finetune

Finetune is a music discovery service that launched in late 2006 and is focused on letting its users build sharable playlists of popular music. You're able to browse and search through a fairly large directory of popular artists and pick out full versions of their songs based on 30-second previews. There's also a really simple music discovery system that automatically builds playlists for you based on your artist picks.

In addition to its Web-based player, Finetune also has a gorgeous application for Adobe Air that both Mac and PC users can run on their machines. It lets you … Read more

A new social-networking DIY Internet radio site called Jango went into public beta on Monday.

Jango, which Webware reviewed while it was still in private testing, offers many of the common features other leading music sites offer, but embeds the controls right within the main play bar.

The site concentrates on improving the usability and interface for DIY music sites that can sometime be daunting. Things like weighting the worth of a song, scrolling your own and others' playlists, finding band information, and managing music is all one click, mouse movement, or thumbnail away from the main play bar.

What … Read more

Webware is always happy to see new competitors challenge the status quo.

Jango attempts to combine Pandora's simple interface, Finetune's control over playlists, Facebook's ease with profiles, and the music community of Last.fm.

While this latest DIY Internet radio Web site doesn't open to public beta until November 12, we're sharing it with you now. It adds nice social-networking features in a simplistic way that others just don't have yet. (We've also managed to get some early invites to Jango for CNET readers before the site officially goes public.)

"What we … Read more

The streaming music site Finetune, a likely competitor to Pandora, is now available as a Facebook application and is working smoothly.

While Finetune launched the Facebook app in September, we found a few kinks in it and, after talking with Finetune's CEO, decided to wait on sending you there until they were ironed out.

Most of the issues with posting and sharing playlists now seem to be resolved.

The application allows you to create music playlists of any artist in its database and post them to your Facebook profile. Friends can then listen to the playlists.

The Finetune Facebook … Read more

Amnesty Hypercube is a small application for Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X that will help you pull bits of Web content to use as widgets. These widgets can be brought up or dismissed ad hoc, or added to your desktop as a permanent fixture. Besides its cool name (second only to flux capacitor), the service is not so different from many existing widget platforms, like Yahoo Widgets, OS X's Dashboard, or the Windows Vista sidebar. Yet the company is taking a slightly different approach, one a little closer to Yourminis, which uses Adobe Integrated Runtime to run widgets on your desktop.… Read more

If you're the sort of Web surfer who hangs out on social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook or someone who frequents MP3 blogs, you've surely seen and used one of the free Flash audio players in this article. All of the Web-based apps below let you add a functional music player to your home page or blog with no muss and very little fuss.

In this article, I am focusing on Web software that lets you create custom playlists with specific songs that you want to include. I also include Last.fm (the half in my count) because I love it, but its embeddable player works by offering a personal radio station based on your musical preferences. The music is fantastic, but you can't pick specific songs to add to your playlist.

I have compiled my own mixes using all of these players at a new blog. (I even used MyFlashFetish twice!) Go to MP3 Playlist Overload on Blogger to listen to some of my favorite music and try out the Flash players. I'm sure that there are lots of other free, embeddable music players online, so please tell me about your favorites in the comments.… Read more

If you're the sort of Web surfer who hangs out on social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook or someone who frequents MP3 blogs, you've surely seen and used one of the free Flash audio players in this article. All of the Web-based apps below let you add a functional music player to your home page or blog with no muss and very little fuss.

In this article, I am focusing on Web software that lets you create custom playlists with specific songs that you want to include. I also include Last.fm (the half in my count) because I love it, but its embeddable player works by offering a personal radio station based on your musical preferences. The music is fantastic, but you can't pick specific songs to add to your playlist.

I have compiled my own mixes using all of these players at a new blog. (I even used MyFlashFetish twice!) Go to MP3 Playlist Overload on Blogger to listen to some of my favorite music and try out the Flash players. I'm sure that there are lots of other free, embeddable music players online, so please tell me about your favorites in the comments.… Read more

Adobe released the public beta of its Adobe AIR runtime environment (previously codenamed Apollo) about a month ago. The software is designed to allow the development of rich Internet applications that work on any operating system. I'm sure that there are technical differences, but it seems a lot like an amped-up widget engine to me.

Needless to say, AIR apps aren't nearly as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash apps (yet), but there have been a few interesting recent developments. The most-polished AIR application so far is Adobe Digital Editions, software for reading, downloading, and managing e-books. To learn more about it, check Seth Rosenblatt's First Look video for Adobe Digital Editions.

While Adobe Digital Editions might be the most powerful AIR app so far, the one with the most buzz is definitely the Pownce desktop client, a tool for sending content to your Pownce buddies and the Pownce Web site. (Pownce is currently in private alpha; jump down to the bottom of this post for info about how to request an invitation.)… Read more

FineTune is a music discovery service that launched last year and is focused on letting its users build sharable playlists of popular music. You're able to browse and search through a fairly large directory of popular artists and pick out full versions of their songs based on 30-second previews. There's also a really simple music discovery system that automatically builds playlists for you based on your artist picks (see Pandora). The whole package is wrapped up in a slick, user-friendly interface. There are also some basic social networking features. You can add and subscribe to your friends' playlists, … Read more