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 [...]

Categories: Mac, Music and Video, Online Services, Windows

Youtube Videos which are also used on sites like Myspace or embedded into blog posts sometimes take ages to load which results in freezes and stuttering which can only be solved by pausing the playback until the video is fully loaded. There is a possible way that would accelerate the download of the youtube video by up to five times. This is done by the free software Speedbit Video Accelerator which builds up five different connections to the video server to speed up the streaming of the video. This method does not help if you are already using the maximum bandwidth available of course.

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, ie, The Web, Tools

The Hype Machine is a free music blog search engine that makes it easy to search and listen to music that is posted on music blogs. Whenever a music blog that is connected to the Hype Machine adds a new mp3 file it is added to the index of the Hype Machine as well and everyone visiting the website is able to listen to it using his favorite player.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, The Web

If you are looking for an easy way to record internet radio stations look no further. Phonostar is a free radio player and recorder that comes preconfigured with more than 4000 radio stations. Phonostar tries to automatically determine the audio source that can be used to record songs and loads the interface afterwards. Top stations are selected and a double-click starts the playback of that station. Please note that all top stations seem to be in German, conduct a search for English stations.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Orb is a free software that changes your pc into a streaming server. If the Orb software is running on the pc every other device that has internet such as the Nintendo Wii, a notebook or pda can connect to a website and view any media file that is shared on the streaming server. The setup is really simple. Download the Orb software and install it on the computer that you want to use as the server.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, Tools

Pandora streams music over the internet which is related to a artist or song that you have entered at the beginning. The service is great to find new artists that make a similar kind of music than artists that you like to listen to. The service was completely free until now.

Categories: The Web

If you do now Pandora you feel right at home when entering the FineTune website. Guests may use only part of the streaming radio services offered at the website but it is good enough for a rough overview of what FineTune has to offer. Just enter an artists name in the search field and FineTune will search for the artist that you have entered and related artists and start with the playback of songs that the search found.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, The Web

Fraps is a application that lets you capture videos / screens of 3D applications and is mostly used for recording in game movies. The biggest drawback of Fraps is that it is not freeware, you have to purchase it to use all of its features. Taksi steps in and provides a similar functionality with the advantage that it is Open Source, free for everyone to use and download.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

It happens sometimes that you download a video clip from the internet and have troubles playing that movie on your computer. This problem is most of the time codec related, one indication would be a black screen or no sound after hitting play. One solution, which is not that perfect, would be to install a so called codec pack and hope that the coded that is needed for playback is included in that pack.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows