Tag listing for

music

Altec Lansing VS2620 Desktop Speakers Review

After deciding to use my laptop has a pretty much permanent home media set up, I decided that I would move my desktop speakers to provide better sound quality than the standard built in speakers when watching movies and TV shows. This left me short on audio in my Mac Mini (Other than the pretty much useless built in speakers). Therefore I went out on the lookout for some low budget desktop speakers.

After recently receiving some Altec Lansing iPod speakers and being sufficiently impressed, I must say I now have great loyalty to the brand. So you can imagine my delight at coming across a pair of desktop speakers that fit the bill perfectly, from the same company. Having looked around at alternatives from other well known brands such as Logitech, the difference in price was minimal, but the deciding factor in opting for the Altec Lansing VS2620 Desktop Speakers, was as much the aesthetic appeal as anything else.

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Eye-Controlled Earphones For MP3 Players?

Occasionally you stumble upon things that just look too weird, futuristic or downright bizarre that you have to look around to double check that it’s not just someone having a joke, and the new ‘eye sensing’ earphones which have been demonstrated by NTT Docomo Inc fit into that category quite well.

The two earphones effectively track the movement of the eye, which is then recorded and used to do whatever it is you had in mind using some pretty nifty technology borrowed from the methods used in the medical fields to achieve the same outcome – measuring the movement of the eye.

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MusicDNA – MP3’s Possible Premium Successor?

I don’t think I need to point out how fast the tech world moves, and that for every new piece of technology there will be one to replace it and the music industry epitomises this brilliantly: LPs, Tapes, CDs and now MP3s. But some of the people who worked on MP3 have come up with what could prove to be the successor: MusicDNA.

In a step up from MP3’s which just contain the music (and a little bit of information about the artist, track title etc) MusicDNA will allows for a whole host of different types of related data to be carried in the same file as the music, things such as lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts.

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TasteKid Review (How To Find Similar Music, Movies & Books)

Tastekid.com is a great website for anyone who is a love of music, movies and/or books and wishes to expand their library or collection with more similar artists, films or authors. I stumbled upon it whilst looking for a site that did exactly this and it was the first hit. To be honest, I have come to trust any site that hits the top of the prestigious Google rankings.

For instance in the case of music, the site is a database of all artists that are similar to the artist you enter in the search box at the top. Anyone who is a user of sites such as eBay or Amazon will know that they regularly suggest items similar to ones you have purchased before. Tastekid works in a similar fashion to this, only with music, movies and books.

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Altec Lansing InMotion Max Portable iPod Speakers Review

I was absolutely delighted to receive these Altec Lansing InMotion Max Portable iPod Speakers for Christmas. After comparing what was on offer for a long time, there were several options that interested me but in the end, all but this just had something missing.

The first thing that struck me about these speakers are their sharp edges and stylish touch sensitive buttons. In the iPod speakers department it is one of the best looking I’ve come across. It has an interesting colour scheme with mostly black mesh covering the speakers themselves with a subtle orange labelling the buttons and lighting the mini LED screen. Unfortunately (perhaps a little pedantic), it has trouble displaying names such as Bublé, with an accent. Instead it gives you an unintelligible splatter of symbols.

The LED screen is one of the features which set these speakers apart from the crowd. OK it’s not a must have feature, but it is a nice addition and provides some extra functionality. Particularly as most iPods dim the screen after leaving them for any length of time. It’s nice to know the song information as you listen to them.

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DbPowerAmp Review – Lossless Music Converter

After deciding that I would like to convert my large collection of .flac lossless music to apple lossless format so I can organise them all in iTunes, I was faced with the task of finding the best software for the job. I started by using Foobar2000 to convert them via .wav, however I consequently lost all of the ID3 tags on the way and had to manually add them in through iTunes which was unsurprisingly tedious.

Enter DbPowerAmp Music Converter. I came across the software package after some extensive Googling and browsing of related forums and decided it was the most attractive option when compared to rival software. I immediately downloaded the trial and eventually got my hands on a full license.

Basically the package consists of several applications. As well as the music converter there is also a CD ripper and a batch converter. Personally, the only one I use is the latter of the three as I use iTunes itself for the CD ripping and I prefer to do my conversions in bulk as it is much less hassle.

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CD Art Display Review (Minimalist iTunes Interface For Windows)

CD Art Display is a fantastic program for Windows which is free for download and is a nice addition to your desktop and iTunes library. Although it is not stuffed full of features and functionality, it does exactly what it promises and all in all, it does it very well in a similar way to CoverSutra on Mac OS X.

Basically, the application is designed to simply display your album artwork and song information on your desktop. Pretty much exactly as the name suggests. It is neat and compact so does not clutter your desktop at all.

By default, the text is displayed clearly, on a transparent background, therefore it blends in even more to your desktop. Depending on the extremity of colour on your desktop wallpaper, the text should be clearly visible.

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SonicSwap Review (iTunes Playlist Widget)

SonicSwap is described as an iTunes playlist widget. It’s an add-on to iTunes for OS X that provides extremely simplistic usability for even the beginners amongst us. The app features several useful features that all worked extremely well for me and best of all, it’s available as a free download from the downloads section of the Apple website.

Basically, the main feature of the widget is the simplification of the iTunes interface. It sits neatly upon your desktop and allows you to control your tracks and volume etc. without having to bring up the bulky and sometimes laggy iTunes interface.

I have to say, that it doesn’t feature such an attractive look as most other OS X apps, it just doesn’t follow the usual style of apps. However, its functionality is key and it delivers all that it promises. Ok, so you could just leave the iTunes mini player upon your desktop, it would provide the same basics, however, with SonicSwap, not only are the navigational buttons displayed, artwork and track details are listed too without taking up a sizeable chunk of your desktop.

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SongGenie Review (MP3 Tagging Software for Mac OS X)

You may have seen my earlier article on CoverScout, the app which can pluck all of your album artwork from the Internet and attach it to your tracks in iTunes. I mentioned SongGenie in there as an app which furthers the capabilities of CoverScout by adding in all of your track information. You do need both to make all of it happen.

The app is a simple one, it works very similarly to CoverScout by collaborating with your iTunes library and scouring the internet for all of the relevant song information such as Artist, Album, Track Numbers etc. and generally cleaning up your iTunes library. For me there is not a lot worse than seeing a list of tracks which are called ‘track 1’ etc. and this is the answer.

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XLD Review – Lossless Audio Decoder (Mac OS X)

If you’ve read my article rant about the future of digital downloads where lossless music is concerned, you’ll know that I’m somewhat of an audiophile. The problem is, even if you can find lossless music online, it will most probably be in FLAC format, which is incompatible with Apple’s iTunes. You’ll therefore need a converter, which is where X Lossless Decoder comes into the picture…

XLD is an extremely simple, but powerful and free application for Mac OS X that can convert audio from one format to another as well as rip CD’s. Format support is extensive, with support for popular compressed formats such as MP3 and lossless formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless. There’s also an option to output to multiple formats which comes in handy on the odd occasion!

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