Music-recognition service Shazam now features Popular Segments, a data-driven feature that reveals exactly which part of a song resonates most with listeners all over the world, according to an Apple website update Thursday.
Just over a month after launching its own live video service, BitTorrent is getting into music. Legal music, that is. Its new BitTorrent Now app for iOS and Apple TV brings you the latest tracks and videos from independent artists as soon as they’re available.
Google’s answer to Apple Pay may have been late to the game, but it’s already leading the way with a new rewards program — and it’s awesome.
Dubbed “Tap 10,” the program offers up free Google Play content simply for using Android Pay on a regular basis, and there’s even a mention of Chromecast giveaways.
Steve Jobs wasn’t in the habit of dancing at Apple events. But in 2010, prior to a press conference where he addressed concerns about the new iPhone’s antenna, a song lampooning the controversy got Jobs dancing in the wings before he faced off with journalists.
The song in question, which played on a big screen to kick off the event, was the work of YouTube musician and Apple fan Jonathan Mann, who has spent the past five years composing a new song each day and posting it online.
“I heard later on from an Apple PR person that Steve Jobs was bopping along in the wings as the song was playing” at the Antennagate press conference, says Mann, speaking with Cult of Mac. “It was a surreal moment in my life.”
Antennagate went away, but Mann became the go-to guy for jingles about all things Cupertino. To date he has written 38 songs about Apple, touching on everything from Craig Federighi’s WWDC performance to the unveiling of the Apple Watch. His clever ideas and quick turnaround times have turned him into YouTube’s premier Apple songsmith.
Wow, is this app fantastic. Even if you’ve never written a lyric or performed music, you’ll be able to create and share a professional-sounding song recording with new music app, Tunedra.
As a musician, I’m simply stunned by the ability to quickly prototype and edit a song right on my iPhone.
Simply plug in some headphones, tap Record, and start singing. Tunedra will tune your voice and add backing tracks in a variety of styles that match the melody you’re singing. Once you’ve recorded your masterpiece, you can play it, edit it to make it sound less–or more–auto-tuned, and then share it with other Tunedra users or on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and email.
Just days after opening the App Store to 32 additional countries, Apple released a press release this morning to announce that the iTunes Store is also extending its reach to another nine countries in Asia today, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Dragging media files to iTunes after you’ve downloaded them is so last year. All the hip kids get their downloaded files into iTunes without any intermediate steps. Here’s how to be one of the auto-adding-to-itunes elite.
Nothing helps me turn my swag on more than when I’m listening to rap music during my morning jogs. Swimming in a tidal wave of beats fused with magically crass lyrics, I get this uncontrollable tick that slowly mutates into spasms of weird arm movements as I trot along. I think it’s called “crunking”, but I’m not sure. All I know is I need my terribly cheesy rap music to survive my jogs, but today I loaded up songs on my iPhone using iTunes Match and there was a subtle but devastating difference in the tracks I listened to: all the curse words were gone!
iTunes Match had successfully filtered out all the profane and derogatory words by changing the tracks to clean versions of the albums, which pretty much ruined my jog because I was really really wanting to sing along and drop 50 “F-bombs” a minute. Maybe this is just a rare glitch in iTunes Match’s system, but it’s a travesty tantamount to treason in my eyes and I want it fixed.
Recording artist Neil Young has revealed in an interview Apple had plans to launch a high-definition music format that never came to fruition. Young says he met with Steve Jobs personally to discuss the service prior to his passing, but “not much” happened with it in the end.
Planetary isn’t the most practical iPad app, but it’s absolutely one of the prettiest. The app reads your iTunes collection, then forms a gorgeous miniature galaxy — complete with elegantly animated solar flares — on your iPad, where the suns, orbiting planets and moons all represent artists, albums and songs respectively.