music - page 29

Siri is arguably, the best digital personal assistant in the world. She can tell you if you need an umbrella. Wake you up when your late. Remind you that you forgot to buy your girlfriend a birthday present, and so many other tasks that sure are nifty. She’s better than having a personal assistant because she doesn’t get all pissed off when you tell her to go get you a coffee, or call in sick so she can go hangout at the beach with her friends.

Did you know Siri can sing too? Yeah, she totally can, and it’s like having J.Lo in your back pocket at all times, without the obtrusive lady lumps. Need proof? Here’s Siri singing a tear jerking robotic rendition of Stairway To Heaven.

Unless you really hate yourself, or are just plain weird, you probably throw up in your mouth a little every time you launch the iPad’s music app. Ugly, with tiny controls and no way to customize the various navigation buttons on the bottom row (terrible for podcast or audio book fans), it is worse in almost every way than the player it replaced.

So why not ditch it altogether? There are plenty of alternate players in the app store, but OnCue 5 has a great drag-and-drop interface, and will let you create (as its name suggests) play queues, along with a lot of other neat features.

ITunes has long given users the option of scaling music down to 128kbps upon sync to their iPod or other device in order to save space. The idea being, I guess, that you could keep your master collection at a higher bit-rate on the computer’s capacious hard drive, whilst saving space on the smaller flash storage on the iPod. Bit what if you liked this idea, but hated the low quality? Well, iTunes 10.6 has your back.

The coolest thing about the Microsoft Kinect is that it makes your feel like a freaking Jedi. Controlling a device by moving your hands or feet is ridiculously awesome when the technology works. Apple has been slow to jump on the motion control bandwagon, but that’s not stopping some clever developers from taking advantage of Apple’s built-in webcams and implementing their own crazy motion control technology. Enter Flutter – the new OS X app that lets you control all of your music without having to ever click a mouse.

Do you own a Mac, but are forced by an employer/spouse/parent/other evil entity to use an Android phone? Then we have some good news for you. No, I’m not going to buy you an iPhone. But I will tell you about a new Android app that syncs with your iTunes library. It’s called Airbind, and it’s free.

With the number of MIDI controllers on the market, the search for a great portable controller can be daunting.

Let me introduce you to the Korg microKEY, my favorite mobile MIDI controller.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Futulele. It’s a crazy electric ukelele made of iPads and stuff.

Here’s a jailbreak tweak guaranteed to put a smile on your face if you’re a music junkie. It’s called Plugication and it automatically resumes your music when you plug your headphones into your iOS device, negating the need to open up the Music app and resume it manually. Best of all, it’s completely free.

Here’s Tomahawk, a music player with a difference: it plays music from anywhere and almost everywhere. Not necessarily music from your collection, either.

Do you want to rock? Well get ready to enjoy your favorite Justin Bieber tunes in crisp, clear, audio HD, because according to a new rumor, Apple is hard at work developing a new audio file format that will offer adaptive streaming to provide high- or low quality files to iCloud users based on their current bandwidth capacities. Apple’s new format could mean users will have the ability to download high-definition audio to their iOS device via iTunes Match.

Korg debuted the nanoSERIES2 line following the success of its predecessor, the nanoSERIES line. The lineup consists of the nanoKONTROL2, the nanoKEY2 and the nanoPAD2. As a trio, they offer a truly flexible experience for musicians in the studio and on the go. The only thing you sacrifice with this slim-line MIDI controller series is the bulk and weight of traditional MIDI controllers. Korg and its educational arm, Soundtree, were generous enough to provide test units of the nanoSERIES2 line.

Have you ever wished you could use Siri to control Spotify instead of Apple’s Music app on your iPhone? How about using Siri to get directions with your favorite GPS app?

A really cool jailbreak tweak called AssistantLove was released today in Cydia that lets you do those things and more.

The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.

A brand new update from Spotify adds a couple of great new features. The Mac and Windows versions of the subscription music service both now support gapless playback and crossfading of songs. There is also a scattering of other tweaks and improvements.

Good news for Adele: Colombia Records has announced that the singer/songwriter has become the first artist to go double platinum on the iTunes Store. She recently sold a staggering 730,000 copies of her album within a week after winning 6 Grammys Awards The album has been purchased on iTunes 2 million times in under a year.

As the first artist to achieve such a digital milestone, Adele can confidently say that her album includes 16 million singles sold in the United States alone.

With a plethora of options available for any taste, it’s a better time to be a digital music fan than ever before. iTunes Match. Spotify. Rdio. Soundcloud. Grooveshark. There’s a streaming music service for every taste, a place for every song in the cloud no matter how obscure.

With all of these competing services floating around, though, finding music in your library isn’t as easy as it once was, though… mostly because you probably don’t have a central music library. Some of your favorite albums are on iTunes, while others might only be available on Spotify, or knocking around as demos on Soundcloud.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iTunes-like media manager to consolidate all of your music? An app you could use to just find that song on all of your services, no matter where it’s stored: just type it in and hit play?

There is. It’s called Tomahawk. And it’s awesome.

Apple’s OS X version of iTunes is the culprit of one of the worst UI experiences a user can have on a Mac. Even though iTunes is one of Apple’s greatest assests, it is also a horrible swampy mess of a place that most users hate to venture into unless absolutely necessary. Luckily, a report this morning claims that Apple is looking to launch a redesigned iTunes Store and App Store, stat.

Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?

After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: What’s the better music-in-the-cloud service? Google Music or iTunes Match?

In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!

Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.

Zooka bills itself as a wireless speaker bar for any of your sound-producing gadgets, but one look will tell you the truth: it’s made for iPads and skinny MacBooks. The Zooka is a silicone cylinder which can work alone, but which also has a slot into which you can slide the edge of your favorite Apple device.

A new jailbreak app called MultiTunes lets you sync with multiple iTunes libraries on your iOS device. Apple limits you to one iTunes library at a time by default, and while iCloud and iTunes Match make it easier to access your music from anywhere, some would still like to sync with different libraries without deleting all locally stored music first. That’s where MultiTunes saves the day.

I’m always looking for ways to enhance my music listening experience on the Mac. For the last several months I’ve been using Bowtie to control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts, and Ecoute is another great alternative for managing iTunes in a minimal, simplified way.

When the developers of Skip Tunes contacted me, I was intrigued by the app’s menu bar interface. For quick access to simple music playback controls, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Spotify has issued an update to its hugely popular iPhone app that introduces the ability to stream music at an “extreme” 320kbps — the same quality Spotify Premium members enjoy from the Spotify applications for Mac and Windows.

Apple VP and iCloud guru Eddy Cue recently accepted a Special Merit GRAMMY Award for the late Steve Jobs. Cue gave an acceptance speech on behalf of Apple and the Jobs family, saying that “Steve was focused on bringing music to everyone in innovative ways.” Cue worked with Jobs closely for 15 years.

The GRAMMY was awarded to Jobs for his contributions to music with the iPod and iTunes Store.

The 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards will be held tonight at 8:00 PM at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. You can stream the event live, including the pre-show this afternoon, for free on your mobile devices.

Thanks to the free GRAMMY Live app in the App Store, you can stream today’s festivities to your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

Everyone was jamming in the little corner where House of Marley was stashed during the official press event at CES, and a big part of that was due to their Bag of Rhythm dock — the Marley PR people carried it around slung on their shoulders, and it just rocked, man.