Muzicons has to be one of the simplest music-sharing tools I've ever seen, and also the one with the most personality.
Unlike current Web 2.0 darling Muxtape, which lets you create a nice mix of music uploaded from your hard drive, Muzicons is a single-song affair. You still upload the music from your machine for it to host; the only difference is that there's no track list, no song title, and just a single button to play and pause the music. In fact, whoever creates the mix can tweak the buttons the listener will have access to, determining whether they can skip around the track and what song information is listed.
What makes Muzicons an especially memorable Web app is the care and attention that's been built in to the simple ways you can customize its look and feel. There are just two tweaks: one for color and another for the icon. If you've ever played the popular puzzle game Lumines, the icons feel very similar, and you've got a pick of more than 50 to choose from that will sit on the left side of the player.
When it comes time to share your creation you've only got two options: one set of code for blogs and Web sites, and another for BB code enabled forums or blog comments. If you're looking for some of the simple sharing options seen on other mixtape sites you're out of luck--for now at least.
I've embedded a Muzicon above with the song "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult. To make your
on a laptop or connected to an HDTV, boxee gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.
Listen to your iTunes library from any web browser using Anywhere.FM, a slick webapp that hosts and streams your music with its web-based player. The Anywhere.FM beta is almost too good to be true right now, with free unlimited uploads and listens (but the service may charge in the future). Download a free Anywhere.FM iTunes uploader application that will detect your library and upload all your songs to Anywhere.FM for you.
It also offers a music "locker" service that allows you to upload your music then listen to it from any computer with an Internet connection...but it only works with MP3 files, so you're out of luck if you've been using (for example) iTunes to rip your CD
Play music. Play the Web.
Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption an
Spice up your videos, games, applications or just make system alerts a little more hilarious by downloading sound effects from Soundsnap. Whether you're an electronic musician using Ableton Live or a budding YouTube auteur looking to flesh out the audio on a Final Cut Pro project, libraries of free sound effects, loops and samples are like mana (I'm a longtime fan of The Freesound Project). All the sound effects at Soundsnap are uploaded by creators, so if you've already done some foley work or futzed around with a Moog to produce sci-fi ambience, help out others by contributing. There are already many thousands of audio clips already available. If you're a multimedia maker, what sound effects sources do you use?
Probably the most exciting piece of digital music news to come out of CES 2008 was that Napster was planning on offering its complete catalog of more than 6 million tracks in the unprotected MP3 format. Today, with the launch of version 4.5 of the software and store, that announcement becomes a reality. Although digital music stores such as eMusic, Amazon MP3, and even Napster itself already had MP3s on offer before this point, the collective catalogs of all three didn't even come near the volume of tracks you can find in the entire Napster library. This is a huge day for digital music, as all four major labels and thousands upon thousands of indies are represented in the store, and every track will be available at the standard 99-cent price point.
Napster's Web-based store with the online media player window open.
(Credit: Napster)
More good news is that Napster's Web-based store, which is all that is required for MP3 purchases and downloads, is compatible with every operating system. And--of course--the MP3s can be played on any MP3 player, portable video player, or music cell phone. Currently, 95 percent of the catalog is encoded at 256kbps, which is reasonably high-quality for an MP3, and each track comes with hi-res album art (at least 1,000x1,000-pixels). Although Napster has quite an international presence, the MP3 store will only be available to U.S. residents for the time being.
Napster will continue to offer its online and To Go subscription services for $12.95 or $14.95 per month, respectively. The music associated with a subscription will remain in the protected WMA format with the time-out capability. The company did make some improvements to its online interface. It now features a "liquid layout," which resizes everything within both the store and media player windows when you adjust the size of either window. Napster has also improved its download management system so that users can better view what has been purchased already and whether it was eve
At music-based social network Grooveshark you can search a music database and listen to streaming audio from thousands of artists. Additionally, you can can embed songs you find on Grooveshark into web sites and social networking profiles, and share them with friends via email and instant messages. Here's a Grooveshark embedded tune:
Signing up for an account activates additional features like saved playlists, music suggestions, and access to the social functions of Grooveshark, like browsing the playlists of people who share your musical tastes. Thanks Toribor!
An executive from social-music site Imeem told CNET News just days ago that the company would not be going through a round of layoffs.
Well, not quite.
Imeem's vice president of marketing, Matt Graves, said the question was actually "whether we had done layoffs, not whether we were going to," and that he answered accordingly. Sneaky! He proceeded to confirm a report from PaidContent that a quarter of the company has been laid off.
"There's not as much money floating around the market, and we had to cut our costs to accommodate," Graves said. He added that the layoffs are companywide--"finance, marketing, communications, product, technical operations"--clarifying the PaidContent assertion that the layoffs had been primarily "on the technical back-end side."
He would not comment on the other half of PaidContent's report--that Imeem is planning to shop itself to prospective buyers. PaidContent's Rafat Ali added that Imeem's projected valuation is more than $200 million, a figure that many media and technology companies might not be willing to fork over at this point.
Imeem has taken venture funding from Sequoia Capital, a firm that has advocated extreme caution and frugality amid financial panic. Another Sequoia-backed company, Jive Software, cut a third of its employees within days of the now-famous letter from the venture firm to its portfolio CEOs.