If you're a fan of the breakout mixtape-sharing service Muxtape, you've probably noticed that they've been down for a while, dealing with a complaint from the RIAA. Who knows how long that could take, or whether they're even going to be back up at all? What's a mixtape lover to do? Well, some ingenious Muxtape fans have cooked up an open source solution for hosting your own mixes, using an admittedly Muxtape-inspired interface.

It's called OpenTape, and you can host it easily on your own server, if you're running Apache and PHP5 (or some other servers the site doesn't specify, so give it a try for yourself if you're not sure.) There's a demo OpenTape up, and it does work almost exactly like Muxtape, although most of the features have been rewritten. The only code that's directly left over from Muxtape is the song reordering tool, and OpenTape is looking for someone to rewrite that, too. Long story short, this is a slick way to share music on your own site. Give it a look.

SMPlayer is a frontend for the open source MPlayer, which means the media player can handle pretty much any media file you can throw at it, as long as it isn't wrapped up in DRM. SMPlayer is available for Windows and Linux. And now there's a portable version for Windows, which means you can run the media player without installing it. Just download, unzip, and click the executable file.

SMPlayer Portable supports all the same media formats as the classic version. The major difference is that you can install it to a USB flash drive for use on any computer. The portable application is based on SMPlayer 0.6.2, which is the latest version. It lacks the icon themes included in the full version, and it won't write anything to your Windows Registry. You can find a complete list of differences between SMPlayer and SMPlayer Portable in the user forums.

[via The Portable Freeware Collection]

Pandora may be on the brink of self-destruction, but upstart music download service GrooveShark clearly believes in its style of predictive music programming with the launch of its new service, GrooveShark Autoplay.

GrooveShark originally launched with a radical new model which proposed to commercialize P2P by allowing users to be rewarded for sharing songs that were purchased by other users.

Since the initial launch of GrooveShark the company has also launched a Web based download solution 'GrooveShark Lite' which features a substantial music library to compliment the service's P2P features which also allows for full previews of songs on the site.

The addition of the Autoplay service to GrooveShark Lite turns the site into a Pandora style radio station as it allows consumers to search for tracks, listen in and then click on Autoplay which will build a playlist based on your initial choice. Autoplay can then proceed to build a picture of your listening interests with then subsequent user feedback on the selected tracks which allows the user to give any particular track the thumbs up, thumbs down or add the track to your favorites.

With Pandora threatening to close down, it will be interesting to see if GrooveShark can avoid the royalty woes that have afflicted the Web radio giant and prove that Web radio and music downloads can both be made to pay.

[Via GrooveShark Lite]

Music discovery service and online radio station Pandora may have to shut down, thanks to high royalty fees imposed last year by the US Copyright Royalty Board. Pandora founder Tim Westergren says his company is currently paying 70% of its revenue to SoundExchange, the organization that collects royalties for artists.

While nobody is arguing that artists shouldn't be paid for their work, this Copyright Royalty Board decision has always seemed a bit shortsighted. First of all, artists don't make a penny for music broadcast on traditional radio, even though radio station owners bring in plenty of dollars through advertising. Second, since Pandora doesn't just stream audio, but determines a listener's musical tastes and streams music from artists they might like, the service is an amazing promotional tool for musicians who might otherwise not be heard. Why would an organization that says it's concerned with paying artists try to shoot that service in the foot?

Webcasters have to pay a fee every time they stream a song -- and that fee is rising from 8/100 of a cent per song last year to 19/100 of a cent per song by 2010. The new royalty rates are hitting Pandora especially hard because the company streams hundreds of thousands of songs to hundreds of thousands of listeners simultaneously. I assume similar services like Last.fm are also feeling the pinch, but Last.fm was recently purchased by media giant CBS, while Pandora is an independent company with shallower pockets.

The plain truth is I don't like working with media files. Watching them, or listening to them, sure, I'm just as into that as the next girl. When it comes to actually converting them from something captured off an external device or my screen, though, my stomach turns. It's not an aversion that's peculiar to Linux. I hate using the Windows for those same tasks. Since I don't have access to a Mac, I can't vouch for the ease of media conversion on them, but I can safely say that as ubiquitous as Quicktime is, I have very little luck working with (or viewing) Quicktime files on any machine with any operating system in my possession.

Linux presents special challenges with media file conversions. The good news is that though some of the tools might be a little tricky to decipher, they do a great job with conversions and tend to encompass a wide range of file types. Some tools can be used with GUI front-ends, and some I've found are just a lot faster and easier to bang out a command in a terminal window. Many of these tools are either installed by default in a number of Linux distributions, or can be added with a few clicks through the distro's repositories.

So I admit it was with a whole lot of fear and loathing that I decided to include screencasts in a recent post on KDE. My video grab software was working wonderfully, but it saved my files as .ogv. That wouldn't be a problem if I weren't hosting it elsewhere, and if the conversion software on that site didn't require it be in a format other than .ogv. And Ogg files, being funny beasts, aren't always the easiest things to convert.

And certainly, they aren't the only things you'd want to convert in Linux. So let's shake down how it's done.

MeTeoR is a multi-track digital audio workstation (DAW) designed for Windows Mobile. It has all the basic features you'd expect from a full-fledged desktop DAW like Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, or Reaper. But it runs on Windows Mobile.

That means it's not going to be quite as fast or efficient at applying effects or mixing down large projects as the big guys. But here's a little secret. While most people use their cellphones and PDAs to do things like make phone calls and track appointments, many modern phones have more processing power than a computer from 10 years ago. And there's been decent digital audio editing software for PCs for much longer than 10 years. Now when somebody shows me a good digital video editing package for Windows Mobile I'll be surprised.

MeTeoR has a multi-track recorder plus windows for editing wave forms, mixing audio levels and pan settings, and importing audio. You can also add several effects including reverb and EQ effects. The full program costs $29.95, but there's a free trial available.

The program works with Windows Mobile 2003 and newer devices. A 400MHz or faster processor is recommended.

[via Create Digital Music]

Songbird, the music player built on Mozilla is inching a bit closer towards a 1.0 release. Last night the developers pushed Songbird 0.7 Release Candidate 1 out of the nest, and it includes a whole slew of updates including improved memory usage, UI refinements, and a new setup assistant that makes it easy to import media libraries and configure Songbird to work with an iPod or other portable media player.

Here are a few more of the changes:

• Support for iTunes-like smart playlists
• Optional concert calendar displays upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your music library
• Last.fm support allows you to scrobble tracks
  
• Now uses GStreamer as the media core
• Faster metadata scanning

If you haven't used Songbird before, here are a few others reasons you might want to check it out. First, it's kind of like having a cross-platform version of iTunes that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux but also supports multiple tabs. Second, you can use Songbird as a web browser and when you visit pages with links to MP3 files like The Hype Machine, Songbird will automatically detect the music files and bring up links for you to play those tracks.

The latest version seems much faster and more stable than earlier versions.

[via gHacks]

It's 2am and you really, really, really need to get in touch with your significant other to let them know how sorry you are about the thing you said earlier that night. But you're a bit tipsy, and they're probably asleep and you don't want to wake them up. So what do you do? Make a call that goes directly to voicemail of course. Because nothing says "I'm sorry babe," like a rambling voicemail message. And that's where slydial can help.

Slydial lets you make a call to any landline or cellphone number in the US and go straight to voicemail. Just call 267-slydial (that's a Pennsylvania area code, in case anyone was wondering), and while listening to the somewhat amusing, somewhat offensive introduction, just enter the number of the person you want to call. Slydial will play a rather obnoxious ad and then connect you to the voicemail. The person you're calling will then get a missed call and/or voicemail message, but their phone will never ring. It's sort of like sending a text message. But with voice. And without the SMS fees.

If you want to avoid the obnoxious advertisement part of the equation, you can also register for an account and pay $.15 per call or $4.95 a month for unlimited calls. You know, in case you like to leave a *lot* of voicemails, but can't stand actually speaking with people in real-time.

[via Webware]

Online music sites Pandora and Last.fm do a great job of providing you with streaming music you might like based on your listening history. But what they don't do a great job of us letting you listen to any song you want at any time. That's because music labels actually want you to do things like you know, go out and buy the songs.

But in this new information age, practically any song you could ever want to hear has been uploaded to one web site or another. All you need to know is how to use search engines like Google to find them. And that's where music search engines/players like SeeqPod come in. The site doesn't actually host any audio, it just provides the means to play audio hosted on other sites. So while the music may kind of sort of be illegally hosted, SeeqPod isn't violating any laws.

Favtape combines some of the best features of Seedpod and Pandora and Last.fm, with a whole lot of muxtape thrown in for good measure. Here's how it works. You visit Favtape.com, enter your Pandora user profile or your Last.fm username and Favtape will find your favorites and/or bookmarks. It will then create a playlist out of those songs by tracking down the music from other sources online.

The upshot is that you should get a playlist with up to 10 songs that you've already said you like, and you can hit the play button to listen at any time without any of the limiations imposed by Pandora or Last.fm. The downside is that sometimes Favtape will think it found your song when in fact it found another song with a similar file name. See that BNL link above? Yeah, when we clicked play we got some song we'd never heard before and didn't particularly much care for.

[via TechCrunch]

If you ever tried your hand at transcribing audio to text you're probably familiar with rewinding and playing back passages over and over again. What if you could slow down that audio file without altering the pitch to make it easier for you? Well if you're a Mac users, you're in luck as JS8 Media has developed a handy utility able to alter the speed of audio files without effecting it's pitch.

AudioLobe 3 is a light weight application that you can use to speed up or slow down your audio files. All that you need to change the speed of the audio is to move a slider back and forth. No programing or entering percentages. Just drag a slider from left (slower) to right (faster).

If you're working on a difficult passage you can set AudioLobe to loop that region and it will continue to play it back till you're done. This feature comes in very handy since it loops the section for playback so you won't need to press the rewind button over and over again allow you to concentrate on what is being said.

In our testing we found the audio quality very acceptable as the altered file still had a natural sound to it. We also appreciated the included Bass and Treble controls as that helped us focus on the speaking voice by dialing in the correct amount of low and high frequencies.

You can download a demo version of AudioLobe directly from JS8 Media. A full version is available for $20 and supports the saving of the altered file so that you play it back later without having to adjust the speed again.

So if you've been looking for a way to slow down voice dictations so that you can transcribe easier AudioLobe might be the software for you.

There's no shortage of music recommendation engines. Whether you want to find music from artists that sound like Madonna or Meat Beat Manifesto, all you have to do is hit up Pandora, Last.fm, or a similar site and pop a name in the box. If the web site starts playing a song you like, you give it a thumbs up, while a thumbs down should help the software avoid playing music that makes you want to throw up in the future.

But one thing that Pandora and Last.fm have in common is that most of the music they play comes from major label artists. If you want to find music from independent artists, you might want to check out StumbleAudio. The web service uses a music recommendation image engine much like the other sites. But all of the artists are independent acts, which means they're either unsigned or signed to smaller labels.

If you find an artist you like, you can flip through the tracks on their album and listen to full length audio streams. Or you can click on the links on the side of the page to purchase digital downloads or physical CDs.

StumbleAudio currently features over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. We found the recommendations were decent, but not exactly spot on. For example, the service claims it was able to find 388 artists that sound like the Allman Brothers. As far as we can tell, it actually found about 5 or 10 southern rock/blues bands, and a few hundred artists that sound nothing at all like the Allman Brothers.

[via TechCrunch]

It can takes a lifetime of schooling and practicing to learn how to write music. But why do you have to write music the traditional way? Is there really a need to learn the theory behind music? Maybe it's time to start drawing music.

With HighC, you won't need any formal music training to write your first piece. All you need is a mouse and the ability to drag it across the screen.

Of course when we tested it we had dreams of creating something that would ride Billboards Top 10. Unfortunately, it turns out that what we created sounded like a twisting knobs on an analog synth at the beach and nothing like the next club hit.

No matter how hard we tried, everything we made sounded a bit more atmospheric than anything danceable. But HighC never claimed that it would make dance music and is probably used for more for the creation of sound textures.

So if you're into musical experimentation give HighC a try but if you're sights are set on winning a Grammy better get back to that theory class you skipped out on.

Learning a foreign language on your own can be frustrating, but it's much easier if you've got a good coach to help you out. Forvo aims to help out by providing a database of words pronounced in various languages by native speakers.

Forvo is still growing, and currently boasts a user base of about 2,700 contributors and 22 editors. Anyone can register and submit new words they'd like to hear pronounced or add their own pronunciations to existing words. The site makes it easy to learn topical words by tagging submissions in groups like fruit, sport, or bad words (for example).

There are currently 186 different languages supported: everything from English, French, Spanish, and Italian to Gaelic, Hawaiian, and Maori. Obviously, some languages are more active than others (read: we want to learn more Maori words!).

The built in speakers that come with Apple's notebooks are fine for most basic audio tasks. And if you want better sound you could hook up a set of external speakers. But external speakers aren't always an option and that shouldn't mean that you have to give up on better sound. With Hear, you can add some slick audio processing to make your notebook speakers sound bigger than what they really are.

Hear uses digital signal processing (DSP) to shape the audio coming from your applications (iTunes or DVD player) giving them a much needed boost in equalization and reverb allowing your music or movie to sound its best with the notebook speakers.

To make things easy, Hear has packaged a variety of presents to get you going. If you're the tweaking type, you can adjust the knobs and faders till you get the sound you're after.

In our testing we found the processing fine for most audio content and really enjoyed the phantom center channel option giving a weighted anchor to all the movies we watched.

Hear isn't only for your built in speakers, it also works great with headphones or external speakers. But if all you have is the notebook built in speakers, Hear will definitely make them sound better.