instead of the much anticipated video-upgrade, we just have received a very cool Last.fm flash-widget, which is embedding personalized radio-streams (”recently played”…), playlists & charts to any given website. check the sidebar of this page, press the “play”-button & start grooving (click here if you’re reading this post in your RSS-reader!) …stunning!
(more on TechCrunch)
SpotDJ is an innovative service aimed at people who are feeling bored by listening to a monotonous stream of playlisted audio-tracks and instead wish to get background-infos on currently played artist & track or just some moody rant - like radio-DJs did back in the day 
using the locally installed SpotDJ application, listeners become radio-DJs by easily recording audio-comments on tracks they like. when listening to music, SpotDJ automatically searches for matching audio-commentary from other users, which are than injected into the playlist right after the song. since the service only switched to public beta two days ago, it’s no big surprise that comments appear to bit quite scarce. however, I was able to receive quite good comments on popular artists like Gorillaz, Massive Attack or Jamiroquai - the short clips feature users with an attitude celebrating their idols or recommending similar artists.
currently, SpotDJ works with iTunes (both Mac and Windows) only. according to this TechCrunch-article, SpotDJ plans to extend their service to the iPod as soon as possible.
yesterday, Sean Adams - CEO and founder of SlimDevices - announced the aquisition of his company by Logitech (see the SlimDevices forums or the official pressrelease). according to both companies’ statements, development of the Squeezebox- & Transporter network audio-clients will stay independently at SlimDevices, while Logitech will help distributing the devices - which already enjoy very good reputation among the geek-crowd - to a mass market. being an owner of a Squeezebox myself, I’m happy to hear that Logitech will continue the Open-Source-based efforts of SlimDevices, which produced hundreds of user-created extensions to date.
as anticipated by many customers, Apple quickly released a follow-up to the bemoaned 7.0 release of iTunes. iTunes 7.0.1 (both windows and mac osx) “addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more”. however, feedback on the update indicates that some problems still persist, so I was glad to find this download-link to iTunes 6.0.5 on Apple’s support forums.
sometime last night, the Songbird-developers hatched released version 0.2 Test Flight, therefor lifting the Mozilla-based opensource audio-player officialy into Beta. Songbird comes with a built-in Wikipedia-plugin, a cool example of what the integration of browser & player can do: browsing artist-pages in Wikipedia, Songbird automatically offers all linked audio-tracks/samples for playback. the new Audioscrobbler-extension connects Songbird with Last.fm. unfortunately, Songbird is still quite a memory-hog - seems that’s what we need to get used to. binaries for win32, mac osx & linux are waiting for being tried out!
experimenting with Splice for the first time is quite an experience: using a flash-based online-sequencer, users arrange audio-loops and soundbites very similar to desktop apps like Reason or Fruity Loops. editing-functionality is reduced to the basics: clips are looped and automatically beat-matched on up to eight tracks which can only be adjusted in volume and panning (no effects or EQ). changing the BPM-rate requires the sequencer to take a break resynching the tracks, signatures aside the omnipresent 4/4 aren’t supported. users can record new samples directly into the flash-application by using a microphone.
while the sequencer itself isn’t much more than a very impressive demo of flash’s multimedia-capabilities, Splice emphasizes on community-features. users offer their creations for being remixed by others and share samples among each other - all that under Creative Commons-licensing. besides 1.000’s of user-created clips & songs, Splice integrates the CC-based audio-database created by the freesoundproject.
with recently released version 2.0 software-update, Sonos integrates support for Rhapsody’s music-subscription service with their network audio-player. while competitor Slim Devices supports playback of Rhapsody on their Squeezebox-players only when looped through a Windows XP PC running Rhapsody software, Sonos goes a big step further by enabling stand-alone access to the library. Rhapsody offers 2millions of tracks, genre-based- and customized radio and music recommendations - all browsable on the sleek Sonos remote. other than Rhapsody-integration, the software upgrade includes more internet radiostations, an alarm-clock & scheduled music feature, enhanced language support (french, italian, spanish) and several minor additions regarding format- & metatag-support.
update: Jeremy Toeman has an extensive hands-on review.
Apple’s ‘Showtime’-event focussed on digital media just ended 2 hours ago, and like with augusts WWDC keynote, I’m not too impressed with the outcome. check TechCrunch for a brief summary or Engadget for an extremley detailed live-blog + hands-on reports with all products.
as expected, iTMS now sells feature-movie downloads for as low as $13 (pre-orders and first-week buyers) and $15 (regular price) - that’s right in the middle of Amazon’s Unbox rates ($8-20). movies are encoded in 640×480 H.264 (nearly DVD-quality), include Dolby Surround, and can of course be put on any video-enabled iPod under the same DRM-restrictions as iTMS tv-shows. while this sounds fine, the downside is that - as of today - the iTMS is starting with a mere 75 movie-titles from several Disney-studios.
Apple supplements the iTMS with iTunes 7 (cosmetic changes on the user-interface, album-artwork and gapless playback - a feature I ranted about some time ago) and several new iPod-models. there’s a new aluminium Nano in four selected colours (remember the mini-days) a tiny, square successor to the Shuffle (very cool) and an upgraded 5.5G iPod (better battery life, lower price, more storage - yawn). still missing: the touchscreen-video-iPod which is rumoured about since…well, anyway.
one more thing - iTV (codename!), a streaming-client connecting to any TV-set is announced for early 2007. through a Frontrow-like interface, iTV will bring your existing iTunes-library to your living-room. iTV won’t include any storage itself, and it’s unclear if it will be able to access media-files on a non-iTunes-fileshare or NAS-device (probably not, and even if, there won’t be any support for your pirated backup-divx 
).
recently launched (MoMB is a bless!) blogmusik.net delivers free music on-demand through a flash-based audio-player. just search for your favorite artist or track and you’re ready to roll. unlike TechCrunch initially suggested, blogmusik doesn’t host any audio-data itself and therefor is not pledged to pay for licensing. so how does it work then? blogmusik either indexes (illegally) linked mp3’s on gazillions of webpages and blogs, or - even smarter - uses the google index to find these files. the flash-player connects to the original sources - voila, no more waiting for the download to finish, free-of-charge, instant audio-pleasure.
this approach is problematic in some ways:
btw, blogmusik isn’t the first of its kind. radio.blog.club seems to have been around for quite some time. like blogmusik, it streams content harvested from all around the web in a custom flash-player. I like the playlist-feature, which suggests other music matching your inital query - think last.fm / pandora on on-demand-steroids 
Maybe you could explain me sometime
