Crave

When Cover Flow for iTunes was first introduced, I was initially pretty excited. After all, who wouldn't want to browse through their music and movies by flipping through covers? It's almost like flipping through records or CDs at a music store. But once I got Cover Flow up on screen with iTunes, I was faced with something I'm sure a lot of people experienced--there were so few album covers associated with my music library, Cover Flow was almost useless. I've been able to add many covers to my library since, but I still had gaping sections where no cover art would show up at all.

Perform multiple searches simultaneously to fill in the blanks of your album art quickly.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Well, I have good news: there's a program available which will search several online databases to track down cover art for you, and does many more cool things to bring back that CD-flipping feeling of old to Cover Flow. It's called CoverScout, and though you will have to pay to register after a trial period, it really goes the extra mile to fill in the blanks of your music library. Like other programs of this type, it searches the Amazon.com database for matches, but CoverScout searches Google images too and can perform multiple searches simultaneously. It can also seek out art for singles and compilations with its advanced search system, so you're not limited to just the main stream albums. What's more, even if CoverScout can't find what you're looking for, you can use it to snap a picture of your CD cover with your Webcam or iSight camera to fill the art in manually. CoverScout supports iTunes, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and even the Apple TV.

Choose from multiple search results to find the exact cover you're looking for.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're like me, you probably thought Cover Flow was great until you actually saw how few albums were represented from your library. With CoverScout, you can breath new life into your iTunes music library and flip through your albums the way Cover Flow was meant to be used.

(Credit: GeekSugar)

You've got to hand it to Madonna. As she turns 50 this year--50!--she's still remaking and evolving herself to stave off irrelevance. And that applies to technology as well, especially where marketing is concerned.

Her latest idea is to make seven tracks from her upcoming album, Hard Candy, available to Vodafone customers before its April 28 release. But don't expect the tunes to be free, GeekSugar says--just early, for bragging rights.

By the way, in case you were wondering, the uber-star's publicist says reports that her marriage is on the rocks are patently false.

Back in the old days (like 2007), the marketing strategy for new albums included a prerelease "rolling thunder" PR campaign. First came a single, followed shortly by the video.

Then a few chosen reviewers would get early copies with "NOT FOR RESALE" imprinted across the front, allowing them to have their reviews ready slightly before or on the release date. Retail outlets would receive promotional matter, like cardboard cutouts of the band standing in front of the album cover. A few warm-up shows would feature songs from the record. Meanwhile, somebody--a reviewer, a disgruntled record company employee--would leak the entire album to file-trading services.

You're announcing an album a week before it's released? What is this, 1979?

(Credit: Raconteurs)

Jack White and Warner Bros. have decided to dispense with all this for the upcoming release of the Raconteurs' new album, Consolers of the Lonely. Today, the band announced that the entire album will be released simultaneously online, on CD, and on vinyl next Tuesday. No advance singles, no reviewers' copies, and perhaps not even a video at release (they just finished shooting it).

The band would have waited even longer, but knew that the news of the album's imminent release would have slipped out, and didn't want this quick-release strategy to be seen as a reaction.

And why not? Radio stations hardly play this kind of rock 'n' roll anymore, and fans don't need reviewers to tell them what to think: the huge Jack White fans will buy it regardless, and more casual fans probably would have formed their opinion after sampling the leaked version anyway. This way, the band saves promotional money and the release date might actually be cause for excitement, rather than the jaded "oh, I downloaded that months ago" response that greets most album releases today.

Setting up a network-attached storage device (or NAS) is oftentimes a pain. Usually the most frustrating part is getting Windows to identify it and map it as a drive. This way, you can actually use it as it was intended, as a network storage device. In CNET Labs, I've come across many types of NAS management interfaces, be they Web-based or desktop applications. All have one thing in common in my experience: they are not the easiest devices to set up. For this reason, I was very impressed by a demonstration from Synology of its new, soon-to-be released Disk Station Manager 2.0 NAS Management Software (DSM). If you think this is a long-winded, hard-to-remember name, well, it is, but that's probably the only thing you'll have difficulty with.

Synology's new AJAX-based UI for its NAS devices.

(Credit: Synology)

First of all, DSM is a Linux-based application preloaded within the NAS device as a operating system that you can access and control via Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox. As the front-end user interface (UI) supports AJAX, unlike most Web-based UIs, allows for Windows-like functionality within the browser, including the ability to drag and drop as well as helpful Wizards that simplify the NAS management tasks. The interface is intuitive and very self-explanatory. Novice users guess fairly accurately what each button does, and after a few mouse clicks should have no problem understanding how things work. All this makes mapping a network drive to a Synology NAS device a no-brainer. While with most other NAS devices, the list of features stops here; with the DSM, it's just the beginning.

By supporting IP cameras, the DSM can also turn the NAS device into a surveillance station, which can automatically record video either by timer or by motion detection. This is an elaborate surveillance system that supports up to five cameras, and the recorded videos' quality is actually better than most tape-based surveillance systems. During the demonstration, the DSM showed multiple real-time monitoring screens using IE7 as its interface. With Firefox, it was only able to show a single monitoring screen. Synology says it is working on this browser inconsistency, and the company hopes it will be worked out by the time the software releases in April.

Another very interesting and useful feature of Synology's DSM is the Photo Station 3. With this feature, users can easily upload a folder of digital photos that Photo Station 3 organizes into a Web album. The album engine automatically creates the album interface and thumbnails. All you have to do is put photos in the designated folders on the NAS. You can then caption each photo and allow others of your choosing to view the photos online.

And that's not all, the Disk Station Manager 2.0 NAS Management Software also supports the following equally useful features:

- Sony PlayStation and Xbox 360 support: turning the NAS device into a digital media adapter

- Expandable RAID 5 volume: Allowing new hard drive to be added and expanded in RAID5 format on the fly.

- MySQL Support: Supporting MySQL version 5.0.51.

- HTTPs and FTP with SSL/TLS: Accessing the NAS drive from the Web is made more secure, even on the entry-level NAS models.

- Audio Station: Allows user to play audio files directly from the NAS or an iPod to USB speakers, with remote control.

Synology's comsumer-grade NAS: Disk Stationi DS107+

(Credit: Synology)

From what I've seen so far, Synology's NAS device coupled with its DSM 2.0 software, by far offers the most features and best UI I've come across. At the time of writing this blog, I am also expecting an upgraded Disk Station DS107+--Synolgoy's consumer-grade NAS device--that supports most of the above features. So be on the lookout for our in-depth review on CNET.com.

All of Synology's NAS devices that ship in April or later will have this new interface preinstalled. Existing Synology devices can be upgraded to this new interface for free during this time too. The DSM software does not work with NAS devices from other vendors.

(Credit: Roksan)

It's not the "Transrotor Artus," the $150,000 quarter-ton turntable, but that's not a bad thing either. Instead, U.K.-based Roksan's "Radius 5" vinyl spinner still looks like a museum piece without breaking both your back and budget. Well, that last part might be iffy--it does cost nearly $2,000--but at least that hasn't gone up with this latest version.

The upgraded turntable has a new power supply for "less noise and improved matching of the torque," according to Tech Digest, to go with "a drive mechanism with a custom-made motor and precision-machined solid aluminium alloy pulley, along with a build of solid brass and stainless steel alloy." That's all well and good, but there's yet another reason to want one: So you can play the Police's "Roxanne" on your Roksan. (We didn't say it was a good reason.)

From the earliest days of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s up through the early 1960s, kids bought "45s."

The albums of the period typically had just a few good tunes, and the rest was crap. Then The Beatles changed the rules. Their albums were so chock-full of great stuff, you wanted to hear every tune. Sure, singles were still important, but most of the bands that mattered didn't rely on singles, and even The Beatles stopped putting out singles tied to a specific album (there were no singles released from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

I agree with one thing in Mark Cuban's "The Album is Dead" post--that the major labels and music business have a lot to answer for--but rushing to embrace the commoditization of music won't create an environment for artists to thrive.

Cuban's musings--"Consumers are buying music one track at a time. I think people will pay 99 cents to get a single rather than steal it. I think people would rather steal a full album rather than pay 10 dollars or more for it."-- may turn out to be true, but ultimately, we'll all be the poorer for it.

You oldsters may remember that in the '60s, albums sold for $3 to $5, which is a lot more than $20 in 2008 dollars. No one was whining that music was too expensive 40 years ago, and movie ticket prices in the '60s were $1 to $2.

If you applied the same pricing ratio to movie ticket/albums prices, CDs would be closer to $30 today. The ever-escalating price inflation of baseball, football, basketball, and Broadway show tickets are now many multiples of CD prices.

For some reason, people no longer want to pay for recorded music, but millions of Led Zeppelin fans would have happily paid big bucks for tickets for their recent London show.

"The Album is Dead" mantra surely isn't true yet. Witness Radiohead's In Rainbows and the Magnetic Fields' Distortion: these albums aren't merely slapped-together assortments of songs; no, they're cohesive works.

Mark Cuban is a businessman. He clearly knows how to make a buck, but if he was a big shot in the music business in 1966, The Beach Boys would have stuck with singles and never made Pet Sounds.

The "album," a collection of songs, goes back decades before the LP, to when multidisc sets of 78rpm records were popular. The discs were inserted in "pages" of the album, hence the name.

Sure, the LP vinyl record and CD are still referred to as albums, but according to Wikipedia, the album is almost 100 years old. For something to last that long, you'd have to hope it must have some intrinsic value.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Recently Power Downloader received an e-mail from Kitty Kilobyte who was away at school. Apparently Kitty had amassed a huge amount of digital photos by taking her camera with her wherever she went. She had pictures from birthday parties, school events, and concerts she had attended, and also simple shots of friends at school and other scenery in her life. She had thought about putting them into albums or posting them online, but wondered if Power knew of something new and exciting she could do with her photographs.... Read more

LAST UPDATE: 3:54 p.m. PT--Those who predicted that Radiohead would see mass financial support after allowing fans to pay whatever they wanted for the band's latest album appear to have been a tad optimistic, according to a study released Monday.

Of those who downloaded Radiohead's digital album, In Rainbows last month, about 62 percent walked away with the music without paying a cent, reported ComScore, an Internet research company.

About 17 percent plunked down between a penny and $4, far below the $12 and $15 retail price of a CD. The next largest group (12 percent) was willing to pay between $8 and $12--the cost of most albums at Apple's iTunes is $9.99. They were followed by the 6 percent who paid between $4.01 and $8 and 4 percent coughed up between $12 and $20.

Last month, Radiohead, one of the world's most recognized music acts, thrilled fans across the globe by giving them the option of paying whatever they wanted to obtain a digital copy of In Rainbows.

Music blogs lit up with excitement. Pundits crowed that the file-sharing crowd would prove that they weren't really just free loaders by happily supporting artists who had walked away from the labels. That appears not to have happened by and large.

But an important question still unanswered is whether the band is making any money. While Radiohead is believed to have had to pay the costs that go with distributing music online, the group also didn't have to share revenue with a record company.

Chris Castle, a long-time music attorney and record executive, cautions that it's way too early to try and assess whether Radiohead's experiment has failed or not.

Castle, who has represented singer Sheryl Crow and worked for A&M Records, said that the money-generating lifespan of an album can last as long as two years. It starts when an act releases a record and is extended when the performer goes on a concert tour.

The real question, Castle said, is whether Radiohead can equal the same kind of money it made when it was still making records for music company EMI.

Castle offered an educated guess about what the British band was earning at the label. He figures that in every year a Radiohead album was released, it was EMI's top-selling record. The band likely negotiated a larger royalty rate than most performers earn.

He guessed that when royalties were combined with money earned from publishing, Radiohead saw between $3 and $5 for every album sale.

Castle also estimates that the band typically sold between 3 and 4 million units worldwide. That would mean Radiohead hauled in between $9 million and $20 million per album. An EMI spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.

If Castle is right about the band's cut, then the money it received from letting fans pay may not have been a huge drop. According to ComScore, the average amount spent for all downloads came to $2.26.

Castle also said that not only is it too soon to try and measure Radiohead's success, but that they are not a good band to use as a test case. The group is a phenomenon with an enormous following and not all acts will see the same success by going independent.

"I may not agree with what they are doing but I think people should respect what the artist wants," Castle said. "If they want to give their music away, let them."

Radiohead's experiment with a different business model may benefit the entire music industry if record executives can learn from it, according to Castle.

"I think if we had done this kind of thing a long time ago," Castle said, "we'd all be better off."

Already, Radiohead's promotion has given rise to similar offerings from other bands. Last week, rapper Saul Williams released the album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust. Williams gave fans the option of obtaining the music for free or for a $5 donation.

An important difference between the offers of Williams and Radiohead is that those who paid for Williams' music received songs at higher bit rates and thus better quality.

Trent Reznor, the front man for Nine Inch Nails, produced NiggyTardust, and he offered kudos to Radiohead for experimenting with a new business model.

"I think there were some serious flaws with how they executed," Reznor said in an interview with CNET News.com last week, "but it was a good idea."

Coincidentally, on the same day that ComScore released Radiohead numbers, EMI announced that it was releasing the group's first six studio albums and one live album in several formats including uncompressed WAV files.

The WAV files come on a USB drive and goes for $167.

(Credit: Furutech)

With luxury turntables reaching prices well into six figures, a salient question arises: What about the quality of the albums themselves? Even the most ardent vinyl collector has lost a few records to warping over the years.

That's where the "DFV-1 Record Flattener" will prove its worth as long as it stays true to its name. The device, made by Tokyo-based Furutech, claims to be a "one-stop, one-button solution" that uses a "carefully controlled heating and cooling cycle it flatten all your warped records, even those with only slight irregularities that still unsettle your cartridge causing mistracking."

The Flattener doesn't come cheap at $1,480, but it's all relative when you're spending $150,000 to play your records. Besides, as fellow Craver Rafe Needleman suggests, maybe you can use it to make Eggos too.