It’s always nice to plop down to a big bowl of hot dog food and read about how the company you work for (ostensibly and/or on paper) squandered one of the most recognizable brands in PC history. As you’ll recall, the turn of the century was a time of great confusion. iTunes hadn’t yet rolled over the media space and these new M-P-3 files* were quite popular yet no one knew how to play them. Enter… → Read More
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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
The world has too many MP3 players – what? it does – and manufacturers need to move on rather than developing an “iPod killer” which is what Dell might be doing. According to the original rumor mill, Wall Street Journal, the MP3 player built around the entertainment software Zing is being shelved indefinitely. Maybe Dell suits came to their senses, threw in the towel… → 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… → Read More
Amazon MP3 and iTunes—the only two online music stores that really matter—have another competitor to worry about now that Wal-Mart has re-launched its own music store. The “new and improved” (joke: how can something be both “new” and “improved”?) store sells DRM-free MP3s, most of which are encoded at 256kbps; some are only 192 kbps. Individual songs start as low as 74… → Read More
My good friend Peter Ha isn’t sold on the Sandisk SlotMusic hoopla (see his post here). I think it’ll work, though. You have to approach it from the mindset of the casual consumer for it to make sense. Think of the player like a Walkman or a Discman and MicroSD cards as blank tapes or CDs. Then remember that entire albums used to be sold on tapes and CDs and that for many people, there’s a… → Read More
My word, actual innovation coming for a digital audio player. It’s certainly been a while. It’s called the Twinned MP3 player, and its gimmick is that it’s actually two separate players joined at the hips, so to speak. Each half of the player is a fully functional player; both half contains the same playlist of music, a playlist that’s controlled by an online server. So… → Read More
Flickr’d You know what the $100 Sansa Fuze does that the $150 iPod nano doesn’t? It plays FLAC and OGG, now that SanDisk has released updated firmware for the little player. (Apple Lossless is cool and all, but trying finding—wink-wink—albums encoded with it online.) The updated firmware, version 1.01.05 (yeesh, user-friendly numbering convention right there), also includes… → Read More
Just a quick note regarding iTunes. Apple has updated it to version 8.0.1, and this release fixes a few quirks that no doubt annoyed some of you. The bug that caused iTunes to copy over HD versions of a TV show with an SD version is now squashed. Genius also sees some attention: when creating a Genius playlist, the song you’re basing the playlist on no longer stops playing. Just “Check for… → Read More
Get ready for yet another mobile music store, this time from Sony Ericsson. Yup, that company’s still around. SE will launch Play Now Plus in “a few weeks” in Sweden. The music service will initially be available to Telenor subscribers, a wireless carrier there. The service will cost 99 Swedish crowns (about $15) a month for unlimited downloads. If all of this sounds awfully familiar… → Read More
That mobile Amazon music store rumor? Totally true. Yeah, so Amazon just confirmed the existence of a mobile music store for Android-based cellphones. It’s essentially a pint sized version of Amazon MP3, and it comes pre-loaded on the G1. You’ll have 6 million DRM-free songs to choose from, from all four of the big record labels. The catch? You can only download MP3s over a Wi-Fi… → Read More
Another day, another movie and music store. This time, though, it’s for Android-based phones; today is Android Day, in case you forgot. Right, so it looks like Amazon has struck a deal with Google to launch a mobile version of its online music and movie store for Android-based cellphones. That’s the hot rumor right now, at least. It seems—get this—that a G1 made the rounds… → Read More
SanDisk and the RIAA sure do hope y’all aren’t “finished” with physical media-based music playback. If you are, then this whole slotMusic venture will end up being a waste of everyone’s time. SlotMusic, actually written slotMusic, is the name of Sandisk’s new line of music-filled microSD cards. The thinking behind slotMusic is that consumers, what with their music… → Read More
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