albums

People bought more music in the early 90s

Market research firm eMarketer recently published a study about U.S. consumer spending on music since 1980. Most commenters have seized on the fact that the study shows a higher percentage of people are buying music today than ever, but that those users are spending much less, probably due to the rise of single-song downloads. (eMarketer calls these "MP3 downloads"--in fact, the #1 source of legal downloads, iTunes, offers them in the AAC format, and many other sites offer downloads in the Windows Media Audio format.)

But I also noticed that music spending per capita rose dramatically … Read more

Publishing your photos

Taking digital pictures is simple; transforming them into a constructive project is a whole 'nother story. Web services like Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Webshots, Snapfish, and countless others let you create photo galleries that are hosted on their servers, but what if you want to create a gallery for your own Web site?

Personally, I'm the sort of guy who wants to start with my raw images and my trusty NoteTab Light text editor, but I seem to have lost my patience for HTML and CSS (not to mention JavaScript and XML) over the last five years.… Read more

iPhone Tip: Adding art to Cover Flow

It breaks my heart to see an iPhone that's missing album cover artwork. There you are with the most beautiful iPod ever created, but your music collection looks like an endless series of generic boxes. Prove yourself worthy of owning such an advanced piece of technology by using my step-by-step guide for adding cover art to your iPhone's music collection. It's the least you can do. Respect your iPhone, people.

You can even use the guide to find out how to replace your album art with custom photos. You haven't truly lived until you've seen … Read more

Tomorrow: Use Flickr, be in a book

Many Yahoo photos users will soon be making the exodus to Flickr, so we thought we'd give everyone the heads up on a fairly cool "event" going on tomorrow. It's called 24 Hours of Flickr, and it's challenging people to go take pictures all day Saturday and then upload their favorite shots to a Flickr group specifically created for the day.

Flickr editors will go through the photos, pick some of the best, and add them to a coffee-table book (designed using Blurb) that will be made available for purchase this summer.

Anyone who gets … Read more

iTunes adds 'Complete My Album' feature

Apple's iTunes software has added a new feature called "Complete My Album," which allows users who purchase single tracks from an album to receive a credit towards buying the full album. This is a long-requested feature and a great addition to iTunes. Until now, users who preferred to buy one or two singles were placed in a tough situation if they decided later to buy the rest of the album. If a fifteen song album costs $.99 per song or $10.99 for the entire album, users who already owned one or two tracks would have to … Read more

Evening roundup: Viacom sued, MySpace photo albums, Wii browser delayed

Viacom sued over Colbert parody on YouTube. A takedown notice for a parody video clip of The Colbert Report was the cause for a lawsuit against Viacom by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The video featured several short clips from the popular late-night TV show, along with user-generated content. Viacom said it doesn't mind the video being shown on the service.

MySpace photos upgraded. MySpace rolled out an update to its photo service last night, giving users the option to create albums and manage shots en masse with a batch uploading tool. Size limits on uploaded photos have also doubled … Read more

Google: you sly dog you

Oh Google, you got my hopes up today.

I logged into my Gmail and there it was, a little surprise at the top called "Photos." I speculated that you had created an integrated photo-sharing service, but clicking on the new link just took me to Picasa's Web Albums site. Sure, it's been eight months (to the day actually), since Picasa's Web Albums was born; I just thought you had finally gotten around to combining it with Gmail and the rest of your office apps...but it was just a tease.

Save LPs on CDs for auld lang syne

Maybe the New Year is making people reminisce, but for some reason lately we've been seeing more products than usual that convert cassette tapes, LPs and other historical artifacts to digital form. One such example is Hammacher Schlemmer's "LP to CD Record Stereo," which does exactly what its rather prosaic name indicates: It records albums onto discs, allowing you to pause or change LPs along the way if some tunes are just too embarrassing to preserve.

In addition to standard 33 albums, Chip Chick says the machine can record at 45 and even 78 speeds. Now … Read more

Rumor: iTunes album pricing may change

It's one of the perennial problems of the digital-music era. You buy a couple of songs from an album at 99 cents each and, after listening to them a few times, you think you might want the album.

Trouble is, you've either got to buy the other nine tracks individually or pay the full $9.99 for the album. Either way, you don't get any credit for the songs you've bought.

A source tells us that Apple Computer and the record labels are onto this. Supposedly, iTunes customers may soon be able to buy the album … Read more

The $150,000, quarter-ton turntable

With a name like the "Transrotor Artus," this contraption sounds like a piece of heavy machinery that might be found in an assembly plant. And by the looks of this photo, it almost could be.

But closer inspection of the top reveals the real purpose of this erstwhile bucket of bolts: a turntable. And not just any old record record player, but an "LP player/phonograph/grammophone" that goes for $150,000, according to Hiendfi, and weighs nearly a quarter-ton. Maybe it's priced by the pound.