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less than a week after allofmp3.com has released their whole catalogue in a free offering called “MusicForMasses”, the DRM-system in use - preventing the 128kbit mp3’s from being played on mobile players or outside the MusicForMasses Windows-software - already has been cracked. downloadsquad links to MusicForMe, the utitlity used to remove the copy-protection by “dumping the mp3 files from memory after MusicForMasses has already decrypted it”. when trying out, please keep in mind that using MusicForMe is most probably illegal in your country, as well as allofmp3’s service itself!

update: apparently, allofmp3 has updated and distributed their DRM through an enforced upgrade of their MusicForMasses-player, rendering MusicForMe useless - for now!

want to receive all the latest news, blogposts, tourdates, videos of your favorite artists? earFeeder (beta) scans your local harddrive for media-files and builds a customized RSS-feed syndicating various sources matching the artists found in your library. since the media-scan is based on a Java-applet, earFeeder doesn’t require local installation.

update: after being subscribed to my personal earFeeder-newsstream for two days I’m a bit disappointed - despite I submitted about 300 artists to source my feed, earFeeder hasn’t brought up much more than some iTunes-notifications. seems like earFeeder’s feed-base isn’t big enough right now…

those crazy russians! after Mastercard and Visa have been shutting down allofmp3.com’s creditcard-processing earlier this week (therefor virtually destroying the russians controversial business model), allofmp3 now strikes back with a new offering at least as outrageous as their past ones: titled “Music for Masses”, the service allows registered users to download the entire allofmp3-catalogue for free! tracks are encoded in 128kbps and use a yet undisclosed DRM-system (”.mp3x”), which is preventing the files from being played on other computers or media players than the crappy “Music for Masses”-player (screenshot below, Windows only).

normally I’ld expect such service to be shut down within few days, but regarding the fact that allofmp3 successfully resisted international pressure now for many years, I guess the only way to get rid of them is blackmailing the russian government with a possible WTO-membership… those crazy russians!

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.

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.

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:

• linking to illegal content - that’s what blogmusik technically does - could be and in fact is treated as crime by many legislations - depending on where their servers are located, this could bring them to court or at least disrupt their google-ad driven income. some might argue, that loading 3rd party-URLs into your flash-player is to be considered more than plain linking (and honestly, I’ld agree)
• any index of linked mp3’s is out-of-date per definition - blogmusik-users inevitably run into dead links (it happened to me during trying it out briefly)
• audio-quality varies among sources. even worse, some sources can’t cope in terms of bandwidth which leads to buffer-underruns

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

SpiralFrog is in the news again. after last weeks major announcement on their deal with Universal Music (entitling SpiralFrog to start distribution of free music-downloads from Universal’s catalog by the end of 2006), a yesterday announced partnership unveils a similar venture between SpiralFrog and EMI Music Publishing. with two major labels on board and Universal about to buy one half of Sony-BMG, SpiralFrog’s business-model is strongly gaining momentum among the music industry.

while it’s clear that the free distribution-model will be ad-supported, there is still no statement on the exact form of advertising being used. according to rumours on a recent episode of TWIT, advertising could even go as far as requiring the user to listen to ad-spots each time they access a song. while this would definitely overshoot the mark and lead to poor acceptance of the service, I think modestly inserted ads would be tolerated by many users.

in what could turn out to be the beginning-of-the-end for current digital-music business-models, newcomer SpiralFrog yesterday announced a major deal with the Universal Music Group, authorizing SpiralFrog to distribute UMG’s extensive catalog as free - though DRM’ed - and legal downloads within the United States & Canada. the free music-service is an attempt to offer “young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music”. SpiralFrog will monetize on advertisment by - according to TechCrunch - requiring users to log into their website at least once a month to keep downloaded files valid (probably by a technique similar to Napster on-the-go). TC further reports that SpiralFrog will be based on the Windows-Media-format, therefor locking out millions of iPod users (though it’s not even sure if mobile playback will be supported at all). SpiralFrog’s service will be launched in late 2006.

O’Reilly Digital Media published an elaborate feature on music recommendation service Pandora, including an interview with chief technical officer Tom Conrad. the article explains how the Music Genome Project - Pandora’s underlying recommendation engine - works and how new incoming music is analysed and categorized by 40 professional musicians. on the technical side, Conrad gives insight on Pandora’s software-architecture (J2EE, OpenLaszlo, PostgreSQL) and how it scales up to 2.5mio registered listeners.