Posts Tagged
Music
So you want to control iTunes from your menu bar? It’s a simple enough task, but which app is right for you? Are there any free options? Can you also control other apps like Spotify and Rdio?
There are a million of these apps on the market but we’ll save the research and present five of the best options around for controlling your music from the menu bar.
Keeping up with music can sometimes feel like a chore, especially if you aren’t in your younger years of exploration anymore. Currently, with the Internet providing us with the opportunity to meet so many new artists from around the world, we have so much music at our disposal, and we’re bound to like some of it more than other.
That’s why there are services like Last.fm and Pandora, which use your previous history of listened music as a tool to bring you music that fits your tastes. Today we’re reviewing something similar that bundles the functionality of many music services into a simple and cool-looking Mac app called Discovr Music.
I love iTunes. As Apple’s native music player and iOS powerhouse command station, it is unlikely that anything will ever wholly replace iTunes for me. It’s an integrated hub for surfing the iTunes music store, buying iOS apps, making playlists, the Ping network (even though it’s somewhat barren), managing the media and content on my iPhone and iPad, and more. But in spite of my love for iTunes, I will be the first to admit that with a music library the size of mine, it can be a bit slow, unwieldy, and bloated when all I want to do is play some tunes.
When I began reading up on Sonora, a beta-phase app coded by Indragie Karunaratne and designed by Tyler Murphy, I was impressed with the obvious target niche that Sonora was appealing to. At the risk of sounding “scoff-y”, independently developed music players rarely appeal to me because they so often claim to be an iTunes replacement–which, for the reasons listed in the above paragraph, is unlikely for me. Sonora, on the other hand, markets itself as a companion player, humbly leaving the heavy lifting of music purchases and iOS management to iTunes and providing a lightweight player for the express purpose of playing music. Hit the jump to read more about Sonora.
Ecoute, created by PixiApps, has been a moderately popular alternative to iTunes for over a year now. With version 3, developer Louka Desroziers and interface designer Julien Sagot hope to catapult their audio player’s status from semi-popular indie app to major-league success. So is the latest version of Ecoute ready for the big time?
Since the dawn of portable Apple devices, the personal computer has always been the hub we’ve used to manage and sync our media. We are accustomed to our iPods, iPhones, and iPads being bound to our computers by white cables. But when Steve announced iCloud last summer, he declared, “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” His vision was that the personal computer would no longer be the middle man between your media and your devices.
Of all of the digital media that accumulates on our hard drives, our music collections are often guilty of robbing us of significant hard drive space. This is even more of a problem when it comes to the smaller storage space of our portable devices. Most of us have spent time trying to narrow down our music to fit on these devices, only to be away from home and crave a song or album that missed the cut. This is where iTunes Match comes in. Read on to learn what Match is all about, and find out if it’s right for you.
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Choosing a media player – a music player, to be precise – for a Mac is a no brainer. iTunes is the crowd favorite and has the chops to entertain both an audiophile and the casual listener. Despite becoming bloated and unduly heavy over the years, iTunes is more or less the default audio player for the Mac ecosystem. Even folks who are die hard Windows users and those who don’t own an iOS device also are fans of iTunes.
But as I just alluded to, iTunes is a tad bulky and lacks the advanced features of a full fledged media player. The choice of full blown music players for Mac are pretty thin when compared to any other vertical. Winamp hardly needs an introduction. For more than a decade, it ruled the roost as the popular media player for Windows.
Winamp for Mac is a free download and promises to offer the same powerful featureset it is known for. Is it awesome enough to replace iTunes? Read on to find out!
There are a bunch of websites to allow you to share and discover new music, especially from artists that aren’t as big or popular as they deserve. Perhaps the most widely used of these is one called SoundCloud, which is used by many artists personally.
The app that we are reviewing today is a native SoundCloud client for Mac, made by the same folks behind the website. How good is it? Let’s find out.
So far in our series of making music with GarageBand, we’ve taken a look at getting started with GarageBand, and have then moved on to creating a simple song in GarageBand using virtual instruments. We’re going to continue to step up the complexity to make more unique, nuanced songs but I felt that before getting more advanced with virtual instruments and editing MIDI, it’s high time that we took a moment’s pause to look at the basics of recording electric guitar.
Though this article is catered toward beginners looking to use their computer to record electric guitar, electric bass works just the same and it will mostly be applicable to other instruments, like keyboards and drum machines.
In our previous look at using GarageBand, we discussed the basic principles behind creating music with a Mac and GarageBand, talked about what terms like MIDI and DAW mean and dipped a toe into making music with virtual instruments.
Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to get familiar with the basic sounds that come with GarageBand by default, because now we’re going to record a simple song using virtual instruments!
While I’ve used iTunes for the longest time, and it works pretty much as my media center; I have to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t as great as it could be. It’s heavy, slow, glitchy and at times I find it very annoying.
Ditching iTunes is especially enticing when you now have all these new options available: apps that go from streaming free music, to playing you a personalised radio with music that suit your musical tastes. iTunes is still my main music app, but it’s being quickly overtaken by some of these other options.
