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 ran each of them through a series of tests using different artists and genres, and then compare and contrast the various features of each one, and the quality and quantity of the recommendation engines. The verdict? Last.fm and Pandora ran at the head of the pack, with Last.fm receiving top honors. My personal experience with Last.fm echoes this enthusiasm…if you are a real music geek, Last.fm should be at the top of your bookmark list.

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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 subscriptions to share with your friends? Or how to increase or decrease the speed of spoken-word audio content? It’s all here, and worth reading whether you’re a podcast novice or a podcast junkie.

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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 of standard media player features like music library organization & consolidation, support for portable devices and connections to network devices such as Sonos or Slimserver.

In the words of Boing Boing:

It sees the online world through MP3-colored glasses — it looks at an archive of public domain sound files or a music store’s catalog, and displays available media for you.

The Songbird site is getting hammered with traffic, but you can download the software through other mirrors.

I’ve just installed it on my Windows machine (no Mac version available yet) and look forward to taking it for a test drive. The open source nature of the project is the aspect that is most encouraging…if it offers a variety of ripping, encoding, transcoding and organizing functions, it will be a big step closer to the ideal music library manager I’ve been waiting for….

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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 future proof way to store digital audio is to use a lossless codec like FLAC, Shorten or Apple Lossless Codec and convert to compressed lossy formats as needed. Hard drive space is getting cheaper and cheaper…I’ve gotten no fewer than 3 emails this week alone from places like buy.com offering external 320 gig hard drives for about $170….so at about 50 cents per gig and considering you can store about 3 albums per gig in FLAC format it seems pretty economical if you want the maximum quality possible. Wired plans to cover lossless formats in a future article. Wired has gotten a lot of feedback on their music articles published this week and opinions vary widely…take a look here to see what readers have to say.

Fast Company takes a look at P2P startup upstart Kontiki (already in use by over 20 million people with initial deals in place with AOL and the BBC) and how Hollywood’s observation of the music industry’s struggles over the last few years might make them more willing to sleep with the “enemy”.

A less enthusiastic view of Hollywood’s willingness to embrace digital distribution comes from consulting and venture botique i2, who recently published a rather lengthly dissertation on the financial and strategic challenges Hollywood faces in moving into the digital distribution space. The piece is entitled War of the Worlds: Hollywood Opts Out of the ‘Google Economy’ and i2 summarizes their findings by saying:

Hollywood believes large-scale broadband video distribution would only destroy proven value, fail to provide alternative value, and alter a business model that is still far from being in decline. With near-total control of the most valuable program libraries and the business models governing their distribution, a shift towards broadband media will come largely on Hollywood’s terms and at an incremental pace. Read the full article from i2 here.

Finally, here’s an amusing story (courtesy of my colleague Coolfer) about a way in which the RIAA’s war on P2P can help increase your bandwidth…

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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. Many people would agree that it offers the best compromise between file size and audio fidelity with the widest range of hardware and software support. Sure, other formats such as WMA and Ogg Vorbis have gained footholds and offer arguably better sound and compression (especially at low bitrates) but they aren’t as widely supported.

As this article in Wired points out, as storage space has increased in capacity and decreased in cost, and improvements have been made in hardware and software used for digital music playback, some folks are listening to their 128 kilobits per second music libraries and finding themselves dissatisfied with the quality of sound. This Wired points out the LAME MP3 encoder which is an opensource project that strives for the best possible sound quality of MP3s.

I’ve been using the LAME encoder for a couple of years as my primary encoding tool with dbPowerAmp and it sounds much better than the iTunes MP3 encoder (especially north of 192kpbs which is the sonic compromise I’m willing to live with for portable digital music). LAME is easy to use and comes highly recommended to those who don’t mind the extra step of using an encoder and then importing the files into iTunes.

From my perspective, at the rate that hard drive prices continue to drop and digital music hardware/software continues to improve, any lossy compression scheme will eventually fall short. I’m starting to encode everything using the lossless FLAC format and then using software like Anapod to transcode into a lossy format when I want to fill my iPod. For some music, I’ll leave it in FLAC format and use my iAudio X5 (which other than the Rio Karma is the only portable digital music player that supports FLAC) when I really want to hear something with full dynamic range.

Whether LAME MP3 or FLAC, I am slowly but surely moving to encode my collection to digital and store it on a series of external hard drives…this is much more to my liking than CDs (and takes up far less space). I’m still experimenting with directory structures and naming schemes, and have yet to find a music library manager that does a thorough job accounting for the music from both commercially produced CDs and live CDs (my Grateful Dead and Phish collections alone are well over a terabyte). Some music library managers tap Gracenote or freedb to help populate tracklists and album credits, and others have taken to grabbing that information from Amazon.com. Ideally, the perfect solution would be a music library manager that grabbed info from all of those sources, as well as the All Music Guide and also tapped the incredible live music database at etree.org for unreleased live material. The icing on the cake would be that this software would also integrate with iTunes for playback and syncronize with iPods and other portable devices, transcoding on-the-fly as necessary. And a good universal tagging/renaming engine is a must.

Does anyone out there know of any software that comes close to this functionality?

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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 so. But a couple of those quirks have been addressed by 3rd parties…let me call attention to a couple that are worth your time.

idleTunes allows you to quickly and easily find and insert album artwork into tracks in your iTunes music library. There’s no batch functionality unfortunately, but on an album-by-album basis it works very well. It also creates instant playlists of all your albums and/or all of your artists with one click, which is very useful if you have a library that is larger than will fit on your iPod. It can also export any iTunes playlist to M3U, PLS, or B4S formats to use with other music players, and removes “dead” tracks from your iTunes library (“dead” tracks are when the music file is no longer on your hard drive but the reference to it still exists in the iTunes library). idleTunes is “donateware”…its free to download and use and if you find it useful the author has a Paypal link on the idleTunes homepage where you can donate to the development effort if you wish.

One of the things that REALLY annoys me about iTunes is the need to switch to it as the active application when you want to pause, skip a track or otherwise make a quick change to what you are listening to. That annoyance is overcome with exTray, which allows you to control iTunes from your system tray or from a series of keystrokes (known as “hotkeys”) that you can define. exTray has a whole bunch of other useful features, including the ability to import/export track ratings and playcounts (very useful if you use iTunes on multiple computers) and the registered version (which costs $12.95) will synchronize those things for you. exTray shows the name of the album, song and the album artwork in a small pop-up that you can control and the pop-up does NOT interrupt the application you are working in which is a very welcome feature.

Now, if someone would only create a plug-in that allows for faster movement between tracks when renaming several at a time…

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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 in comparison to existing P2P clients), requires users to give up their Gmail account information and doesn’t work consistently with Internet Explorer.

A host of alpha issues means that workarounds, fixes and patches will eventually make sharing through Gmail possible, perhaps even easy. That doesn’t mean that Google won’t alter their protocols to defeat or disable the service, though they haven’t done that yet with the incredibly useful Gmail Drive or other customizations of the Gmail service.

User customization is a really compelling feature of many Google web applications…it will be interesting to see if, where, when and how Google decides to step in and start establishing restrictions on these modifications, or if it chooses to find the requisite legal loopholes to allow user-created mods to continue even if they result in stepping on the toes of content owners.

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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 entirely.

Some of these issues are to be expected with any “dot zero” software release. I generally wait until a piece of software is in .1 or .2 revisions before installing. In other cases, the nature of the Windows operating system is as much to blame. Over time, as you install more and more programs the operating system itself becomes cluttered and less stable. A $30 Windows registry cleaner and the occasional disk defragment are quick, easy and can help things remain fairly stable. But the thing that can save the day that most folks don’t do is *BACK UP*. There’s really no excuse for not doing it at this point–a big external hard drive (250 gig) can be found for under $150 and most of them include backup software in the package. Once you’ve set it up, you can just leave the drive attached and have the software back up your files overnight. With a drive that size, you can easily back up an entire digital music collection, along with digital photos and important documents. A drive that size could back up your entire PC, allowing you to restore things to where they were in the event of a crash or virus.

The upsides to a digital music collection are many, but the reality is that hard drives fail. Software upgrades crash. Operating systems get flaky. The only way to prevent you from having to re-rip or reaquire your digital music collection is to back it up.

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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 music library as well as the option that will be of interest to most users — the ability to easily move songs from an iPod onto a hard drive. This is a simple process for non-DRM wrapped files…files with DRM require the additional step of stripping the DRM using software from the Hymn Project. The footprint of Winamp with the plug-in is very small (under 5 meg of disk space) and uses few system resources.

I’ve been using Anapod to manage music on my iPod since day one and I’ve been very happy with it. But I certainly plan on giving the Winamp plug-in a test drive…certainly before Apple releases the inevitable iPod firmware upgrade that prevents the Winamp plug-in from working…

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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 the Yahoo Music Engine differentiates itself from the competition.

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