Windows/Mac/iOS/Android: Audiogalaxy, the surprisingly simple app for streaming your own music between computers and smartphones (surprising in how rare that is, at least) is out of beta and open for registration. Download it, activate it, and listen to your tunes anywhere. More »
Moodstream is an interesting mashup of several forms of media, designed to bring you music, images, and video in sync with the mood you're in—or the mood you want to be in!—through a simple interface.
Click on the image above for a closer look.
Moodstream streams music accompanied by images and video clips to create a sort of audio-visual ambient mix. We’ve covered some interesting mood-based music streaming services here before, like StereoMood and Sourcetone, but none of them have incorporated a visual element.
At Moodstream you can select from the presets of Inspire, Excite, Refresh, Intensify, Stabilize, and Simplify. Each preset is a mixture of the mood spectrums on the Moodstream mixer—happy/sad, calm/lively, warm/cool, and so on. You can start with a preset and then mix things up including the type of image transition, whether you want more or less vocals in your music selection, and how long images and video will stay, among other settings.
One area where Moodstream falls short of the other mood-based services we've covered is that it doesn't play the entire song. Songs blend into one another in 30 second segments, instead of playing the full track. Although it sounds disconcerting the actual experience isn't bad and if you really love certain tracks you come across you can add them to your Moodboards—mini playlists within the Moodstream service you custom build for your specific moods and tastes.
Have a cool music-related service to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Whether you’re in the mood for some classic animation or some old-school spooky films to get you in that Halloween spirit, Classic Cinema Online has hundreds of films in dozens of categories.
Classic films have a certain charm to them—the small budgets, simple special effects, and archaic dialogue all lend themselves to creating a sort of celluloid-quaintness that tends to get lost in modern "Is that real or CGI?" blockbusters.
Classic Cinema Online has gathered together hundreds of films in categories ranging from Action to Westerns and even old cinema shorts and news reels. They routinely feature selections of movies based on the time of year, holidays, and other notable events. This week, of course, it's classic spooky, scary, and supernatural movies in honor of Halloween's approach. Even if you're somewhere you can't sit down and watch a film from yesteryear, browsing the awesome movie posters is worth the price—free!—of admission.
Have a favorite spot to catch some vintage media? Whether it’s film, television, or radio, we want to hear about it in the comments.
Wired reports that the popular CBS-owned music service Last.fm is launching as a radio station across the top 4 U.S. markets—specifically, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. "Listeners in those cities (who own HD Radios) will be able to tune in to the channel, to be comprised of 'an eclectic mix of music aggregated and influenced by the service's user-generated weekly charts, combined with live performances and interviews from the Last.fm studios in New York, and event updates,’ according to Friday morning’s announcement.” [Wired]
Want to watch movies for free? Speedcine indexes movies and where they can be watched for free—and legally—across the web.
Speedcine indexes feature length movies—by their definition at least 60 minutes long and not television shows—they currently have 13,000 movies in their database. When you search for a movie, you're provided with multiple ways to watch the movie.
The primary link is to the free streaming source—movies come from providers like Hulu, Jaman, and Crackle, all of which are authorized to stream the movies. Other links, when available, point to services like iTunes, Amazon VOD, Netflix (Watch Instantly), and so on. Part of Speedcine's revenue stream is generated by referrals to these services, although if you already have a Netflix account, for example, you can just sign in and add the movie to your queue.
Speedcine is a free service and requires no login.
Windows only: Last year we shared TubeMaster Plus with you, an extremely handy program for downloading videos and music from streaming sites. TubeMaster++ has been released and comes with a slew of new features.
TubeMaster++ makes grabbing streaming videos and music incredibly simple. As long as TubeMaster++ is running, it will grab nearly every kind of media you watch over your internet connection thanks to its ability to scan the incoming data and not rely on the browser itself. Whether you’re watching a video in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera, as soon as you start watching it, TubeMaster++ will begin capturing it.
You can save files, play them back right in TubeMaster++ and convert them. What formats can you convert into? A better question would be what formats can’t you convert into. You can convert audio formats into WAV, MP3, OGG, and AC3, among others. Video can be converted into dozens of formats and presets for mobile devices including the Creative Zen, iPod, Blackberry, PSP and PS3, various mobile phone sizes, and more universal formats like AVI and MPEG4.
TubeMaster++ does lose one feature from its predecessor: because of dependencies it has on installed software it is no longer portable. The trade off will be more than worth it for most people however as the new version is more stable, offers more features, has a built-in video and music search engine, and has dropped the upgrade requirement to download from adult video-sharing sites. TubeMaster++ is freeware, Windows only, and requires Java Runtime Environment and WinPcap (both of which are included in the installation if you don’t have them.)
Windows/Mac/Linux/Apple TV: Now your friends can actually try out Boxee. The open-source app that TV-sizes your files and streaming web content is available in alpha for Windows, and updated on other platforms with neat apps and fixes.
Besides the general advent of a much wider user base being able to get the same kind of wide-screened, media-centric experience that Mac, Linux, and Apple TV users have been enjoying for months, Boxee’s latest version streamlines the left-hand interface, parceling web-based sources into “Applications” and the files on your system into “Local Files.”
The latest release also introduces a handful of attention-getting web apps like MLB.tv, officially supported and offering full access to baseball games around the country. Others, like Current TV, Digg, some clever Twitter/Tumblr mashups and niche video sources, came from the providers themselves or the just-ended dev challenge. But the improvements users will really want to know about include generally improved streaming, M4A and M4V playback, lower CPU usage on Macs, support for Ubuntu 9.04, and DVD playback optimization.
On Windows specifically, a number of enthusiasts were already noting problems with Hulu playback (not completely unexpected, given the two projects’ history) and Netflix streaming (a real bummer), but that may be localized to specific machines. 64-bit platforms aren’t supported, and anyone using Microsoft’s default video drivers instead of their specific hardware drivers is out of luck. Windows 7 seems to install and run Boxee well enough, after a brief test.
Boxee is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux (specifically Ubuntu), along with, through an installation previously detailed, Apple TVs. Those with Boxee accounts can grab it here directly, while newcomers should head to the link below to get an account and grab their file.
Windows/Mac/Linux: Is having your entire media collection on tap, ready to stream wherever you may be, too much to ask? Not if you’re using Subsonic.
Subsonic can be installed on everything from a Windows-based computer to a home server running FreeNAS. Once installed, you can tune into your media collection from anywhere you access the web or use your mobile phone. Subsonic is a complete web-based front end for your collection. You can search tracks, listen to saved podcasts, assign ratings, add comments, and create playlists. Subsonic supports on-the-fly resampling to keep the quality high, even when you're using a lower bandwidth connection—you can turn the feature on permanently if you've got a bandwidth cap you're trying to stay under. If you're a fan of Last.fm, Subsonic has support for the service and will scrobble and update your now-playing status. There's a demo account available if you’d like to take the interface for a spin before installing it. Subsonic is free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, *nix systems.
