iOS: AirPlay is great if you have a Mac or an AppleTV, but if you want your iPhone’s music on other devices you’re out of luck. AirMusic solves that problem by serving up your iPhone’s library on DLNA-compliant devices like the Xbox 360 and PS3, as well as some TVs and set top boxes. You can even stream to Windows Media Player. More »
AirPlay is great if your video collection is in the right format, otherwise you can only stream Apple-approved videos from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Here’s how to circumvent that limitation and how to get the best results. More »
The internet has revolutionized nearly every form of media, and music is no exception. This week we look at the five most popular music streaming services to see how people are getting their music fix.
Photo by CarbonNYC.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite music streaming services, and now we’re back with the top five contenders. Read on to learn about the services and then cast your vote in our poll at the end.
When you’re ready to listen to some tunes online, Grooveshark allows you to jump right in. Unlike many services that require a subscription to use, Grooveshark lets you search for music and build a playlist as soon as the site loads. If you want to save the playlist, however, and access other session enhancing features like flagging songs to enable the music suggestion service, you’ll need an account. Aside from manually building a playlist, you can also listen to Grooveshark Radio, their suggestion engine. One of Grooveshark’s most unique features is that if you can’t find a song or artist you love, you can upload the music from your own collection to build the Grooveshark database.
First the bad news about Spotify: as of this writing, 02/28/2010, Spotify isn’t available in the U.S. due to various legal issues and licensing requirements. The good news is that Spotify is an incredible music service, and we're always hearing whispers that it'll soon be available stateside. You can collaborate on and easily share playlists using the service—as easily as you share a link to a YouTube video for comparison's sake. A premium account adds more features, like commercial-free listening or the ability to listen to your playlists on your mobile phone. Premium service also enables offline mode for local storage of music, higher quality streaming, and travel access—so should you visit a country like the U.S., where Spotify isn't available yet, you can still enjoy it.
Pandora is the easy-to-use front end for the massive database of attributes generated by the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs with up to 400 different attributes so when you tell Pandora "Play me something like the song Punkrocker by The Teddy Bears featuring Iggy Pop" it doesn't just return a song that people who liked "Punkrocker" also liked—it returns a song that is also "genetically" related to your suggestion. Pandora may not have the most bells and whistles of the music sharing services rounded up today, but the power of the Music Genome Project and ease with which you can create and rate personalized streaming radio stations has won Pandora many fans. Upgrading from free to premium service allows you to stream more than 40 hours a month, gives you access to a dedicated desktop client, and increases the quality of your audio stream.
Last.fm is another service that not only streams music but generates suggestions for new music based on what you like. In addition to building playlists and enjoying tunes on the web, you can "scrobble" your own music collection to Last.fm—which basically means you let Last.fm track the songs you're listening to and add them to your Last.fm profile, allowing you to both listen to them and use them to increase the scope of Last.fm's suggestion engine for better personalized picks. In addition to listening to streaming radio and building personalized stations, Last.fm also allows direct music download—when authorized by the copyright holder—so you can expand your personal collection as you listen.
Lala's claim to fame is the ease with which you can listen to both your own music over the web and purchase new music inexpensively. Lala has a database of 8 million songs that you can listen to once for free, purchase for online play for $0.10, or buy as a DRM-free MP3 for $0.79. If you have a song in your personal collection—on your computer at home—you can add it to the Lala database to allow unlimited play without paying a fee. Lala doesn't sport a hefty music recommendation engine like some of the other contenders in the Hive Five—although we didn't find the one they have lacking—but instead focuses more strongly on connections between people to drive music suggestion. As a result Lala supports easy rating and playlist sharing with friends to encourage organic music discovery.
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over the top contenders for champion of the golden earphones, it’s time to cast your vote in the poll below to decide the winner:
Which Music Streaming Service Is Best?polls
Have a favorite that didn’t get a nod? Have a creative way to use one of the Hive Five nominees above? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Chrome only: Firefox users can already use the VidzBigger Greasemonkey script to tweak and customize popular video sharing sites like YouTube, and now the script has been ported as a full Google Chrome extension.
After installing the extension, you simply can browse to any YouTube, MetaCafe, or DailyMotion video to see the layout changes—everything on the page is rearranged to show the video in a bigger size, and it keeps the video in place while you scroll the page to view suggested videos, so you can keep watching while looking around.
The biggest set of features is hidden in the preferences menu, where you can change dozens of options including disabling auto-play, skipping warnings and advertisements, tweaking the layout further, or even enabling a set of download links so you can keep a copy of the video for later.
Windows/Mac/Linux: A test version of Opera’s formidable alternative browser introduces Unite, a plug-in that lets users share music, pictures, files, notes, and chat rooms straight from their desktop. Check out its services and features in a quick screenshot tour.
Before jumping into the big pictures, note that Opera 10 with Unite is a “Labs” release, meaning some features may not work as intended and might run a bit buggy. I created Unite services in an Opera window and accessed them with a Firefox browser, and all but the straight-up web serving, oddly enough, worked just fine.
Once you’ve signed in, or signed up, with an Opera account, you can hand out your sharing URL (in the form of computername.username.operaunite.com and, when you start up your Opera Unite services, your friends will see the same landing page as you. Streaming music and full-res pictures from your system can obviously be a bandwidth and system resource drag, but if you’re using Opera Unite mostly while you’re away from your system, that’s probably not an issue.
Opera Unite is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems; using and serving up files and media requires a free Opera account sign-up. Click the screenshots below for a gallery-style tour of Unite’s features, and be sure to hit the “800×600″ links for full-size shots.
The controls for Opera Unite mostly run out of a pop-in sidebar, allowing you to start, stop, and configure services you want running. Oddly enough, to set a password for each service, you have to visit it from the browser instead of set it in your configuration panel. New services can be installed with a few clicks from Opera’s site, but it appears this Unite test version comes loaded with everything that’s out there, for the moment.
The Fridge is a pretty neat, simple, and ingenious little service. Anyone who knows your sharing name can stop by and write a little note to tack to your fridge, though you can tweak the accessibility from the configuration options.
The straight-up web server. Doesn’t support PHP, mySQL, or any of the other modern web services (though those may arrive in the future), but could be helpful for selective web access to your-eyes-only documents, or hosting docs from crashed/overwhelmed servers.
Photo sharing is straight-up and simple. The server points to whatever folder they want shared, and the user sees thumbnails and bigger pictures when clicked, and can download the full-res version from there.
Music streaming is also fairly straightforward, but offers preview streams along with full downloads. If you’ve got a whole lot of music you want to offload to friends, you’d be better off running the more direct File Sharing service (not pictured, but pretty much how you’d imagine it).
The chat service works well and is really snappy in relay time, at least in our own browser-to-browser tests. Then again, there are a whole bunch of web-based services that let you create instant chat rooms (TinyChat and Chat.io come to mind) without having to make your browser the center of repetitive pings.
Starting today (or at least very soon), Windows Media Center users on Vista systems can stream Netflix Watch Now videos, and manage their DVD and streaming queues, straight from the TV + Movies section.
Microsoft’s announcement came late yesterday, and some in-house blogs are reporting the feature as “starting today,” but we lack a Vista system and Netflix Unlimited subscription to test it out at the moment. When it does arrive, however, users running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate can fire up Media Center, head to the TV + Movies section, and should see a new Netflix option there.
Here’s how the selection and queue management should look. Search, recommendations and ratings are available from the Media Center view, and any remote that works with Media Center should be able to operate the Netflix streaming controls while it’s playing. The plug-in is Silverlight based, and requires a Netflix subscription, of course.
Running Media Center on a lower-tier Vista system, or want that same kind of Netflix streaming on your TV-connected PC? Try the myNetflix plug-in, or make the leap to Boxee or XBMC. Mac users should also check out Plex’s latest upgrade.
Here’s Microsoft’s video preview of Netflix streaming:
Thanks, Ognjen!
Need a worry-free background track for a multimedia project, or just some new tunes to work into your daily mix? The Free Music Archive, a project of indie freeform station WFMU, has downloads and streams galore.
Inspired by the ideas and ethos behind Creative Commons licensing, the tracks on the FMA are offered for whatever use you want. Use them to soundtrack your latest YouTube epic, remix them and release them, or download and share them with friends. The site also boasts a kind of quality control to the database of songs both live and recoded, selected by WFMU’s audio archivists and curators. The search functionality works pretty well, and can be re-sorted by genre, album, or other criteria.
If you really dig the tunes you’re finding, there are links to the artists’ albums and a tip jar for each. Otherwise, stream, grab, and go at your leisure. Free to use, sign-up required for the social aspects of the site, like mix publishing and sharing.
If you’re a frequent viewer of Netflix’s streaming fare, you’re probably numb to how inefficient the rental service’s browsing and search pages can be. InstantWatcher is a soothing balm of clean, fast movie browsing.
You’ll still need to be logged into your Netflix account to get much out of InstantWatcher, but once you’re in, you’ll find dozens of ways to filter and search films. Movies featuring Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine? Just type in their names. Check which films won’t be available for streaming soon? Sure, just click one button.
Each page of results can be listed as straight-up titles, text with year, directors, and actors, a few lines of synopsis, or a picture-only box art view. Every result has a “Play” or “queue” link, and a left-hand sidebar offers related YouTube videos, Wikipedia and IMDB links for movie results, and nary an ad but on the right-hand side.
One of those web resources you truly hope the big enchilada it's working off of takes notice of—and soon. Free to use, no sign-up required.
PC Games on Your iPad, Courtesy of HTML5
The iPad is already a strong entry in the mobile games realm, with its large, high-resolution display, touchscreen interface and support for external devices like keyboards. Plus it has the iPhone/iPad development community cranking out innovative games all the time, too.
Gaikai was shown running on an iPad (on Touch Arcade), and playing World of Warcraft on the device. Whether it’s a good thing to put WoW in the hands of addicts wherever they happen to go is another question entirely, but the promise of PC games running untethered on a device in your lap is intriguing indeed. I’m not a WoW player myself, but Starcraft II is landing late this July, and I somehow doubt it’ll be accompanied by a native iPhone port at the same time.
But will the gatekeepers at Apple allow Gaikai to invade its playground? The move could potentially have serious consequences on the App Store’s economics, since conceivably, Gaikai could stream any game to the iPad and other Apple devices, not just ones sanctioned by the Mac maker. Gaikai’s Dave Perry says Apple basically can’t block the service.
The reason being, Gaikai is HTML5-based technology. That means that its browser-based player will work fine on mobile Safari out of the box, unless Apple goes out of its way to shut down access to Gaikai specifically, which would fly in the face of certain recent correspondence by Steve Jobs himself regarding the closed nature of Flash versus the open nature of HTML5.
Gaikai shows the way to sidestepping iCensorship altogether, at least in terms of streamable web content. At this stage in the game, Apple has basically painted itself into a corner wherein it has to condone anything done using the HTML5 standard, versus rich media that uses browser-based plugins like Flash and Silverlight. It won’t work for all apps (like the one that allows you to sync wirelessly, for instance), but it should allow content providers to publish whatever kind of iPad and iPhone-targeted material they want without blocking fears.
We’ll see the Gaikai North American beta launch in the comings weeks, and then we’ll find out just how much openness Apple can tolerate. Hopefully it’s just enough to see me playing Civilization 5 on my iPad this fall.