Jazz Odyssey

ExtremeTech has published a roundup of 8 music recommendation sites/services, including:
* MusicStrands
* Liveplasma
* UpTo11.net
* Audiri
* Pandora
* Mercora
* Yahoo LAUNCHcast Radio
* Last.fm
They [...]

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Apple has published a very cool guide to managing podcasts that covers a lot of cool features most podcast fans probably don’t even know about. Do you know how to subscribe to a podcast that isn’t located in the iTunes music store? How about how to export a list of all your iPod [...]

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A group of folks who were previously behind software/services like WinAmp, the Yahoo Music Service and Firefox have released Songbird, an open source desktop media player. Songbird offers access to a wide variety of music and video on the Internet, digital music services, podcasts, internet radio and more. It also offers a number [...]

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Here are a few articles worth noting as you head into the weekend:
Wired continues their series on digital music formats with A Music File by Any Other Name, an article comparing the most common lossy formats, and discussing which ones are the most future proof. As I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, the only truly [...]

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The MP3 format celebrates its 10th birthday this year (it was actually invented a couple of years before that but 1995 was its first real public appearance with available software players…those interested in the history of the MP3 should read the wikipedia entry) and it continues to be the most widely used digital music format. [...]

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I’ve tried a lot of jukeboxes and music mangement software, but I find myself returning to iTunes which just can’t be beat with its elegant simplicity. That said, iTunes still has a number of truly irritating quirks that are bothersome enough to get me to try a new jukebox every couple of months or [...]

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BetaNews reports on a new web-based service that repurposes the 2 gig of storage per user offered by Google for their Gmail account can be repurposed as a file exchange mechanism. The service is called G2G Exchange and it is a looooong way from ready for primetime. It is complicated (particularly [...]

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There have been a number of posts and blog entries over the last few days describing some installation issues with iTunes 5.0. While some people were able to upgrade without any problems, a number of people are reporting that their libraries have disappeared, or in some rare cases, the installation has has trashed Windows [...]

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A recently released plug-in to the popular Winamp audio player allows users to use Winamp to manage music on their iPods, eliminating the need to use iTunes as a music manager/organizer for their iPod. In fact, the Winamp plug-in offers functionality above and beyond iTunes, including the ability to synchronize multiple iPods with one [...]

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Don’t answer until you’ve read this amazing piece by Ian Rogers on the pros and cons of Yahoo’s latest music offering. From basic functionality to geekier topics like plugins, skins and support for FLAC format (yay!!!), this piece is absolutely essential reading for anyone in the digital music space who wants to understand how [...]

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A new service called Music On Command allows radio listeners in the U.S. to call a toll-free number while listening to the radio and have a link to purchase the song (or talk radio, news broadcast etc) from Buy.com emailed to them. Read more about it here and sign up for the beta test [...]

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“Sun Microsystems has unveiled a technology that will recommend songs to users based on an analysis of the music that they already enjoy. The technology analyses features such as rhythm and beat strength to categorise the music. It then searches for files with similar attributes.”
Kinda makes you want to splice the left [...]

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This article from Extreme Tech is just one of several that have appeared over the last few days that reports on commercial or Open Source software that leverages the capabilities of Sony’s PSP beyond its default functionality.  In this case, the PocketMac software allows users to listen to their iTunes playlists (as well as [...]

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MSNBC ran this article by Bob Sullivan this past Friday. Mr. Sullivan presents some information on Gracenote (formerly CDDB), the "quiet company" that populates the track list and album data in iTunes when you place a CD in your computer. Gracenote began life years ago as a volunteer project, with thousands of users [...]

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The improvements to the iPod/iTunes experience keep coming….syncOtunes is an application (available for Mac and a beta version for Windows) that allows you to compare iTunes libraries across a network and synchronize them, mirroring missing files from one computer to the other. The resulting "missing files" folder is then easily imported into your iTunes [...]

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Blogs and news sites are all abuzz over the "workaround" to the Napster-To-Go DRM that allows you to "bypass" the copy protection and burn "hundreds of thousands" of songs to CD. I’m not exactly sure why this is shocking or even mildly surprising. The tools for directing audio output to .wav files [...]

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If you aren’t yet using it, I highly recomend downloading and installing dBpowerAMP.
dBpowerAMP has 4 components: an audio player, a music converter (which serves as both a CD ripper and codec converter), a CD burning utility and a portable player manager.
dBpowerAMP has several key strengths:

It’s very fast and uses few system resources. It is [...]

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Marc Eisenstadt discusses Exeem, MetaTorrents and the impact on the future of Podcasting in this excellent article.  There are a few sections that veer into some technical talk, but the explanations are clear, the history presented lays a good foundation and ultimately the article should be at the top of your "must read’ list for this week.  [...]

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Engaget has a great article on how to customize the graphics on your IPod.  You can replace the "do not disconnect" logo, battery logo, fonts and more.  There’s a terrific little application called IPod Wizard that will walk you through the process.
Here’s a nice example.   And here is another one.  Here’s one with an ironic sense [...]

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Itunes is a great piece of software. It’s easy to use and it works well.  For most people, its the only music player and organizer you’ll ever need.  However…if you are a more advanced user and looking for more flexibility, you owe it to yourself to check out Anapod by Red Chair Software.   Anapod integrates with Windows [...]

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