Apple has posted a cryptic message on its Web site, teasing the world about an “exciting” iTunes announcement that’s coming tomorrow. What could it be? I saw that someone had suggested The Beatles were finally coming to iTunes, but really, who cares? If you want The Beatles on your iPhone you can grab the newly remastered albums that came out last year, “rip, mix, burn,” then off you go. Not very exciting, no. What could be exciting, though, is a streaming music service. In an instant, Apple would have killed the MP3 once and for all. You hear that? That’s the sound of the RIAA thanking Apple over and over again. → Read More
I always say that you’re never too young to start with your first gadget. This is an example of that theory, taken maybe a little more serious then I would normally consider reasonable. How old do you need to be to have your first MP3 player? → Read More
Tokyo-based gadget maker OTAS is selling sunglasses [JP] that feature, for some reason, a built-in video camera and MP3 player. The so-called aigo glasses come with a 1.3 megapixel camera, a music player that supports MP3 and WMA files, 4 GB of internal memory, and a USB 2.0 port. → Read More
iDFX Audio Enhancer is an add-on to iTunes that serves to, “re-encode your current MP3 and AAC files using a patent-pending method that repairs the damage and lost harmonics that occurred during the original encoding process”. Sounds like doublespeak to me for a $40 EQ and extrapolative guesswork. And the demo of iDFX sounds like just that. if you want good sounding audio, stop buying MP3s. And if you want smaller file sizes, start compressing with FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, or any number of lossless codecs. → Read More
Summer is slowly, slowly wasting away. Perhaps you should go to a beach, just to see what all the fuss is about. Me, I don’t care for the beach. There’s too much sand and too many people who don’t share my concern for what sand does to electronic devices. And the sun! Get over yourself, Sun! We get it, you’re bright. I’m trying to play games on my iPod touch — now tone it down a little bit, you’re washing out the screen. Anyway, here’s a cooler that holds 16 cans and features an AM/FM radio with MP3 input for $25. → Read More
Truth be told, I actually like the looks of this old-timey speaker very much. And it’d go perfectly with my newfangled “digital” music collection. It’s only $29, too, which may or may not mean that the actual sound quality is poor to quite poor. → Read More
If you’re like me, you grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System and then spent your formative years listening to Weezer. Now the best of both worlds is available in true chiptune form with music label Pterodactyl Squad’s Weezer — The 8-bit Album. → Read More
Behold a USB flash drive that also doubles as a simple MP3 player. You supply your own microSD card, actually, so maybe think of this as a $16 memory-less MP3 player that doubles as a USB flash drive. → Read More
I doubt there are still many music cassettes around but if you happen to own some and want to save your childhood memories on your computer for eternity, you might like the MV-CM001U. The retro-style device was announced by a Japan-based company called Novac today [JP]. → Read More
Since being a lousy parent seems to be all the rage these days, here’s another weapon for your doing-the-bare-minimum arsenal. It’s a baby pillow—see how it contours to your child’s neck—that has a built-in MP3 player and speaker. Presumably you’d put your baby on the pillow (well, it’s merely a render, so you won’t be doing any of this, as a matter of fact) while you sleep, watch TV, gamble or whatever it is that parents today do when their baby is asleep for a few minutes. Anyway, you lie the baby on the pillow, and out comes either A) a pre-recorded voice that whimpers “please stay asleep for 30 minutes so mommy and daddy can rest” or B) soothing music that you’ve downloaded from The Pirate Bay. (Best not to use that I-Doser stuff!) → Read More
Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That’s what they say, apparently. “They” being people who are good at selling stuff to other people who can’t always see the steak through the smoky sizzle. There’s apparently another type of sizzle that kids these days can’t get enough of; the sizzle-like sound of noise artifacts in lower-quality MP3 files. → Read More
You’d think that the music industry would be grateful for Apple, which, with the launch of the iTunes Store in 2003, pretty much saved its keister. Not so, according to the old gray lady! In the negotiations leading up to tiered pricing and the removal of DRM, Steve Jobs and Sony’s music chairman, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, got into a little bit of an argument over the phone, which the paper described as “tense.” (Knowing the New York Times, “tense” probably means some pretty salty language, like in a Tarentino film.) It seems the Sony man wasn’t satisfied with the timing of the new pricing structure, and made his opinion known to Jobs on Christmas Eve. Jobs, as is his wont, had none of it, and thoroughly laid into Mr. Sony. → Read More
A Kiwi bought an MP3 player in Oklahoma. No, that’s not a setup to a bad joke, but the chilling, real life ordeal that’s currently the long national nightmare of New Zealand. → Read More
This is the portable radio that’s supposed to rescue HD Radio from obscurity. It was showed off at last week’s CES, but since its name isn’t the Palm Pre no one gave a damn. → Read More
Numbers from two online firms show that iPod touch usage “exploded” on Christmas day. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Apple must have sold a ton of the things during the holidays. → Read More
The RIAA’s new scheme to fight music piracy doesn’t sit well with small ISPs. Under the plan, rather than file lawsuit after lawsuit against John and Jane Doe, who may or may not even exist, the RIAA wants ISPs to cooperate with it by, ultimately, cutting people off from the Internet. That’s not going to happen easily → Read More
Paul McCartney’s previous album, Memory Almost Full, may have been, in so many words, complete garbage, but you have to give credit to the man for his latest endeavor, a new album from his electronic-ish band The Fireman. The album Electric Arguments is available as a DRM-free download from the band’s official site. It’s in a bunch of formats, too, including MP3, FLAC and Apple Lossless; for a few dollars more they’ll even throw in a CD. (Sounds a lot like what Nine Inch Nails did several months ago, right?) And, if you’re not too sure that you want to spend $9 of your hard earned dollars on Mr. McCartney’s side project, you can listen to the entire album on the site via a Flash player. Above all, it shows that “mainstream” musicians are finally getting it, that digital downloads aren’t inherently evil. DRM-free is a welcome bonus, too. It also makes AC/DC’s decision to release its album exclusively at Wal-Mart seem all the more weird. They didn’t even so much as release it on iTunes. via Slashdot → Read More
First, I have this to say about it: if this device works as well as its website, I hope it’s banished to the innermost receses of the earth. Please, web designers: no more autoplaying music and pointless intro videos that show nothing. And especially no music that continues to start up 10 seconds after you stop it, again and again and again. Now, on to the product. It’s an mp3 jukebox of a form factor that has never been tried: supremely awkward. Apparently composed of a rectangular prism intersecting with an oblique column, this gadget was not created with subtlety in mind. I believe the guts are found in the base, and the control interface uses only that silver disc and the buttons thereupon. Honestly, though, why would you get this? It’s ugly as sin and if you’re going to cough up for a nice central mp3 controller, why not go with a touchscreen, either wireless or embedded? No, this appears to be strictly for attention-seekers and interior designers making a “music room” or something. Feh! [via Acquire] → Read More
Did you hear the news? MySpace is thinking about creating its own portable media player! Reuters seems to think that such a player would be in competition with the iPod, which we all know is a lie: there’s the iPod WAY UP HERE, then everything else WAY DOWN THERE. If anything, the MySpace player would be in competition with Zune and Sansa—you know, the “other” portable media players. → Read More
