The ultimate way to tag and rename mp3s
I'm one of those guys who likes to have a neatly categorized mp3 collection with a distinct folder structure ( band name / album ) and properly named and tagged songs. I absolutely hate it if songs are not properly named or are missing tags because it messes up my iPod as well.
Schedule Online Music Recordings
RaimaRadio is a free software that lets you record music played by online radio stations. Several other programs such as XMPlay or Streamripper offer the same functionality and you might be wondering why I'm reviewing just another Internet Radio streamripper. The answer could not be simpler, RaimaRadio offers several unique features that make it worth a review.
Remove Protections from DVD folders
Free DVD is a small freeware that is able to remove certain protections and other unwanted features of Video_TS folders on your hard drive. The software can remove the Region Code, Region Code Enhancements, Macrovision and so called UOPS (user operation prohibitions) protections.
DVDFab HD Decrypter
DVDFab HD Decrypter is a free DVD and HD ripper that is able to copy the contents of a movie onto your hard drive even if that movie is copy protected. It can remove DVD copy protections such as CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and Sony ARccOS and even manages to remove AACS from Blue-Ray and HD-DVD disks which means that it should be possible to copy most DVDs and HD DVDs that you have to your hard disk without running into copy protection problems.
Why DRM is not consumer friendly
I just read an interesting article at Arstechnica by Ken Fisher who was commenting on the termination of Google's commercial Video service. The termination takes effect in just two days which would not be a big problem if the users who bought or rented videos from the service would still be able to play their purchased videos after that date.
Watch the Summer Olympics 2008 in China online for free
The Summer Olympics 2008 in China will probably be the biggest sport event in 2008 next to the Euro 2008. Many people from all over the world have the opportunity to watch the Summer Olympics live because they have access to television channels who broadcast the event.
Holiday Tip: Store your DVDs on your Notebook
I always take my notebook with me when I go on holidays with my family or friends to make sure that I can update and administrate my websites during that time. I also like to take a few of my DVDs with me to be able to watch them when there is nothing else to do, nothing beats watching a DVD on a rainy day in my opinion.
Download 'Watch Now' Movies from Netflix
Netflix, a online movie rentals company, is offering a so called 'Watch Now' service since the beginning of 2007 which allows subscribed users to watch streaming movies. This offer lets you watch x hours of movies where x is the amount that you pay in dollars for your monthly subscription.
What is the name of this song?
I can't rememeber the name of the song but it goes something like this.. If you ever have been in a situation where you were not able to remember the name of the song that you heard either because it was played on radio or a song of the past you should check out the new service Midomi to get a good chance to discover the songs name.
Taking another look at Joost
It has been a few months since I used Joost for the last time and I thought it would be a good time to take another look at Joost considering the announcement that they would go live at the end of the year with almost one million beta testers. A post at the Cybernet Blog also called my attention where Ashley asked if someone was actually still using Joost.
How to play flv files on Windows
Several readers have been asking how they would be able to play movies with the flv extension. Those flash videos do not play normally in standard programs such as Windows Media Player but there are a handful of great alternative video players that support flv files out of the box.
Free Music List July 2007
The article Free Music List December 2005 was a very successful article back in 2005 and I finally found the time to update the article with new sites and get rid of links to sites that do not exist anymore. Most of the sites listed below allow downloads even for non registered users, several ask you to register after downloading some albums and some require a registration before you can start to download or stream music.
Seeqpod search and listen to music
Seeqpod offers two ways to find new and exciting music. The first is the so called PodCrawler which constantly displays songs that have been found and added to the database. From what I can tell they are crawling official band and company websites as well as podcasts and probably other websites as well.
FairUse4WM 1.3 works with Vista and Zune
A new version of FairUse4WM hit the Internet two days ago which is able to strip the DRM - that is Digital Rights Management - right of music files that use MS DRM IBX components up to version 11.0.6000.6324. So, if you own a Zune, use the Yahoo music service, Urge or several other services you might want to give FairUse4WM a try and get rid of the DRM in the music.
Liberated Films
Liberated Films is a movie plattform that brings independent film makers and film enthusiasts together on a single website. Independent film makers get a lot of exposure from the central plattform while viewers are able to enjoy more than 9000 films that are currently hosted on site.
Huge List of Free Legal MP3 Sites
I found a very comprehensive list of sites that offer mp3's that can be legally and freely downloaded. The list is neatly categorized which aids the visitor in finding out which sites offer mp3 files that could be worth the download.
Tune in with Tun3r
While I love Internet Radio streams I sometimes find it hard to find a station that plays the kind of music I want to listen to right now. I do have some regular stations that I normally listen to but when I want to listen to something else I have to search shoutcast and tune in into several stations to find the one that is playing music I like to hear.
Stream Music over the Internet with Vibe Streamer
A friend of mine was asking me if there was a quick and easy way to stream music over the Internet. I did some research for him and found the solution in the free software Vibe Streamer. This program makes it possible to stream music over Internet and Lan and comes equipped with all the features necessary to make it a great product.
Song identification community
It's been a long time since Wildbits started to provide an amazing and free music identification software called Tunatic which helped me many times identify a song I loved. This happened for instance when I recorded Internet radio streams without information about the artist or the song name. I bet you've happened to be in such situation too.
Simpsons promotion
Ok. I have seen lots of movie promotions but this one is topping them all. Remember the Simpsons tv series ? The Kwik-E-Mart were Apu is pressing money out of Homer and his friends ? Well, they apparently created several of those across the United States to promote the new Simpson movie.
Preview Daily Top 25 of Youtube with SlapVid
If you ever wondered how so many users are able to watch hundreds of videos that are published on Youtube on a daily basis you might want to consider using a service like SlapVid which offers previews of the daily top 25 videos at Youtube.
Crunchyroll Asian Movie site with many translations
I love Asian movies, especially the ones from South Korea and Japan which sometimes reach a quality that is on par with only the most exclusive movies from Hollywood. But there is more than Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano, just consider all the great Anime movies or television series that rarely make an appearance on Western television.
Get free electronic ringtones at Toneshared
The distribution of ringtones for mobile phones is a very lucrative business if you consider that there are more than 3 billion mobile phones out there in the world. You can buy ringtones of every popular song in existence but it is rather hard to get those ringtones for free.
Toneshared is offering a large, free collection of electronic and alternative ringtones that can be downloaded right from their website. It is furthermore possible to listen to the ringtones before downloading them. Ringtones are sorted by artist, popularity and age. I don't know any of the artists mentioned on Toneshared but if you like electronic music you might probably know some of them.
Erase Personal Information from iTunes Plus Songs
The outcry of the Internet community was loud and clear when then information was published that songs purchased without DRM from Apple's iTunes store would contain the name and username of the buyer. Horror scenarios where created that suggested that someone could get convicted if his purchased songs would be found on P2P websites even if he did not share them personally.
Best Way to tag your mp3 music collection
Everton from Connected Internet posted a nice article where he is detailing his steps to add tags and cover artwork to his mp3 collection using a few selected freeware programs and iTunes. He suggests to use Picard for the tagging process because Picard is able to add most tags of known albums automatically.
The only information that are not added by Picard are the cover artwork and the genre. It is understandable that the genre is not being added because it is sometimes difficulty to select a genre that everyone would be comfortable with. Itunes will be used to add the cover artwork right from the iTunes store.
Want to watch TV Shows online? Use TV Links
TV Links is a very comprehensive up to date website that offers links to hundreds of TV shows, movies, cartoons, anime, music videos and sport shows. The main url brings you to the listing of all available TV shows which start with all episodes of 24 and end with Zoey 101.
Find out which audio or video codec is missing
Nothing is more frustrating than to witness that the movie that you downloaded for hours won't play on your computer. Maybe there is only black screen, no audio, blurred pictures or out of sync audio and video. The most likely cause for this behavior is that a audio or video codec is missing on your system.
Skreemr Mp3 Search
If you are looking for a great mp3 search engine you should head over to Skreemr immediately. The interface looks pretty much like Google's interface. Just a search box and some links that point to some inner pages. All you need to do to get it working is enter a name of an artist, album or song and Skreemr searches its database for reference to your search string.
A search for Linkin Park revealed more than 2300 entries. Each search results page contains ten links to mp3's with information about the absolute link to the mp3, a description, name and details as well as a basic music player that connects and plays the mp3. The file size is the most important information next to the song name of course because it can be used as an indicator of the quality of the song.
Sync iTunes with non iPod mp3 players
I do not know why some users swear on iTunes and prefer to use it as their main software for their music collection. The biggest drawback in my opinion is that iTunes was designed to only work with iPods and not other mp3 players from different manufacturers. I personally think that it is a bit way of to install iTunes if you do not own an iPod but apparently some users are doing it.
No Good Television
A word of caution before I start the article. If you are easily offended by strong language or a minor you should stop reading right now and read some other articles on my site. No Good TV is a Internet TV portal that looks and feels a lot like the Joost or Bablegum with the difference that No Good TV is a web application.
All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it - well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.
Throw Cans, Upload Video, Become Famous
It seems that you only need a crazy idea, record everything on video and upload it to Youtube to become famous. Five friends from France decided to record their (successful) attempts of throwing empty cans into trashbins and upload this video to Youtube.
They released two videos on Youtube. Their second one received more than 1.500.000 million views which is pretty impressive. I think one reason for the success of the two movies are that it everyone is able to try it by himself and see how difficulty it is to aim and throw the can to hit the trashbin. The videos are well done and enjoyable, have fun watching them..
Real Player 11 Beta leaked
I'm sometimes wondering if the companies leak betas on purpose to create news about their upcoming products or if this is just the way it goes in the software business. A beta version of the upcoming Real Player 11 has been leaked and everyone may download it as of know from the official real website.
View and Edit information of songs with More Tunes
More Tunes monitors various music players such as iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player and fetches information like Artist, Album, Genre and Year about songs that are currently played. The data that has been fetched can then be used to repair or edit the ID3 tags of the song and rename it as well.
Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs
The joy that Apple decided to sell DRM free music on their popular iTunes plattform was overshadowed by two elements. The first one was that the DRM free songs would cost $0.30 more which could not really be explained. The second element was discovered after users were actually able to purchase drm free songs at iTunes.
Account information, namely name of buyer and account name, remained as information in the DRM free files. While this should not be a problem for everyone some users would have at least preferred to receive information about this before making the purchases.
Grooveshark Introduction and Invites
Grooveshark is a new social music website that is currently in closed alpha stage. I was able to get an invitation to the system and would like to write about it here at ghacks and also give out some invites to Grooveshark to a handful of lucky readers.
Grooveshark works basically the following way. You start an application on your computer and decide which music folders you want to share with the community. This application has to be running in the background to be able to share and listen to the music on the Grooveshark website.
Using Media Coder to rip Audio from Videos
I would like to share a really nice and easy way to rip any kind of audio from videos and save the audio in mp3 format. This is a great way of adding music to your collection for instance or to get podcast like shows by ripping the audio from documentations or other videos.
Get Divx Pro for free
Genbeta are reporting that you can get a free version of the Divx Pro suite for a limited amount of time. All you need to do is go to Windows download or Mac download and download the divx pro software. You are asked for an email address during installation which will be used to send the Divx pro key to. You probably want to uncheck the "I would also like to receive" offers.
Anti-DRM T-Shirt Designs
The sites Torrentfreak and Beautiful Crime announced an Anti-DRM T-Shirt competition a while ago and all entries to the competition have been posted on the Torrentfreak website. All 46 T-Shirt designs can be seen and everyone may vote for their favorite T-Shirt design. Who would have thought that this competition would get such a large amount of entrants ?
You can find some really clever designs among the 46 and I would like to display the five designs that I liked the most here at Ghacks. Just head over to the Torrentfreak website to take a look at all of the designs. The winning design will receive a price of $250, the second one of $100 and the third a price of $50.
Knowledge Community Video Sites
People are crazy about watching videos on Youtube, Metacafe & Co. but the videos there are in most cases either entertaining or kinda crappy. In my opinion, it's a little hard to find really good or useful videos in this jungle if you're not searching for something specific or don't get a suggestion or link from another website.
You probably want to learn something new sometimes and in such case vivid video tutorials are many times more appreciated than written tutorials.
Online Music Recorder
Online Music Recorder is a web service brought to you by the team that also created the Online TV Recorder web application. The music service basically records songs from Internet radio stations for you which you can download once they are available. Due to legal concerns you can only download songs that have been recorded since you joined the service and actively stated that you want them to record songs for you.
This means that you create a large library of songs over time. Hundreds of songs are added daily to the list of recorded songs which are kept for an infinite amount of time. The music that you download from Online Music Recorder is encrypted and you need a special software that decrypts the music using your username and password that you use when logging into the website.
