominently displayed on the homepage.

TubeRadio will search its database for albums that match the song or artist. All of the albums that are found will be displayed with their album cover and name.

Albums are selected with a left mouse click. It is possible to select multiple albums. TubeRadio will then perform a search on Youtube for those songs in the selected albums which are then added to playlists from where they can be played. Registered users have options to save playlists so that they can reopen them whenever they re-visit the website. Another option is to go back to the search and add additional albums by performing new searches. It is furthermore possible to search directly on Youtube instead of the discography search option.

The music is played on the TubeRadio website with a small video being displayed. Basic controls like switching songs, changing the playback volume, repeating, muting or shuffling songs are available. Users can also look at lyrics, biographies or similar songs (if available) while listening to the music.

There is also an option to display albums and artists that are currently in the charts to listen to these songs instead. The only aspect that users might criticize is something that all of these services have to cope with: the quality of the Youtube videos. It can happen that the service does not retrieve the song by the artist but a cover that is performed by another artist.

Just visit the TubeRadio website if you are interested in trying out the service. (via Make Use Of)

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The interface is divided into two main levels. The left sidebar offers a folder browser with some filtering options at the bottom. It is for example possible to filter for specific audio formats or file names. The confusion can be attributed to the right main window. This window is divided into a main tab with buttons to rename, tag, edit, organize, retrieve online information and play. The two lower menus change depending on the main tab that is selected by the user.

The rename tab for example contains buttons to scan, open or save playlists, open the rename options, execute scripts and handle changes (like undo or ignoring files. More confusing than that are main options like the organize or online tabs where the choice in the second menu level changes the third menu.

Here are some of the highlights of the music manager:

• Batch rename of files using Tag/Filename/Folder name/Audio file information.
• Batch Tag update.
• Manual / single file editor.
• Album/filename rename & update using freedb.org or www.allmusic.com, Amazon, and custom sites
• Powerful library.
• Encode/decode your files with LAME,Ogg Vorbis or mpcenc. (trans code with out losing tag information from one format to the other)
• Restructure the files on your hard disk ( copy,move or even create shortcuts ) in new user defined location based on Tag field information.
• mp3, ogg, mpc, ape, flac, aac, apl, wv, mp4, ofr, spx file support

The Godfather is available at the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems and can be downloaded as a stable or beta version.

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Probably the most noteworthy is the automatic recognition of music that gets added to the music player. It is possible to scan folders on the local hard drive for music. Album art and additional information are automatically retrieved by Jaangle and displayed in the player. This does include band and artist information which are usually not provided by many music players.

Jaangle can also display song lyrics, tabs, reviews and user comments if available. Extensive tagging options are supported to edit or add tags to songs or albums. This includes the usual information such as band name, genre or album but also lyrics, tabs and comments.

Another interesting feature is the search which offers several advanced search parameters. It is possible to perform a basic search, advanced search (artist, title, album, location), display the latest additions since a specific date, by rating or by lyrics, comments or personal information.

A major drawback of the music player is missing Internet radio support; Something that most players are offering. Samer of Freeware Genius points out that it is also missing mp3 player support, audio podcast subscriptions and CD ripping capabilities. Jaangle can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It is an interesting player for users who do not need the missing functionality.

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The mobile phone market in Japan is different from that of the rest of the world as Japanese mobile phone companies control the software on the mobile phones meaning it would be very unlikely that these measures, if agreed on, would be introduced in other markets as well.

The article fails to address several difficulties of such a system. The most important ones are the following:

• What happens to songs that have been ripped from legally bought CDs? Won’t they be played at all? (this assumes that it is legal in Japan to rip CDs)
• What happens if no connection is available currently? (Will it be possible to play songs without net connection?)
• Who pays for the traffic that the song checks create?

Please post your opinions in the comments.

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These information are then used to search various video services including Youtube, MyVideo, Vimeo or Discogs. The information are then displayed in the main interface that resembles a desktop music player. Results are shown in a song and album list. It is therefor possible to check out a specific album of an artist or band using Semsix.

Semsix displayed quality levels for each song that is listed in the interface. Green dots indicate a good quality while gray dots indicate songs that have not been found by the search engine. A click on an album at the top will only show the songs of that album in the results list. Songs can be added to a playlist which can be saved for later use. All songs that have been found can be played right away on the site. A video of the song will be shown during playback as well.

A site logo on top will indicate the source of the song. Other possibilities offered by Semsix are switching to simple view which will display all songs that have been found in a list, a build in lyrics search engine and web radio capabilities.

All these features make Semsix an interesting option for users who want to listen to songs from specific artists or albums online. No registration is required to use the service.

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Winamp by default comes with the option to import the iTunes media library. It does however not include a similar option to import media from Windows Media Player which is why the software program has been created by the developer.

The application can import the Windows Media Player library into Winamp. This includes audio and videos files, all metadata including ratings and play counts.

The software comes with a few options to customize the import of the Windows Media Player library. It is possible to import all media files or only audio or video files. There is also an option to only import audio and video from an existing playlist.

Three additional options are available. It is possible to ignore files that are already in the Winamp Media Library, remove files from the Winamp Media Library that are not in the Windows Media Player Library and to automatically import on Winamp startup.

The program will not make any changes to Windows Media Player no matter which settings are selected in the application.

Windows Media Player Import is available at the developer’s website. It requires Windows 2000 or higher (means it is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7), Winamp 5 or higher and Windows Media Player 9 or higher.

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The developers of Google Chrome have added jumplist support recently and it was only a matter of time when other developers released versions of their software programs with jumplist support as well. The latest beta versions of the popular software music player AIMP 2 are also offering jumplist support.

Users who install the latest beta version of AIMP 2 in Windows 7 will notice the jumplist menu when right-clicking the icon in the taskbar. The jumplist provides quick access to recently opened songs in the music player.

There does not seem to be any other features yet but this might change in future releases. The changelogs suggest that the developers are still working on improving compatibility with Windows 7 which could mean additional feature support. Users who are interested in downloading the latest version of AIMP 2 can visit the developer’s website to do so.

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You find a good mixture of established artists in the list including songs by Bif Naked, Underoath or Warren G but the majority of songs comes from artists that most visitors probably never heard of. This does not necessarily mean that this is bad music. It is actually a good way of discovering new artists that are not that in the focus of mass media.

The downloaded songs have been encoded with 192 Kbit and it is likely that all songs are encoded in this bitrate. Music can be sorted by letter or genre which helps to find the right music genre or artist.

There is no word yet on the duration of this promotion. Thanks goes to jagslive for sending us the tip.

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Trout can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. It supports a wide variety of audio formats including mp3, ogg, wma, flac and others. Music can be loaded by dragging and dropping files or folders into the interface or by using the menu toolbar at the top. All audio files that have been loaded into the player are displayed in the playlist area in the lower half. This area contains not only information about the names of the songs but also information about bitrates, sizes, artist and album tags and more.

Songs can be sorted by clicking on one of the columns. It is for example possible to sort by album, artist, playing time or filename. Trout offers a set of features that many expect from today’s music players. This includes support for Internet radio streams, freeDB support for audio CDs, compatibility with most tag formats and tag editing, hotkeys, lyrics, album covers or various play modes. Track announcements are another interesting feature that are great when listening to audiobooks.

The minimized music player needs less than 3 Megabytes of computer memory while playing and therefor ideal for low end computer systems. The free music player Trout is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems from Windows 9x on including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website.

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While this is not a problem on modern computer systems where hard drives with Terabytes of data become the norm. It could however play a role with mobile devices like cell phones or mp3 players. These have seen a storage increase in the last two years as well but it is still not uncommon to see cell phones or mp3 players with a few Gigabytes of storage or even less.

It might make sense to reduce the quality of the music to be able to store more of it on the devices. It is obviously up to the individual user to find an acceptable quality setting. One application that can modify the quality of music.

The software is pretty easy to use. It takes only a few clicks to modify the quality. The user can drag and drop music into the interface. Various information such as the name, size or bitrate are displayed automatically. The last step before the conversion is to select a preset which ranges from high quality over portable and compromise to low quality with the option to add custom presets to the application.

A preset is made up of a sample frequency, bitrate mode, rate and modus. Conversion takes only a few seconds per song and can remove the original if that is wanted by the user. The results page will list the size differences between the original and the conversion. MP3 Quality Modifier can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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Songbird is able to import the iTunes music library and playlists if iTunes is installed on the computer system as well. It does not really make sense to use both iTunes and Songbird unless iTunes is used to purchase music and fill music gadgets like the iPod or iPhone as Songbird provides an equal – and sometimes even advanced – functionality otherwise.

Users who do not use iTunes can import music easily by adding folders from the local computer system. Songbird will automatically recognize tags and categorize the music accordingly. One of the most interesting features is the support for plugins. A handful of plugins are installed by default unless the user opts out of the installation. Plugins expand the functionality of the music manager. Available are for example a Shoutcast Internet radio browser and player, the Last.fm radio player, concert information, various skins and interface enhancements and dozens of additional plugins that sound mighty useful.

Especially the plugins make Songbird a viable alternative to other music players.

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Right-click the folder that you want to add the options to and select Properties from the menu. Now switch to the customize tab in the window that is popping up. Select Music (best for audio files and playlists) from the drop down menu on top. You can also check the “also apply this template to all subfolders” if the subfolders should also be turned into music folders. A click on OK will change the folder template in Windows Explorer to music.

A right-click on that folder will from then on display the two Windows Media Player entries. You can revert the changes by simply changing the music template back to the default folder template.

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The only other available option is to select a playlist to be created or extended with the music that is found in the monitored directory. This is an optional step though and not required for the music import to work properly. The software will check the folder for new music periodically and add it automatically to iTunes whenever new music is discovered in that folder on the drive. It looks like the interval is set to 1 minute as music that is moved to the folder gets quickly added to iTunes all the time.

The program has to be running in the background for this to work properly. It uses quite some computer memory (34 Megabytes on a Windows XP test system) which might make it to memory hungry for some computer systems. Could be worth a try for users who regularly add music to a specific folder and its subfolders on a computer system though. The music does get added to iTunes regularly as well.

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This is beneficial for users who feel irritated by the sound volume after some time of playing and those that want to reduce it to fall faster into sleep. The portable application will control the system volume of the operating system meaning it is compatible with all applications that are running on it.

The user can define the total duration of the process, the time the volume duration should begin and the target volume in the end. The duration can range from 5 minutes to 120 minutes while the sound volume can be set between 0 and 100%.

The application will display a graph detailing the sound volume progression over the entire time. Sweet Dreams can furthermore perform one of the following actions after reaching the total duration: shutdown, switch off monitor, standby or hibernate.

English users should not be worried by the German homepage of the developer as the application itself has been completely translated into English.

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The first method is a search that can be used to find exact matches for artists, songs, albums and so on. Youtube has one of the largest collections of music videos and it usually is pretty easy to find the music that you are looking for. Music that has been discovered can be added to playlists which can be saved after a free account registration at the official website. This is a great way of creating lots of playlists that cover all the songs and genres that the user likes.

The second option that is offered by Muziic is pre-generated playlists that can be accessed from the sidebar of the music player. Those playlists are sorted by genre. About 30 or so genres are available which do contain one or multiple playlists that can be selected for playback.

The video going along with the song can be displayed in the music player if that is something that the user wants to view as well while listening to the song. Besides the playlists that are offered users can import so called channels that have been created by other Muziic users into the application. Channels are also categorized in genres making it easy to pick a suitable one.

The music player is quite interesting as it uses a concept similar to cloud computing to provide access to a large collection of music to users. Users benefit from this by being able to search and access that large database and by saving disk space as virtually no local disk space is required. The only possible drawbacks are the quality of the songs which are definitely not high (but acceptable) quality and the chance that songs vanish if the videos get deleted on Youtube.

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It does require an installation of Apple’s iTunes software to work which is the only requirement. The main interface is divided into a library selector that provides access to all playlists that are currently configured in the installed iTunes version on the computer system. A click on the Clean button will initiate the scan of the songs that are listed in the library.

Users who want more control can access several configuration settings before which define the value that null fields will be replaced with and which also allow the selection and deselection of several cleaning filters.

The application is definitely a work in progress and could need some additional information to guide the user and explain what it is doing. The homepage of the software developer lists several of the features and plans for future versions. The download on that page is currently broken but will hopefully be fixed by the developer soon. Here is the direct link to the page containing the download.

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I have been using a lot of different ones over the years, but I never really came to like any of them because I either missed features, found them too complicated to use, and I never ever managed to maintain a we ll organized collection, especially with ratings.

I have used Foobar, Media Monkey Winamp, iTunes, and just as in last weeks post, I returned to the most simple one, Windows Media Player 11.Yes, Foobar is simpler, but it is a pain to get to look nice and WMP 11 is built in from the start. I actually like Media Player 11 a lot, I thnk it looks great and handles great, although there could be better features, and frankly, it’s video capabilities are really bad, but I like it for music. So, how do you use your media player?

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The result is pretty amazing. The complete discography of many artists are shown on the results page. All albums and songs can be played right on the website without additional plugins or registration hassles.

Users who want to listen to music online can enter a band or artist name in the search form or pick one of the suggestions in the tag cloud below. It takes only a few seconds before the next page is loaded containing information about the discography of the selected band or artist. The first song of one of the music albums will play automatically.

The results are spot on. Even the tested live albums did return the live songs (most of the times) and not other studio versions of the songs. All songs were playing fine during tests, there was no delay or any other sort of disturbance. The page with the music player uses several ads which might be distracting to some users. It provides the means to purchase songs at Amazon. There are also some concert information listed on some pages.

Vastfm is a unique interesting website that provides access to virtually any band and song that can be found on Youtube.

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Last.fm Downloader (via Life Rocks) is a free portable software program for the Windows operating system that can connect to any last.fm radio station to record the music that is played there. The software is absolutely fool proof as it provides only a few buttons and configuration options.

The url of the radio station has to be pasted into the application which is the only thing needed to start the recordings. Settings make it possible to change the download location of the music files, to define a maximum size limit or download file count limit, to start an external application if a limit is reached and whether to download cover art and make use of a deep folder layout while downloading.

The last.fm software will download three different songs at a time from the radio stream and save them to the local computer. Several songs are shown that are next to be downloaded from last.fm.

The downloaded songs will be named artist – title.mp3 by default and \Artist\Album\Artist – Title.mp3 if the deep folder structure has been selected.

An alternative to Last.fm Downloader is Last Sharp.

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