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Despite the rise in popularity of TV on demand, Internet and Twitter, I still like listening to the radio. It offers such a wide variety of songs and different kinds of programs that, for example TV, doesn’t offer. Call me a dinosaur if you will, but I would much rather listen to the radio for a couple of hours than wind it away in front of some lifeless, cheap TV program.
Believe it or not, I don’t actually own a radio – I tune in via the Internet. I am currently based in Germany, and from time to time, I need a good, solid dose of British culture to remind me of my roots. I can get all my British radio stations (such as BBC Radio 1) via the Internet, without having to pay any kind of license fees (unlike television).
When you look at the figures, the popularity of Internet radio is on the rise. In 2007, 11% of the U.S. population listened to the radio via the Internet; in 2008 this figure had crept up to 13% (and is presumably still on the rise). It’s certainly cheaper than buying an actual radio, and you can listen to stations from different parts of the country.
I am a very fussy person when it comes to my iTunes library. I like to have it completely organized and I can’t stand it when there are gaps in the song information or when cover art is missing – it’s one of my pet peeves. A tidy iTunes library leads to a clearer mind and, in my opinion, a far better listening experience.
There are a number of ways to tidy up an iTunes library on a mac. The first (and the most long-winded way) is to sit down with a beer and trawl through all your songs, filling in any missing information by using good old Wikipedia! This is not a problem if you’ve only got a few songs, but if you’re like most of us, you’ve got a large music library and you’ll want something a little more sophisticated to help you organize it. Read on to see if SongGenie is the answer you’re looking for.
VirtualDJ was first released in 2003 and over the years has grown into a real success story for Atomix Productions, providing professional DJ’s and hobbyists with effective DJ software. Originally sold in shops, this multi-platform ‘Home’ version is now available for free in the Mac App Store and sees the developers adopt an innovative pricing model to offer a largely uncrippled and feature-packed app in the hope of enticing users to eventually upgrade, with the end result being a big win for the consumer.
Let’s take a closer look at this innovative App Store favourite.
I’m the kind of person that likes things to be neat and organized, but I don’t like it enough to put a lot of effort into making it happen. I’m mostly content to be moderately irritated by things being out of order in exchange for not having to waste time organizing, alphabetizing, labeling or tagging. Since my recent hard drive failure, I’ve been dreading transferring music from my iPod back to my computer because I’d forgotten that all the hard work I did updating song metadata hadn’t been synced to my iPod.
I was naturally very intrigued by Little App Factory’s new app Tagalicious, which promises to clean up your iTunes library quickly and painlessly by auto-detecting track metadata and updating it in iTunes. Read on to find out if it succeeds!
For those of you from the U.K. and other fortunate regions that have been enjoying Spotify for years, this is a non-event. However, for any readers from the U.S., this is huge news. Get ready to completely neglect Grooveshark, Pandora, Last.fm and any other Internet radio you listen to. Spotify is that good.
What is Spotify? How does it work? How do you get it? Keep reading, we’ve got the answers.
There are plenty of radio services out there, and most of them offer different music and/or features than the others. This makes it hard for audiophiles to remain loyal to just one radio service, and if you are anything like me, you have accounts that you use with more than one of these radio services.
Today we are reviewing an app that is called Musicality, and it works as a desktop app that can play your Pandora and Last.fm radio stations without the need of having a browser tab or window open. How good is it? Let’s find out.
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Music, I think it is fair to say, is a large part of most people’s life. Many of us listen to music whilst we’re on the computer, and, being on Mac, this will probably be through iTunes. But if you want to change the song, pause it, or anything else, you don’t want to disrupt your workflow and open up the bulky musical hub that is iTunes. You could set up a few keyboard shortcuts, but what if you want more functionality?
That’s where Music Commander comes in. Music Commander is a menu bar app, available exclusively in the Mac App Store, which allows you to control certain elements of iTunes from your menu bar, so you can get back to work instantly.
Read on to see how it fares when put to the test.
iTunes. You can’t live with it, and yet you can’t live without it. Sure, it does its job, but there are a whole lot of features which are unnecessary, and necessary features which haven’t been implemented. It has Ping, a social network used by about 7 people, but no support for AVI videos, a video format loved by millions. Unfortunately for us, there aren’t many decent alternatives.
Miro 4 was released recently, and although Miro was always an iTunes competitor, version 4 has really brought it into its own. The 100% free and open source media library does all of the things you want iTunes to do, and more. But is it worth abandoning iTunes for? Read on to find out.
Perhaps it’s just me and my complete lack of musical ability, but any time I open up a bit of DJing software, I get completely lost – There are far more knobs, levers, sliders, options and timelines than any man could ever want. I do, however, quite enjoy doing a bit of casual mixing, but don’t want to go through a massive learning curve to get there.
Enter Djay, a very impressive DJing app from Algoriddim, which does everything most users will want it to, in a beautiful interface which is very easy to get to grips with. Sounds like your sort of thing? Read on to see just how good it is.
